"Progressive Lit.": Amiri Baraka, Bruce Andrews, and the Politics of the Lyric "I"

Abstract

Bruce Andrews's poetry and criticism have done much to establish assumptions about dissent that became standard for readers of Language poetry during seventies and eighties. For many readers, Andrews's position made oppositional poetry in tradition of Whitman impossible to believe in: Beat poetry, (1) for example, seemed politically unselfconscious. Andrews assumes that lyric poet's freedom to dissent is only freedom to say yes to American ideology--individualism. (2) Calling poems that fail to explode lyric I--in other words, false dissent--progressive lit., Andrews tries to establish a consensus that exploding lyric I is only true dissent possible in poetry. (3) However, Amiri Baraka's poetry shows that Andrews's position is reductive and brittle. Baraka's lyric I is always already exploding, reinventing social and historical within individual and collective lyric. Corrosively and with persistent monochromatic anger, Andrews's Gestalt Me Out! substitutes a particular kind of paratactic irony for lyric I. However, in sacrificing (certain modes of) representation, narrative, and expression, Andrews may unintentionally throw out political we along with lyric I: That's way you spell it, dear, it's way you look it up, arouse beat, saccharine zip-a-tone ... wake knees of normals? (Romanticism 97). Andrews's pastiche is neither a parody of mainstream culture and values nor a parody of Beat (individualist) nonconformity-as-opposition (arouse beat ... wake knees of normals?). Instead, Gestalt Me Out! performs symptoms, acts out poet's inability to transform alienation into prophecy (that's way you spell it, dear ...). Andrews tries to develop a mode of opposition, a poetics of resistance, more genuine than what most readers still think of as political poetry. Andrews's stance toward opposition and resistance depends on his assumption that progressive lit. (Praxis 23) is naive--and is always coopted into ideology of American freedom. Gestalt Me Out! slaps repeatedly at sort of themes and narrative trajectories readers expect to find in confessional lyric. Andrews's tone oscillates and wobbles, connecting camp, schizophrenia, and outrage: His mode is a cyberpunk version of what Fredric Jameson called the hysterical sublime as schizophrenia--psychological liminality without reintegration). Andrews politicizes surface of his poem in order to embody individualism, representative democracy, and representation as inextricable, as a single sinking ship: Sometimes you just get tired of sucking same dick all time. never break a mirror. Religion=chucksteak; quits its sap. All elderly feel parental. (Romanticism 97) Andrews's staccato concatenation empties potential plots, one after another, of lyric force, and these unstable micro-narratives obviously are not believed way fictions animating Out of Cradle Endlessly Rocking or Kaddish are believed. Through tropes, allusions, and routines (as in stand-up comedy), Andrews calls attention to problems that bedevil subjectivity and identity. For example, ego quits its sap is a thumbnail parody of vital continuum--a language rather than a single analogy--among self, body, and nature--a continuum central to Emerson and Whitman and countless gorgeous (and valid) poems. I'd never break a hints at magical thinking and (proposed) connection between magic and schizophrenia in a faux-naif voice. trope recalls fragility of self in Marvell's The Mower's Song-- My mind was once true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay And in greenness of grass Did see its hopes as in a glass (109) --or catastrophic/gothic recognition in Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott (the mirror crack'd from to side [24]). …