In the case of a cultural group, the number of people involved is usually much too small for statistical analysis. There may or may not be organized institutions, through which the group works or develops, but even the most organized institutions are different in scale and kind from those of large groups. The principles which unite the group may or may not be codified … But there are many important cultural groups which have in common a body of practice or a distinguishable ethos, rather than the principles or stated aims of a manifesto. What the group itself has not formulated may indeed be reduced to a set of formulations, but some effects of reduction – simplification, even impoverishment – are then highly probable.
The social and cultural significance of all such groups, from the most to the least organized, can hardly be doubted. No history of modern culture could be written without attention to them. Yet both history and sociology are uneasy with them. We find histories of particular groups, but little comparative or analytic history.
– Raymond Williams1
Art’s a peculiar division of labors.
– Robert Creeley2
Poetic Community investigates the relationship between poetry and community formation among several groups collaborating during the Cold War era. Although the phrase “literary movement” is more likely to conjure images of the numerous avant-garde groups in existence during the first decades of the twentieth century, consider a shortlist of poetic groups operating in the years after 1945: the Black Mountain poets, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the coterie of British poets known as the Movement, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, the Caribbean Artists Movement, the Concretists, Fluxus, the Black Arts Movement, the Toronto Research Group, Naropa, the St Mark’s Poetry Project, the Dub poets, and the Language Group. Certainly these communities differ drastically. Each one posits a very distinct relationship to national and racial identities; the groups named write in remarkably different geographical locations, ranging from the rural environs of the American Midwest to the cosmopolitan milieu of London, England. That they are variously affiliated through creative writing programs, performance venues, alternative colleges, and self-styled artistic laboratories also suggests that decidedly different forms of organization enable their creative practice and shape their political commitments. Some have a poetics clearly defined by political agendas or common aesthetic principles, while others value collaborative interaction as a more unsystematic cultural activity. And although one may object that not all of the “members” of such communities self-identify under the collective nouns that have since come to designate an aspect of their work, evidence that these writers share with one another methodologies, resources, and institutions certainly warrants an investigation of the relationship between community formation and the development of artistic practices. I will expand on my terms shortly, but as provisional definitions, I take community to mean the network of poets, cultural spaces, and institutional frameworks that enable a group’s collaborative work. By practice, I mean the methods and texts that evolve generatively among a group of authors to form an approach to writing.
There is something in this commitment to community formation that is at odds with the dominant critical assessments of mid-century poetry and poetics. The editors of the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry echo the often stated remark that contemporary poetries typify a shift from objective to subjective sensibilities (2:xlv), advancing a neo-Romantic aesthetic in opposition to Eliot’s objective correlative. Helen Vendler describes the function of contemporary verse as the “mirror” of one’s “feelings,” laying bare the “voice of the soul itself”; she asserts that the “lyric desires a stripping-away of the details associated with a socially specified self” (Soul Says 2–3). The gifted critic Charles Altieri characterizes post–Second World War poetry in terms of a transition to a poetics of “immanence.” Having no recourse but to declare the failure of modernism, contends Altieri, poetic imagination shifts radically to the epiphanic disclosure of “numinous experience” (Enlarging the Temple 31).3 Perhaps surprisingly, the equally talented Marjorie Perloff takes a similar view, albeit from a position that denigrates this paradigm. The poetry of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, she argues, reveals an “authenticity model” in search of “the ‘true voice of feeling’” (21st Century 4). Perloff insinuates that the previously heralded poetries of open form, Personism, and Beat aesthetics might be a more suitable object of study for critics of the lyric tradition who probe in order to determine what, in fact, the soul says. Yet this view of poetic practice, even among those critics who judiciously acknowledge the shift towards process (over product) in contemporary verse, tends to emphasize the inward (if not passive) exploration of the writer’s own consciousness. As a result, this approach ignores the social nature of aesthetic production. It is important that many of the most significant practices in contemporary poetry – projectivism, “nation language,” concrete and sound poetries, the “new sentence,” aleatoric and constraint writing, even confessional verse – occurred generatively and collectively, through a process that involved many poets adapting and transforming a poetics to which they contributed. The solutions of modernist authors may indeed have become untenable for poets during the Cold War era, but a resultant “inward turn” to the self is at best a partial history of the varied cultural contexts of aesthetic production after 1945.
Intriguingly, a poetics of the “private self” as an alternative to the copious number of totalizing notions of community – be they neoliberal, fascist, or otherwise – would have been understandable. For historian Eric Hobsbawm, “[i]t was not a crisis of one form of organizing societies, but of all forms.” Indeed, “[t]here was no other way left to define group identity, except by defining the outsiders who were not in it” (Age of Extremes 11). Categories designating group formation, regardless of political orientation – the people, the masses, the crowd – seemed reducible somehow to the “hoard,” the “volk,” the “mêlée,” as any collectivity will invariably become violently unhinged or else will totalize, fix, and exclude.4 W.H. Auden’s “unintelligible multitude” stands poised to become
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign[.]
(“The Shield of Achilles” [1952] 14–15)
Any philosophical affirmation of community expressed after the Second World War would seem to share the same fate as poetry, according to Adorno’s admonishment, that to speak of it is disingenuous, if not barbaric. Hence, we have come to accept that a preoccupation with alienation and the cult of the outsider are central themes in post-war poetry. Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse” (1971) is exemplary:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
(1–12)
To be fair, Larkin’s poem is meant to be ironic and funny, but its fatalism is at best typical of an age surging with Eliotic “whimpers.”
