Remembrances of Left Pasts

Abstract

by John Lowney Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. 287 pages John Lowney's History, Memory, and the Literary Left considers in detail, and with a focus primarily on single, large-scale poetic sequences or volumes, six poets who rarely get mentioned together in the same breath: Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thomas McGrath, and George Oppen. Indeed, if one adds a preliminary discussion of Wallace Stevens in the first, more general chapter titled Janitor's Poems of Every Day, one might legitimately wonder whether Lowney has not summoned us for a late-modernist poetry version of a Steve Allen gathering of deceased greats, where William Blake and Einstein will anatomize the vicissitudes of human existence alongside Shakespeare, Hitler, and Moses. It is, however, the burden of Lowney's argument that he has assembled more than a colloquy of illustrious ghosts, and that a particular weave of cultural affinities and affiliations, ultimately knotted into the broader fabric of an American society shaped by the Popular Front of the and its aftermath, holds these otherwise divergent poets in unforeseen and mostly unacknowledged community. Despite some of the examples it discusses, History, Memory, and the Literary Left is not for the most part a book that deals with the as a distinct chronological slice in which such-and-such a writer produced such-and-such a set of works. It is rather about the 1930s in American left poetics, an historical space-time that extends, through complex dynamics of memory, nostalgic longing, self-criticism, and poetic re-elaboration or even revisionary correction, well into later parts of the century in the lives and works of certain left-wing poets. More than just a focused study of a period or literary group, Lowney's book can thus best be seen to contribute to the ongoing reappraisal of twentieth-century American left-wing writing impelled by the archeological salvage work of scholars such as Cary Nelson in Repression and Recovery and Michael Denning in The Cultural Front and elaborated in the diverse researches of Alan Wald, Barbara Foley, Walter Kalaidjian, Michael Davidson, Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Michael North, Aldon Nielsen, Michael Thurston, and other scholars of American literary history. Lowney's particular slice of this expanding field is politically conscious, left-oriented, late-modernist poetry. This multiply qualified designation has a useful precision for determining and delimiting the object of his critical discussion. Lowney does not really discuss at length the poetic avant-garde (in a stricter sense) and its utopian brand of politics, nor does he consider in detail the thicker cultural context formed by numerous minor poets who, however functionally significant their production might have been in their moment, fall well short of the formal and intellectual excellence of the poets he treats. Instead, he is primarily concerned with how several highly self-conscious, learned (if often largely self-taught), and technically gifted poets dealt with a crisis of representation precipitated by the social crises of the 1930s, along with the new hopes--too soon dashed--that the Popular Front fostered for alternative publics and alternative idioms to communicate artistically with them. Lowney structures each of his chapters in two major parts: a discussion of an individual poet's situation in and relation to the and his or her affiliations with left-wing cultural organizations and cultural concerns, followed by the closer explication of a key work by that writer. The works discussed include Muriel Rukeyser's innovative use of documentary materials in her 1938 sequence The Book of the Dead, which deals with the notorious Gauley Bridge silicosis scandal of the early to mid-1930s; Elizabeth Bishop's Key West poems from North and South; Langston Hughes's assemblage of socially coded verbal riffs, Montage of a Dream Deferred; Gwendolyn Brooks's engagement with Chicago's modernist architecture and the decay of its urbanist utopia in In the Mecca (which in 1968 offered a hinge between an earlier Popular Front politics and a developing Black Arts militancy); Thomas McGrath's long autobiographical poem of the geography and history of the suppression of popular politics in the United States; and George Oppen's austere confrontation of his communist-influenced politics of the and 40s with the social realities of 1960s New York in Of Being Numerous. …