Poetry in a Global Age by Jahan Ramazani

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poetry in a Global Age by Jahan Ramazani Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu Poetry in a Global Age. By Jahan Ramazani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. If poetry has historically been seen as a provincial, local, or national genre, then Jahan Ramazani’s most recent book, Poetry in a Global Age, adds to an emergent discourse that rethinks poetry within transnational, global, and planetary scales. Readers of scholarship on poetry are likely familiar with the work of Ramazani, the University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia and an Editorial Board Member of this journal, particularly his two prior books that dealt with postcolonial and transnational poetry, A Transnational Poetics, published in 2009 and winner of the Harry Levin Prize for the best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010, and The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, published in 2001. After more than two decades spent meditating on this constellation of topics, Poetry in a Global Age develops further attention to cross-cultural and cross-national poetics through “an approach to poetry that highlights literary confluences, commonalities, and conflicts that cross national borders” (9). The poets Ramazani highlights within this net include both writers who may be familiar and others who may be unfamiliar to readers, such as Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas Hardy, Claude McKay, Elizabeth Bishop, Karen Press, Arun Kolatkar, Daljit Nagra, Wallace Stevens, Derek Walcott, and W. B. Yeats. Along the way, he enmeshes their work alongside theorists and scholars, including Franco Moretti, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Arjun Appadurai, and Bruno Latour, who help us view poetry through the refractive and multidimensional aspects of globalization, modernity, and theories of the world in literature. Both interesting and intriguing, the title of the book and the early announcement of the book’s approach speak directly to current discourses surrounding “world literature” as a field of inquiry and an approach or method for literary study. The key difference in terminology, besides the quite evident [End Page 121] focus on poetry, is Ramazani’s use of the word “global” as opposed to “world” or “planet.” Poetry, according to Ramazani, has a “relation to globalizing processes . . . which . . . significantly precede the 1990s” (12). Poets utilize these processes to “create textures, forms, and voices that embody and reflect on the experience of living transnationally and interculturally” and what it “feels like to live in a global age” (13). For example, Ramazani notes regarding Seamus Heaney that “his extensive travels . . . generate an ever-wider range of geographic and cultural reference in his poetry,” something that Ramazani says becomes especially evident to a student of global studies (177). The term “globe,” then, begins to highlight the “interplay between the world and the ball-like maps that help us imagine it,” and the term can “help check the national ghost in the transnational paradigm” (21). Ramazani’s approach to this paradigm is exemplified well in the introduction to the book, where he anchors his argument with a reading of Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” to situate the poem on a global and planetary scale. As Ramazani will do with readings of other poems, he notes how the globality of the poem can be found in the “coalescence of money, labor, commodities, and skills” that emerges in the planetary scales of a rather ordinary writing instrument (1). The book’s arguments are frequently reinforced by inclusions of theoretical material, usually after the analysis of a poem, such as his engagement with Bruno Latour alongside his reading of “I, Pencil.” Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the book is its international scope, which still remains rare in poetry studies. Throughout the ten chapters, Ramazani makes widespread yet specific claims about the place of globalization in poetry, so the sweep of the book—its transnational scope, transhistorical archive, attentive close readings, and large steps through poetic literary history—bolsters both a reimagining and a reaffirmation of the global range of poetry, reigniting our understanding of some individual poets and poems, and resituating broader conversations of the world within a poetry-focused literary study. These claims are supported by what I see to be three distinct parts of...