Other poets express a more complex and ambivalent view of the poem’s role in constructing communal identities. The now-famous opening lines of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) seem to promise a similar disintegration of restrictive bonds, yet his persistent idealism is incompatible with Larkin’s defeatism. The lines “I’m with you in Rockland / where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter” (104–5) challenge the poem’s earlier dissolution, intimating a nascent counterculture’s celebration of a communal and participatory culture. Had Larkin, who was living in Hull when he composed his poem, been present to witness the genesis of the West Indian Student Centre in London during the same period, he would have encountered a very different approach to community building among an eclectic consortium of expatriate Caribbean writers. These poets, who dubbed themselves the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), understood the founding of a community to be the necessary precondition of their artistic and social existence. Thus, the speaker of Kamau Brathwaite’s Islands (1969) announces:
it is not
it is not enough
to be pause, to be hole
to be void, to be silent
to be semicolon, to be semicolony;
…
So on this ground,
write[.]
(“Negus” A 72–7; “Vèvè” A 51–2)
A poet and feminist activist like Adrienne Rich articulates a similar “drive to connect”:
imagining the existence
of something uncreated
this poem
our lives
…
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
(“Incipience” [1973] 18–21; “Natural Resources” [1978] 173–6)
In an interview conducted for The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook (Ramstad and Ronnie, 1975), Rich records that the “poetry of many of [her] male contemporaries” conveys the sense that “we’re all doomed to fail somehow, in human relationships, politically, you name it” (“Poetry and Women’s Culture” 108). “It’s not as interesting,” Rich insists, “to explore the condition of alienation … as it is to explore the condition of connectedness” (108). Gloria Anzaldúa, author of Borderlands/La Frontera, claims similarly that “some of us are still hung- / up” on the notion “that the poet / is forever alone. / Separate. / More sensitive. / An outcast.” Yet “[w]e don’t want to be / Stars,” she writes, “but parts / of constellations” (“The New Speakers” 22–8, 45–7 c. 1975). Contrary to claims that poetry after 1945 functions according to a paradigm of expressive individualism, community persists as a problematic of central importance for innumerable post-war poets, both as experiments in social action and in the invention of poetic forms. Poetic Community argues for an inexorable relation between the two; like any social collectivity, one should analyse the structure of poetic texts for the emancipatory projects they potentially embody and enact. Among writers as diverse as Rich and Brathwaite, Charles Olson and Steve McCaffery, Judy Grahn and Robert Duncan, the poem constitutes a space in which to imagine alternative forms of social existence. Following the speaker of Rich’s text, this book examines the various ways that mid-century poetic communities aim to “reconstitute the world.”
The momentous political, economic, and cultural changes enacted during the Cold War era cannot be overstated. This study addresses groups of poets who were writing from 1950 to 1980, an era often described by the stark contrast between the cultural conservatism, conformity, and consensus politics of the 1950s and the dissent directed against prohibitions on sexual, aesthetic, and political freedoms a decade later. This somewhat arbitrary division obfuscates significant underlying continuities, while it arguably focuses too strictly on the Cold War’s impact on American culture. The recognizable organs of a global economic apparatus – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for instance – appear during the late 1940s and expand radically throughout the subsequent decades. As so many historians observe, the Cold War generated a violent either/or logic of West versus East, and the United States and the Soviet Union were the chief sites of this conflict, but both its physical and ideological violence would reverberate throughout the world – in the policy of innumerable governments, and by war of proxy in Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. If the post-war condition is marked by a rapid expansion of mass industrial production, one also encounters the emergence of a logic variously termed “late-capitalist,” “post-industrial,” or “post-Fordist,” dominated by multinational capitalism, new and diverse forms of consumption, the saturation of media, the exploitation of Third World labour, and an unprecedented displacement of peoples across the globe. Of course, this period of history is also notable for the post-colonial independence won by several nations throughout Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, yet many critics observe that it is also the beginning of a “neocolonial”5 enterprise, in which empire operates under the guise of political interference, military-industrial collusion, and humanitarian debt relief. And although esoteric matters of copyright policy may seem trivial when placed alongside the death toll of the Vietnam War, the Cold War period also marks the nascent formation of a global “intellectual property” regime bent on consolidating control over culture and information by corporate concerns in the West (the consequences of which we are only now beginning to realize fully).
Marxist critics often identify the period of 1978 to 1980 with a new phase of capitalism,6 signified in the political sphere by the ascendency of Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and Deng Xiaoping in China, the last of whom would take the first steps in liberalizing the largest economy on earth. The economic policies set into motion in these nations especially and throughout most of the West at the end of the 1970s were intended to further abolish trade unionism, deregulate manufacturing industries, exploit ecological resources, and liberalize global financial markets. A history of the 2008 economic crisis would find a convincing point of departure in the radical changes implemented by these policymakers during this fateful period of history. Nevertheless, although it is true the securitization schemes and futures markets of today make Thatcher’s iron-fisted union-busting look old-fashioned by comparison, it is more instructive to understand this increasingly ubiquitous totalization of capital as a slow-moving process rather than a decisive breach. It has been said of Olson that he is America’s first “postmodern poet.”7 Whether this claim is accurate or not, one may say with certainty that he is one of the first poets of the post-war era to recognize the stakes of what Marxists call “total subsumption.” He writes in 1952: “[i]nside totality, where are we, who are we?” (“Culture and Revolution” 4). Throughout The Maximus Poems, Olson warns of a totalizing interiorization of our social relations to capital, such that its mode of production comes to saturate the intimate texture of our everyday social existence – our desires, our affects, our knowledges, indeed, our “mu-sick”: “where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen / when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned” by those “who use words cheap” (“I, Maximus” [1950] MP 1:2). It is perhaps now a truism to say that capitalism possesses a unique ontological status. Every other socio-economic system in history involved some founding exclusion, some elemental site that could not be absorbed by the dominant social order. An emancipatory politics had at least the possibility to launch from this exterior position. In a word, one can no longer draw a clean distinction between what used to be called base and superstructure, economy and ideology, the production of commodities and the manufacture of desires and ideas. Rather than characterize the Cold War era in the Manichaean terms typically reserved for this period of history, one might instead interpret its several terrains of struggle as so many shifting fronts of contestation. The dividing line between West and East is joined by those separating the rich North and the exploited South, the policies of global institutions and the consequences for local populations, the entitlements of citizens and the treatment of refugees, and so on.
