<i>Wholly Communion</i>, Literary Nationalism, and the Sorrows of the Counterculture

Abstract

those americans here writing about it's time to back, after our heroes were always gangster outlaw why surprised you act like it now, a place simplest man was always most complex you gave me usual things, comics, music, royal blue drape suits & what they ever me but unreadable books? Tom Raworth, I Mean These opening lines from I Mean by British poet Tom Raworth, published in 1967 in Raworth's fi rst full- length collection, The Relation Ship (Goliard Press),1 stand as a kind of meta phor for a larger problem facing British avantgarde poetry in 1960s. Put simply, I Mean addresses an infl uence on British letters that was to weigh heavily on poets challenging restrained formalism and hostility to modernist project characteristic of British Movement poets.2 How were many Beat and Black Mountain- enamored versifi ers of Albion to be innovative on their own terms? The avant- garde, as Raworth seems to have it, is predicated on aura of outlaw, gangster. Such fi gures are suggestively American, particularly when read within context of poem's opening lines. American signs pointing way forward for a developing British poetics include an idealized simplicity, comics, and music.3 Raworth's poem works in part to ask whether En glish will be able to give back. What would that something sound like? What would it look like? Would it be somehow distinctly En glish? Would it be as good as Americans? Is Raworth ventriloquizing and mocking anxiety felt by British fellow poets enamored of experimental American verse, or is he being sincere? If Raworth is ventriloquizing, why might that be case? To write all those americans here writing about america is to address highly problematic way American avant- garde poetry and poetics were unselfconsciously nationalized in 1950s and 1960s through a variety of strategies. Many British poets, for example, got their fi rst taste of American alternative poetry from Donald Allen's pop u lar 1960 anthology The New American Poetry. Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and related fi gures were ensconced in a book whose title gladly relied on identifi cation with United States as an attractive selling point, and whose cover featured red and white stripes allusive of American fl ag. The Beat poets in par tic u lar saw no contradiction in positioning themselves as antiestablishment fi gures while maintaining a marked patriotism that distinguished them from their more internationalist peers. Ginsberg, for example, appeared any number of times throughout 1960s in an Uncle Sam hat. This challenged mainstream American values by virtue of hat's placement on head of a polysexual bearded Jewish poet, as it simultaneously marked a sincere love of country that Ginsberg, following Whitman, expressed throughout his work. We can refer to his 1956 poem A Supermarket in California, which invoked and implicitly called for a recuperation of an idealized lost America,4 and move right through his poetry of 1980s and 1990s to get a sense of poet's lifelong commitment to United States as a promised land that had to be redeemed. Kerouac certainly never shied away from expressing his loyalty to States even as he, like Ginsberg, railed against limitations it placed on his desires. His On Road refers repeatedly to an America that symbolized- like no other place- freedom he so craved. Despite its problems, America was the mighty land.5 As Manuel Louis Martinez suggests, it may be that [Kerouac] is neither voice of dissension as his most ardent readers claim, nor violently reactionary racist he came to resemble in his fi nal years. It may turn out that what Beats most clearly signifi ed was tendency of American dissent to subvert its own countercultural instinct for middle road, for stability, for comfort of status quo that promises a protective space for individual. …