TBSBT Formal Protests James Matthew Wilson Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form David Caplan Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com 165 pages; paper, $24.95 Contemporary literary scholarship has, by and large, impaled itself on the paired horns of an equivocation on the word "politics," and this has damaged the study of poetry in particular. Taking to heart the lessons ofpoststructural thinkers, foremost among them, Michel Foucault, most scholars accept that the very structures of culture and subjectivity are constituted by and within a potentially infinite series of power relationships. As such, every facet of experience merits analysis to expose these lines of political tension or domination. One fruit of this has been to open up discursive space for works previously marginalized for their lack of high cultural resonance or aesthetic achievement. Where once Dracula (1897) was a kind of pulp fiction, it now occupies a central place in the ever-proliferating syllabi of graduate courses on the gothic, gender, and Irish studies. Inadvertently, perhaps, these same scholars elide mis understanding ofthe political with another more demotic understanding associated with protest movements in the nineteen-sixties. Then, to be "political" meant to be engaged and to subordinate all other facets of life to a particular socio-political cause. It was, in fact, in contradistinction to mis notion of politics as engaged and conscious action that Foucault outlined his almost despairing Nietzschean social theory. Nonetheless, in the literature classroom, these two understandings intermingle widi often confusing results—especially for the reading ofpoetry. Novels traditionally accounted as part ofthe canon remain in place, but our understanding of them has developed to appreciate what they leave unspoken, the way in which a text can inform its reader's extra-literary subjectivity. Novels outside the traditional canon are also granted entry into this discursive space, precisely because—sometimes—what originally set them "outside" was their disruptive or revealing emplotment oflines ofdie political. Adept at tracing the curvature ofany number ofideologies in prose narratives , most contemporary scholars lack the patience to perform a similar task with poems. An ignorance of and prejudice against poetic form (the complex of rhyme, meter, and stanza) often,exacerbates this impatience ofdiscovering political form, and poems by and large get ignored. In scholarship and teaching alike, when the odd poem does make its appearance, it does so because it was written in such a way as to make it easily available as a "political" document in the second sense of that term. In other words, scholars will seldom consider a poem like John Crowe Ransom's "Miriam Tazewell" in an essay or classroom, despite the striking way in which that poem projects anxiety about democratic chaos, material progress, and scientific rationalism onto the domestic sphere and the female body (although , I note, Cary Nelson has done so). More likely, they will make token representations ofthe genre of poetry by discussing explicitly, baldly "engaged" poems. Denise Levertov's raw and dated protests against Vietnam or whistling construction workers may get taught precisely because it is so raw as already to be "digested" into a pat political message suitable for the undergraduate classroom. Längsten Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" gets taught because the title is so helpful one need hardly attend to the languorous lines that follow; and it also gets celebrated because of its author's race, despite the poem's appropriation of romantic nationalist and structuralist concepts that most contemporary scholars would find troubling. Because poems seem to resist the subtle hermeneutics of ideology, their use in the academic milieu gets reduced to that ofthe campaign billboard. And, to extend this observation, only those poems most aggressively, even obnoxiously , susceptible to this "billboarding" get studied. Certain supposedly "avant-garde" confections, for instance those ofCharles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian, gain a privileged institutional credibility. The very opacity of their work makes it seem consummately "engaged"—precisely because, it would seem, upon reading it one is left wondering, "Ifthis is not political of intent, what else could it be?" Caplan'sfirst ambition is to demonstrate that nothing in poetry orpoeticform inheres. David Caplan's pithy yet wide ranging study steps into this prosaic academic atmosphere and...
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Dec 11, 2017
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