These developments signal the emergence of new identities, subcultures, and social movements. For instance, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the environmental movement in the United States and abroad; the protests of immigrant communities in Britain; and the May 1968 revolution in France mark occasions in which the previous solidarities of economic class needed to make room for the concerns of racial, gendered, and sexual identities. These events, which no doubt produced disagreement among the Left, also created new possible alliances and collective subjects, initiating a crucial re-evaluation of citizenship, subjectivity, and institutions capable of either suppressing or enabling social action. The four case studies constituting this book – Black Mountain College (BMC), the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM); and the Toronto Research Group (TRG) – may appear at first glance to represent an eclectic sampling of the many aesthetic-social movements to emerge during the Cold War era. Yet Poetic Community seeks to be representative in a somewhat different sense. I shall expand on these choices at the end of this introduction, but, for now, it suffices to say that each case study situates a shared body of writing at a crucial site of antagonism or “cultural front” of the post-war era.8 The book begins at Black Mountain College, where Olson, Robert Creeley, and others collaboratively develop open form writing; a significant context for what Olson calls “works in OPEN,” I will argue, involved commitment to alternative forms of local community building. CAM consists of a group of Caribbean poets living and working in London during the 1960s, just as the British government eliminated “common citizenship” for Commonwealth subjects. The work of Kamau Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey, and John La Rose articulates an anti-racist poetics at the crossroads of the so-called Immigration Question, and, in so doing, anticipates many comparable migrant struggles (e.g., the sans-papiers in France, “Mexican illegals” in the United States). Returning stateside, poets associated with the WLM, including Adrienne Rich, Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, and Robin Morgan, challenge the gender oppression implicit in conservative America and among proponents of the civil rights and Black Power movements. For readers less familiar with the TRG, the work of Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, Dick Higgins, Robert Filliou and others can be found at the intersection of an international grouping of sound and visual poetics, Fluxus, and language-based conceptual art. Their elaborate multi-authored poems, collages, appropriations, and performances anticipate and challenge a growing intellectual property regime threatening access to information and culture. In this sense, each chapter documents the generative development of a poetic movement’s body of practice as it encounters and negotiates questions of collective local autonomy and state intervention, the post-war diaspora and race discrimination, feminist formations and gender division, and the changing status of cultural property amid an increasingly mobile and manifold system of state and corporate power.
For several decades now we as critics have dutifully rehearsed our incredulity towards “master narratives.” This now canonical axiom of postmodern thought challenges modernity’s intransigent monumentalism and its myth of a universal selfhood by conceiving of subjectivity as something provisional, transitory, nomadic, and diasporic, wherein a position of permanent displacement is said to register an ideal of ideological flexibility.9 Yet members of a collective such as the Caribbean Artists Movement never celebrated rootlessness in such ways; the highly structured organization they formed created stability for members disenfranchised by systemic racism. One of the Women’s Liberation Movement’s most adept thinkers warns against the “tyranny of structurelessness.” Radical feminist Jo Freeman coined this term to describe a tendency among the New Left to promote “leaderless, structureless groups as the main – if not sole – organizational form of the movement” (285). Rather than eradicate hierarchies of power, structureless movements may indeed create disparity among their participants by concealing the rules, procedures, and practices designed to reveal the power dynamic of collectives. I am indebted to the network theory of Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Bruno Latour, insofar as this study attempts to trace the “types of connection” between the elements composing a “group formation” (Latour, Reassembling 5, 27). The task of this book is to determine, in a specifically literary context, how an “internally different, multiple” collective subject “acts in common” to invent new modalities of social existence (Hardt and Negri, Multitude 100). One should, however, be sceptical of the inchoate energies that are said to bring such contingent networks into being. Hardt and Negri’s multitude would seem to perpetuate postmodernism’s valorization of a transitory collective, defined in the final analysis by the spontaneous and unpredictable formation of a social subject, whose constitution, they argue, draws its power from the very fact that its coalescence cannot be anticipated or sustained. Alain Badiou argues instead for a prescriptive politics, such that only an axiomatic claim can initiate the formation of a collective subject.10 Yet one need not transpose the dictates of twenty-first-century Continental philosophy onto the activities of post-war cultural movements, since they, too, were preoccupied with such questions. The following passage from Pamela Kearon’s “Power as a Function of the Group” is instructive:
[T]he group creates its own reality and its own truth. Knowing that reality is whatever is agreed upon by society, the group creates its own society and thereby its own power. Power is the organization of many wills with a common purpose and a common interpretation. The group through its many individuals working together creates an interpretation and then stands collectively behind it. (109)
Radical feminism is often criticized for its ostensible promotion of a universalizing female subject, yet for Kearon even equality is not an essential truth discoverable in human nature, nor is community founded on autochthonic or tellurian presuppositions. Simply put, truth is a production, not an essence. Collective subjects are formed by the construction of axiomatic claims – for instance, “radical equality must exist” – at which point the group is invented coextensively with such a claim. One need only state this position, commit to it, and mobilize in its realization. Attention to a litany of Cold War–era literary cultures indicates that if poets were suspicious of the Enlightenment’s essentialist conception of a social totality, then they were equally doubtful of an impermanent community defined merely by a refusal of totalizing ideologies. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is precisely this prescriptive politics that we are most uneasy with, yet it is this aspect of mid-century poetic culture that is most neglected.
