Who We Are, Who We Aren’t

Abstract

Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics by Michael Davidson Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 281 pages Michael Davidson's new study impressively complicates conventional narrative that literary historians have continued to use to define literary writings of postwar years. Especially when describing role of poetry in 1950s and 1960s, literary historians have traditionally seen field as sharply divided between apologists for establishment and renegades or mavericks--or and raw, as Robert Lowell defined them in an influential 1961 interview. Lowell drew on terms from Claude Levi-Strauss (from a book excerpt that had just been published in Partisan Review) that carried within them a judgmental weight. Tribes that cooked day's catch were more advanced than those that simply fell to devouring it. What was strikingly unfair about such a characterization, of course, was notion that renegades were in some way unsophisticated, as if they were driven to spontaneous objections because they didn't know any better. Correcting such a simplification has, in decades following Lowell's pronouncement, been an important task for many. Impressive careers were developed by those who defended these postwar outsider poets, from Sherman Paul's innovative journal-entry type meditations from 1970s, which addressed Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, David Antin, and others, to Marjorie Perloff's how-to-read models for linguistic experimentalists in Europe and America. Indeed, Davidson himself actively participated in that rehabilitation. His important first book of criticism, The San Francisco Renaissance (1989) remains a significant introduction to alternate poetry of Black Mountain, of beats, and of those who made a community for themselves in San Francisco in 1950s. Guys Like Us continues Davidson's examination of poets of postwar years (here he defines Cold War as extending from close of World War II to beginnings of detente in 1980s), but he now views those poets within a framework that he has widely expanded. That Davidson makes considerable demands on poets he studies is not surprising, given ambitions in his own poetry. In work he started to publish in 1980s--beginning with The Landing of Rochambeau (1985)--he joined with Michael Palmer and Ron Silliman, among others, to design a poetry that flourished as it investigated those places in which sharply different facets of cultural life overlapped. It follows, then, that he would hold poets to a high standard, conceiving of them as participating fully (if subtly, complexly, even secretively) in shaping of postwar culture--or perhaps more accurately, in resisting dominant culture's idea of how to shape postwar years. Focusing in different chapters on work of such poets as Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Amira Baraka, and Jack Spicer (with extended attention to individual works by Kenneth Rexroth, Edward Field, John Wieners, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others)--and emphasizing pioneer work these writers accomplished in decades just after World War II--Davidson consistently challenges poems by placing them within larger contexts, even viewing them alongside popular films or prose potboilers. He involves Orson Welles's Lady from Shanghai (1947) with Rexroth's Love Poems of Marichiko, or he evokes Michael Curtiz's treatment of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce (1945) as a prelude to discussing Bishop and Plath. Crucial to so bold a project is Davidson's ability to discern a Cold War cultural imaginary both vast enough to encompass diverse materials and precise enough to generate meaningful interpretations. Agency panic (the phrase is credited to Timothy Melley in his Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America [2000]) fuses fears of insecurity at global and local level and assumes that a fatal feminization threatens agency that is presumed to be the domain of strong masculine figures (8). …