To this end, a number of pressing questions emerge: do Cold War–era poetic groups challenge or establish continuities with the modernist avant-gardes? How do they conceive a collective modality that neither makes concessions to liberal-humanist abstract universality nor an atomized individualism suspicious of any group formation as the inevitable erasure of personal freedoms? How do poets respond to and operate within institutions such as the college writing program and how did they negotiate the role of poetry within political movements? In addition, what role is given to collaboration and collective artistic production? Poetic practice shifts to an emphasis on process, strategies of appropriation, polylingualism, and interdisciplinarity, thus politicizing aesthetics and contesting the New Critics’ claim for the poem’s aesthetic autonomy. To what extent might these formal operations be understood to problematize authorship not by erasing the originator of texts but by “communalizing” literary artefacts?
An impetus towards collectivism among poets writing after the Second World War certainly has its precursors. Critics who take seriously the influence of collaboration and community as a formative aspect of aesthetic process have typically focused on the proliferation of “-isms” that dominated the literary and artistic landscape of high modernism. To be certain, the phenomenon is not a high-modernist invention either, but it may be argued without reservation that the early decades of the twentieth century demonstrate an unparalleled intensification of this tendency, causing critics Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris to declare that the “exploration of new behaviors and the opening of new possibilities” was chiefly expressed in “movements … some tightly organized, some hardly so” (Poems for the Millennium 5). The “movements of those first two decades,” they argue, “functioned also as collaborative vortices ([Ezra] Pound’s term), bringing together many individualities in a common push toward a new dispensation, aimed at a drastic change of poem and mind” (5).
Yet the concept of the avant-garde “movement” as a process of self-definition through polarization has arguably overdetermined notions of literary community during the twentieth century.11 Renato Poggioli offers the most comprehensive definition of avant-garde community formation in his pivotal work, The Theory of the Avant-Garde. The “movement’s” chief distinguishing trait, according to the Italian critic, is that, unlike other terms such as “school” or “circle,” it is a “term which not only the observers, but also the protagonists, of that history use” to describe a “group of artists intent on a common program” (17–18). The formation of a movement is essentially agonistic; it is defined “against something or someone” – and typically the academy, tradition, or the public (Theory 25). Though agonism has complex associations with Greek, Christian, and Romantic traditions, “avant-garde agonism” refers to an extreme form of antagonism, a paradoxical affirmation of “self-sacrifice” by a “collective group” on behalf of the principles it advances (Theory 67–8). Poggioli’s agonistic model is suggestive of Harold Bloom’s filial and patently male-centred presentation of literary tradition: the author as a rebellious son who rejects the parental imposition of the father. In this case, the avant-garde becomes the “band of brothers” who together forge an alliance of siblings to usurp control of the household. The Italian Futurists “glorify war – the world’s only hygiene,” exalting that there are “beautiful ideas worth dying for” (Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism” 187); the Russian Constructivists pledge “to stand on the rock of the word ‘we’ amidst the sea of boos and outrage” (Burliuk et al., A Slap in the Face 223). This combative stance establishes the moral superiority of the “we” and the banality of the “they.”12 Of course, several critics take issue with such claims, in particular, the temerity of the avant-garde’s opposition to a bourgeois culture that, in fact, aided its formation.13 But for the purposes of the present study, I would prefer to highlight the function of avant-garde community formation, understood by Poggioli and others,14 as a militarized and masculinized en-closure with clearly demarcated boundaries between members and non-members, practitioners and non-practitioners.
It is also worth pausing to consider that such a model of group practice offers an explanation of a collective identity forged in relation to external factors only (usually the public). The internal dynamic of Imagism, Surrealism, or Vorticism was fiercely hierarchical, orchestrated by controlling ideologues. Pound made no secret of his opposition to Amy Lowell’s proposal “to turn ‘Imagism’ into a democratic beer-garden” (Selected Letters 48). To become a Surrealist, one had to pledge his or her allegiance to André Breton, the self-appointed “Pope” who reserved the right to excommunicate members. Perhaps no one puts the question of a group’s internal hierarchy more succinctly than Wyndham Lewis in his discussion of Vorticism in Blasting and Bombardiering: “I concluded that as a matter of course some Romantic figure must always emerge, to captain the ‘group.’ Like myself! How otherwise could a group get about, and above all talk. For it had to have a mouthpiece didn’t it?” (46).15 Although it is beyond the scope of this book to address the political affiliations of such writers as Pound and Marinetti, the following observation by Paul Morrison in The Poetics of Fascism is instructive:
Communism collectivizes the means of production and the fruits of labor; fascism provides the illusion of collective experience through aesthetic means … [by] respond[ing] to real needs with a pseudocommunity of the Volk[,] … respect[ing] the basic sanctity of capitalist property relations even as it labor[s] to provide … an aestheticized version of the Marxist promise. (6–7, 8)
This characterization of fascist politics helps to illuminate the “pseudocommunity” promised by numerous avant-garde leaders, a promise, namely, for a “true” communal experience, without any change to the property ownership of ideas and artistic practices, or without change to the material conditions that would facilitate collective artistic production.
Two observations deserve emphasis: first, a study of contemporary poetic communities cannot and should not take the modernist avant-gardes as its proverbial strawman. Second, the heterogeneity of group formations during the first decades of the twentieth century is a debate far from being over. Critics like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams emphasize that modernism “was always composed of many different projects, which were not all integratable or homogenous with one another” (Hall, “On Postmodernism” 132). Poggioli’s agonistic model provides an effective description of the historical formations and militaristic tropes favoured by the Italian Futurists, Imagists, Vorticists, or Surrealists – movements notably dominated by male authors – yet, as I argue elsewhere, it fails to characterize the comparatively more inclusive gender politics of the Bloomsbury Group, New York Dada, or the salons of Paris.16 Neither does the self-destructive logic of avant-gardism describe the cultural poetics of the Harlem Renaissance, a group whose political goals seem somehow trivialized by Poggioli’s claims. In this regard, more recent scholarship on modernist communities offers invaluable instruction. Shari Benstock’s groundbreaking Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 and Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun’s Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation, for instance, call attention to the impressive literary production of female communities of authors that also shaped high modernist aesthetics. Although neither study explicitly contests Poggioli’s now-canonical definition of the avant-garde movement, the breadth of their historical research exposes a much more heterogeneous array of communal practices and political commitments. Similarly, in The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, and Breton, Beret E. Strong argues convincingly that far from aspiring to realize the groups’ own dissolution, movements during the interwar period advance a politics of survivalism.
Studies of literary community in the post-war era often focus (consciously or not) on generating alternatives to Poggioli’s agonistic model. Hoping to retain the avant-garde as a concept, a critic such as Achille Bonito Oliva proposes a “trans-avant-garde”: “these artists,” he insists, “no longer seek head-on confrontation” (“The International Trans-Avant-Garde” 257). Whereas the modernist avant-gardes, according to Oliva, advanced a fiercely dialectic conception of art “as a means of overcoming and reconciling contradictions and differences,” the trans-avant-garde “is an indefinite area that groups artists together … its family stock extend[ing] fan-like over precedents of diverse descent” (257–8). According to this view, the avant-garde comes to stand for a zone of interaction and convergence, rather than a strict adherence to aesthetic principles. Ron Silliman redefines avant-garde collectivism in similar terms, offering a useful distinction between scenes and networks – a lexicon that notably avoids the term “movement.” While a scene is specific to a place, the network is transgeographic. He states further that “neither mode ever exists in a pure form. Networks typically involve scene subgroupings, while many scenes (although not all) build toward network formations” (28–9).17 In contradistinction to Poggioli’s notion of the movement, Silliman has in mind a more open system of affiliations and aesthetic intersections.
Notably, studies such as Michael Davidson’s The San Francisco Renaissance, Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, and David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets demonstrate a conversion to Silliman’s preferred terminology as a means to jettison agonism as the defining trait of avant-garde community formation. The title of Kane’s book – All Poets Welcome – epitomizes this tendency. Davidson argues that poets congregating in San Francisco during the late 1950s and 1960s (among them Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and Michael McClure) forged a literary community that refused “to propose an institutionally ‘correct’ ideology.” A commitment to pluralism, he claims, distinguishes the project of these poets from W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, adherents “to a single humanist ideal and a series of accompanying institutional and doctrinal supports (Marxism, the Catholic Church, existentialism)” (The San Francisco Renaissance 31). Davidson goes further than any other critic of contemporary verse to theorize the importance of community for mid-century poetics, but the absence of female authors and ethnic diversity among the San Francisco poets makes Davidson’s claim for an “essentially plural society” debatable, nor can one say that the Bay Area was representative of the period.18 Did not radical feminist poets propose an axiomatic politics as the foundation of its aesthetic work, an uncompromising, if not totalizing, commitment to unqualified emancipation?
It is worth noting that an attempt to amend the avant-garde is a specific trend among those poets and critics cognizant of the avant-garde tradition in the first place. Frank O’Hara writes in his “Personism” manifesto that the “movement” was founded at a particular place and time (“lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959”), on “a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents” (499). Given O’Hara’s emphasis on cosmopolitanism, his campy homoeroticism, and the politics of interracial friendship, it is hard not to read his description of a “movement” as parody of the avant-garde’s canonical definition. The omission or ironic use of the term “movement” among bohemian-cosmopolitan poets is telling. Notice that where the term enjoys continued currency, especially among groups such as CAM, the WLM, the Black Arts Movement, or Situationism, it typically loses its associations with aesthetic elitism, positing instead an affinity with the collective struggles undertaken by proponents of the civil rights movement, Black nationalism, radical feminism, and so on. That is, the term “movement” forges links with political rather than strictly aesthetic discourses. Attempts by bohemian literary communities to reformulate avant-garde community make significantly less sense in these contexts.19 The politico-aesthetic project of a group such as CAM is articulated within a diasporic context, and should be understood as a synthesis of the African-Caribbean literary traditions they sought to revive and the new social movement activism underway in London. Groups like CAM also demonstrate that the creation of literary community is not merely the consequence of voluntary “self-exile” (Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry 69); according to this view, the alliance forged by avant-garde artists is the consolation of individual alienation from a dominant culture. Like the WLM in America, members of CAM found themselves involuntarily excluded from the political apparatus of British society. Their work as writers and activists often focused on overcoming exclusionary policies that disenfranchised immigrant communities in England.
One should examine seriously whether an attempt to reformulate community without agonism is desirable to begin with. What would it mean if contemporary poetic communities simply rejected high-modernist agonism in the name of a non-adversarial pluralism? A consensus-driven criticism that rebukes oppositional cultures simply for being oppositional would no doubt curb artistic exploration and pacify political dissent. Members of the WLM and CAM, for instance, were unapologetically militant in their opposition to race and gender oppression and capitalist exploitation. They zealously sought to hegemonize radical equality. By evading the overt politicization of poetry that the term “movement” announces, terms like “scene” and “network” risk a degree of political quietism. At the very least, none seems wholly appropriate when applied to the multiplicity of social identities that emerge in the decades after the Second World War. There is no reason to delete the term “avant-garde” from the vocabulary of cultural analysis, but to avoid the inevitable dead ends perpetrated by the modern/postmodern (read: agonistic versus inclusive, monolithic versus pluralistic) dichotomy, one should reserve descriptions of avant-garde activism specifically for those experimental practices that embody and advance emancipatory projects. Hence, the question one should ask is this: how do experimental literary forms propose novel social modalities?
Notably, all of these words – avant-garde, movement, scene, and network – bear the trace of the word community, a term that, in turn, remains the broadest and least theorized. One speaks of national or ethnic communities, counter-communities, community-building or -outreach. Indeed, among those critics who give explicit attention to the term in their examinations of poetry and poetics, it often modifies another term more actively pursued, or else it contrasts against a comparatively more rigid system of social organization: community and performance, and coalition, instead of institution.20 Raymond Williams astutely notes that the term “community,” unlike “society,” “state,” or “nation,” has managed to retain a “favorable” sense throughout modern history.21 Yet community is almost always defined favourably insofar as it remains undefined. I mean by this paradoxical statement that the word is evoked in opposition to what it purportedly is not: community is not society, not the state, not the nation, and hence it is assumed to be something comparatively unbureaucratic and less structurally rigid. Community then denotes tactile and immediate personal relations between subjects in opposition to objective (often oppressive) structures that purportedly confine, bind, and exclude individuals. Readers of nineteenth-century German social philosophy will likely infer the source of Williams’s terms; the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies first formalizes this general distinction as Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). (Significantly, Tönnies’s book was not translated into English until 1957, featuring the appropriate title Community and Society.)22 To be sure, this categorical separation of community and society is a consummately modern idea. If the abbreviated appellation “post-WWII” names an aftermath – “after” Nazism, “after” the Holocaust, “after” an unprecedented fusion of technology and death – then it also signals a further polarization of Tönnies’s terms, marking a spectacular rupture in the West’s understanding of social existence. After 1945, community could only signify affirmatively by naming an unrepresentable absence, a structureless outside solely defined by its withdrawal from whatever was inside. One encounters an unparalleled reverence for individualism, which would come to represent the only antidote to the failure of all social forms. That poetry in popular culture is so often thought to represent the apotheosis of individualistic expression only serves to underscore the principal task of mid-century literary groups: to defend community from its very definition as negation.
Hence, I will argue, mid-century poetry advances a very different understanding of community. I take this term to mean not the absence of structure but the productive invention, multiplication, and arrangement of social formations. For the literary critic, this means tracing the associations between elements of cultural production – actors, materials, technologies, methods, spaces, and texts – in order to determine what sort of social model it invents. Terms like “group” and “institution” are coextensive rather than antithetical, since it is impossible to theorize social formations apart from the structures that enable organized collaboration. By practice, I propose a term to denote the work of the community. A practice may entail a common set of aesthetic goals, but this is not its defining feature. Instead, a practice denotes what a community shares: its tactics, procedures, conceptual models, and resources. One might usefully contrast the concept of a practice with a style. The designation of a style involves a theoretical abstraction: it imagines a quantifiable and static taxonomy of characteristics specific to it. A style describes the features of a finished cultural artefact and is therefore a formalist concept. A practice, conversely, has both a social-historical and an aesthetic-formal dimension, insofar as it names a cultural artefact and its characteristic traits, but also a process of construction, a social space in which such construction is carried out, those who participate in the process, and the political project it enacts. In this sense, the object of study is not a particular author or work, but instead the ensemble of agents, locations, techniques, and texts that together come to constitute practices of community.
Polemics directed at the institutionalization of poetry too often impede rigorous analysis of the relation between community and practice. Those who complain of poetry’s co-optation by the academies tend to believe that participation in such organizations invariably rarifies and homogenizes creative output. Christopher Beach remarks of academic writing programs that what is now needed are studies that “analyze the phenomenon from … historical, sociological, pedagogical, or even philosophical perspective[s]” (Poetic Culture 54). Yet perhaps a preliminary step is needed, since there is certainly debate as to what constitutes an “institution” in the first place. While the BMC has come to designate a site of one of the most radical poetic innovations at mid-century, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is now synonymous with the type of “academic lyric” that has incited so much inflammatory response, especially among critics associated with the Language Group. It is intriguing that movements like CAM and the WLM do not receive similar criticism. During the rebellious 1960s, Brathwaite, Salkey, and La Rose were busy organizing meetings and conferences. Members of the WLM published lists of feminist presses in almanac-style sourcebooks alongside information about health services and legal resources. They viewed this institutionalization of their work, if one chooses to call it that, as a necessary tactic to render such resources more available to women without access to education. Having said that, I do not mean to exonerate all poetry produced within academies, or any other site of artistic production. Rather, I would caution against the pejorative sense imposed on such words as “institution.” It bears asking what the actual impact a given organization has on the creative production of its members. If one accepts the premise that all social interactions (meetings, movements, etc.) and the artefacts produced by such encounters (poems, stories, etc.) indeed possess an organizing logic, then we will have to refute the validity of Tönnies’s distinction between society conceived as the imposition of order (Gesellschaft) and a structureless community of purely lived relations (Gemeinschaft). Instead we should examine the structure of poetic texts the same way we examine the structure of cultural movements, recognizing, as Jacques Rancière does, that poetry has its own metapolitics – its capacity for “proposing to politics re-arrangements of its space” (Dissensus 119). In addition to questions regarding content, a text’s processual logic and its formal innovations may imitate and enact novel forms of social existence.
If questions of community pervade theoretical discussions in mid-century poetics, then one finds a commensurate thematic preoccupation in countless creative texts – for instance, the formulation of “polis” in Olson’s Maximus Poems (1953); diasporic community in Brathwaite’s Arrivants trilogy (1967, 1968, 1969); critiques of governmentality in Duncan’s Bending the Bow (1968); and social activism in Levertov’s To Stay Alive (1971), Adrienne Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1978), and Audre Lorde’s Between Our Selves (1976). In addition, it is striking that so many major developments in mid-century poetic writing emerge from intensely collaborative poetic cultures: the situationist détournement; feminist writing as re-vision; Caribbean creolizations of “standard” English and the signifyin(g) practices of Black Arts; open form’s mutually adaptive modes among Black Mountain, the Beats, and the New York School; along with the innumerable creative misprisions of Fluxus, Concrete, the TRG, and the Language Group. These experimental forms of writing are inexorably linked to experiments in forms of collective life and action. On the relation between form and the social formations they embody, Olson was never more candid
that no line must sleep,
that as the line goes so goes
the Nation!
(“I, Mencius” [1954] 31–3)
An experimental poetics for Olson is nothing other than an “initiation / of another kind of nation” tested out in the discursive space of the text (“I live underneath” [1969] MP 3:228).
Yet how might one discuss specific poetic texts for the collectivities they enact? Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s contention that “every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics” (A Thousand Plateaus 213), this would entail an analytic approach focusing on the political structures that poetic forms articulate. Take Steve McCaffery’s The Kommunist Manifesto: or Wot We Wukkerz Want (1977) as an example. The text rewrites Marx and Engels’s manifesto in the dialect of the author’s native Yorkshire slang:
It’s abaht buddy time thut kommunizum spoouk its orn mind, unwarritsehbaht, un edder reight set-too we awl this youngunz stuff ehbaht booergy-misters, wee uh bitter straight tawkin onnitsoowun.
Un soourt kommiz frum awlort place uv snugged it up dahn I Lundun, un poowildahl the buk lernin tehgither un cummupwithisser Manifesto, unnitz innuzoowun un int’ froggy, unt’ jerry, un i-ti, unt flemmy unt dayunish. (171)
[It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish, and Danish languages.] (33–4)
The idea for a translation of the Communist Manifesto was inspired by a conversation between McCaffery, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Filliou during a trip to Robert’s Creek, British Columbia, in the mid-1970s. Together they conceived of an “Eternal Network” (a concept Filliou had developed years earlier with George Brecht) as the shared artistic techniques and conceptual models that anyone can use and adapt. The group thus proposed this text as a poetic expression of the network. Simultaneously local and global, micro and macro, the idiomatic translation constitutes a singular, local expression that nonetheless preserves communism’s axiomatic claim: that class subjugation is not inevitable, that a form of collective organization based on the freely associated labour of producers is possible. Hence, Marx’s Communist Manifesto in never universal in the liberal-humanist sense of an abstract generality applied to any situation, but universally transferable, in that it may be taken up eternally by communities that choose to incorporate (and adapt) its principles as their own.
It might be alleged, however, that such a reading strategy is appropriate only for a selective range of texts, in particular, experimental poetry that demystifies the artifice of artistic construction. Yet one can apply this analytic approach to decidedly different poetic traditions. The following passage is taken from Sylvia Plath’s famous lyric, “Daddy” (1962):
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time –
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
…
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
…
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
(“Daddy” 6–10, 31–5, 46–50)
Read in its entirety, the poem’s private references to a father/husband figure are filtered through a series of signs (god, Nazi, devil, vampire, teacher). It is not simply that Plath’s father and husband are patriarchal figures presiding over the household; they also represent precise references to state, religious, cultural, and educational apparatuses and historical events. One could map these relations, drawing lines that link private reference to public symbols and institutions.
It is not at all that Plath confines her focus to a domestic sphere, while turning inward towards the private psyche. Rather than oppose private to public experience, Plath exposes the common patriarchal logic structuring both social spaces. And although critics sometimes argue that Plath depicts a victimized female subject, the daughter/wife figure of “Daddy” identifies potential alliances of resistance between women, minoritarian communities, and artists. Hence, the poem contrasts two competing social formations: one generating oppressive bifurcations and hierarchies (man/woman, public/private, etc.) and a collective that might potentially subtend these dominant relations (woman – Jew – artist).
Studies of poetic culture usually take the form of cultural biography, assessments of canon formation, or critiques of poetry’s institutionalization. Whereas biography attempts to capture the ethos of a group’s personal relations, studies of canon formation and literary professionalization examine the pedagogical frameworks of literature and criticism, the dissemination of texts, and the criteria of literary taste. These modes of study have produced an abundance of fruitful inquiry. My goal is not to take issue with these approaches and themes, which in many respects frame and guide this book. Rather, Poetic Community argues for a crucial intersection between social formations and the invention of poetic forms. Nichol and McCaffery’s description of their work as a “we-full, not an I-less paradigm” applies equally to group formation and literary texts (RG 11). Hence, this study charts the connections between the cultural organizations that authors build, the poetic techniques they jointly develop, and the poetic texts such collaborations generate. I am indebted to scholars such as Barrett Watten, Adalaide Morris, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who examine the reflexive relation between poetic forms and their cultural contexts. Additionally, I find common cause with critics Joshua Clover, Chris Nealon, and Nathan Brown, whose work on poetry and political economy informs this study.
Chapter 2, “Black Mountain College: A Poetic of Local Relations,” examines the literary production at the college in North Carolina between 1949 and 1956, during which time Olson had become its rector. The work of Olson and Creeley develops amid intensive discussions about how to forge a local, autonomous artistic community unaffected by state authority. It was also at this time that John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg were present at the college, and participated in several performance art projects. Although the college is typically associated with the abstract expressionists who worked there during the late-1940s, Olson had collaborated with Cage, while Creeley worked with an expansive range of artists affiliated with Fluxus, mixed media, pop, and abstract art. A wealth of correspondence and archival materials indicate that “open form” poetries should be read as an extension of Black Mountain’s localism and its interdisciplinarity.
Chapter 3, “The Caribbean Artists Movement: A Poetic of Cultural Activism,” investigates the emergence of a pan-Caribbean community of authors in London, England, during the late 1960s. The three principal members of CAM, Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, and Andrew Salkey, together with an expansive group of writers, artists, and critics, viewed their activities as a collective effort to preserve Caribbean cultural history. Yet the group also participated in struggles for migrant rights in the British capital. The chapter reads the work of Brathwaite and his collaborators within this context of Black British activism, situating the development of “nation language” (Brathwaite’s term for Caribbean English) in relation to La Rose and Salkey’s Marxist commitments and their tireless work as activists in London.
Chapter 4, “The Women’s Liberation Movement: A Poetic for a Common World,” examines a network of American feminist poets involved with the movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Like members of CAM, poets such as Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, and Robin Morgan mobilized around a formative counter-culture linking a social poetics with political work. Denied a place in the counter-public spheres of the New Left, radical feminists devised comparatively more dispersed networks of small press organizations anchored by an axiomatic politics of female emancipation. The chapter traces a much-misunderstood poetic of the “common,” a term that Rich, Grahn, and others use to denote cooperation, shared resources, and an accessible “common world.” Given the considerable attention to the commons in recent social theory (including the work of Hardt and Negri, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou), it is telling that the prescient work of WLM poets and theorists remains largely unacknowledged.
In contrast, chapter 5, “The Toronto Research Group: A Poetic of the Eternal Network,” addresses a cosmopolitan grouping of Canadian, U.S., and European poets experimenting with multi-authorship, appropriative writing, and creative translation during the 1970s. Although readers of U.S. and British poetry are likely less familiar with the TRG, its members were active in artistic movements such as Fluxus, conceptualism, and mail art, such that their work might be thought of as a poetic constellation drawing from these various traditions. Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, along with other members of the Four Horsemen, Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, constituted the core group in Toronto, Canada, but their collaborative experiments also involved Dick Higgins, Robert Filliou, Dieter Roth, and George Brecht, among others. The group designed their network of shared “conceptual models” in order to discredit proprietary notions of authorship and the nascent emergence of an intellectual property regime, the consequences of which have since become an imperative concern for twenty-first-century writers, musicians, and artists. “For a time, in the 60s and 70s,” remark historians Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips, “Toronto might well have boasted the largest number of avant-garde poets per capita of any city on the face of the earth” (A Secret Location 51). Despite comments like these from several critics, there is little sustained engagement with the Toronto scene outside of a small group of dedicated writers publishing in Open Letter. Suffice it to say, Steve McCaffery’s participation in the Language Group and Nichol’s role in the international concrete movement is just the tip of the iceberg.
No doubt alternative case studies were possible. For instance, while Black Mountain is the first major post–Second World War poetic movement in North America, the San Francisco Renaissance or the first-generation New York School would also have provided succinct histories of open form writing’s development. Had the book featured a chapter on the Black Arts Movement instead of CAM, it would have undoubtedly joined with the WLM to produce a more dialectically driven study of American open form writing’s emergence and transformation. Likewise, a more conventional history of Fluxus instead of the Toronto Research Group would have made for a tidier national study of U.S. poetry. Yet the book would then have to jettison its attention to the diasporic shifts, post-colonial expressions, local experiments, and international alliances forged elsewhere in response to the Cold War’s global ideological enclosures. The study of Cold War literature too often perpetuates its own “politics of containment” by focusing on American literature exclusively. Poetic Community begins in the rural United States; it then moves to cosmopolitan London (while assessing the post-war Caribbean diaspora en route); it circles back to America, this time to its urban centres; and then over to Toronto (a city positioned at the borderline of its super-power neighbour). These geographical movements in and out of America, from the rural to the urban, and through the West and its Others, confront so many ideological borders – be they gendered fronts, racist divisions, or proprietary walls. In the end, however, we visit these sites of exclusion to encounter those willing to trespass against them.
Since the Enlightenment, Duncan remarks, “in poetry as in government or religion, the goal is system or reason, motive or morality, some set of rules and standards that will bring the troubling plenitude of experience ‘within our power’” (“Ideas” 102–3). Instead, he remarks, we must remake the poem as a “co-operative” (90). Duncan’s contention appears in “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” an essay devoted to the premise that formal decisions – those regarding grammar, syntax, style, etc. – manifest themselves as political choices. Critics often argue that the formal elements of a text shape its ideology; yet a poem’s formal politics has the capacity to reflect alternative ideologies as well as dominant ones. It can reiterate a culture’s hegemonic presuppositions, or it can expose and disrupt them, opening up new spaces in which to imagine other possible worlds. A valuable consequence of this work, I hope, will be to establish points of connection between several disparate traditions that comprise the field of contemporary poetry. The collaborative projects that this book documents point finally towards a “we-full, not I-less” aesthetics shaping current performance poetries, intermedial activities, conceptual writing, and digital cultures. Poetic Community looks forward to a tradition of literature tasked with defending communal culture from the enclosures that threaten it.