Nick Selby Online Review X

ALH Online Review, Series X 1 Clemens Spahr, A Poetics of Global Solidarity: Modern American Poetry and Social Movements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 255 + xii pp. Reviewed by Nick Selby, University of East Anglia Clemens Spahr’s ambitious and challenging book seeks to question and overturn (or, at least disturb) established ways of thinking about the place of “Modern American poetry” within global political movements. Poetry, we have been told (since at least W. H. Auden and the aesthetics of disengagement espoused by the New Criticism), “makes nothing happen.” Spahr’s book contests this and looks to trace a different history of poetry and poetics in the last century. The book asks in what ways, and by what means, can poetry be seen as politically motivated, active and seeking social change. What are the affective powers, and effective strategies, Spahr wonders, by which poetry enhances political change? How does it speak to global conditions of labor, production, and class consciousness? In asking such questions, with their particularly Marxist inflections, Spahr wants to set the critical record straight. In this respect, he offers a bold riposte to what have become standard (and normalizing) histories of US poetry in the twentieth century, which, despite their various claims and counterclaims about the canon—and about mainstream vs. experimental poetics and practices – largely settle for accounts that assert either weak or strong versions of modernity and its relationship to “Americanness,” accounts in which the aesthetic and the social are kept troublingly apart. In contrast, Spahr teases out how US poetry across the century might speak to, and of, a “global solidarity beyond imperialist color-coded maps” (9) rather than reasserting models of assured individualism and (neo)liberal subjectivity that are encoded in such critical models. The book, then, does some very important work; but it could press even harder on some of the fascinating issues it raises: for example, global solidarity; instrumentalized poetics; why these, and not other, poets? So, why these poets? Spahr examines a wide range of poets, three or four in each of its six chapters. A Poetics of Global Solidarity thus has the feel of surveying a big sweep of US poets from those involved in the “Lyrical Left” of the 1910s and the Popular Front in the 1930s to those associated with the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement, and to those advocating anti-Vietnam protest, feminist challenges to established hierarchies, and calls for postmodern revolution. It cuts across genres and types of poetry—traditional lyric, documentary, epic, Beat, experimental as well as rap and postpunk hardcore. The book is nothing if not bracing, then, in its attempt to remap the coordinates of US poetry and poetics. Implicit in this breadth and variety, though, is Spahr’s inability to really dig into what each of the poets he analyzes is fully up to. The poets discussed, therefore, become broadly (sometimes, wildly) representative of the book’s larger © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

2 ALH Online Review, Series X political argument about global and social change. A little more nuance brought to questions of social change, political commitment, and changing allegiances over time in the work of each of these poets would have delivered a finer-grained analysis of what’s at stake in poetry’s extraliterary commitments. And this is despite some really brilliant close readings of particular passages: high points are the readings of Anne Waldman and Mark Nowak, of Muriel Rukeyser and particularly fine accounts of Bob Dylan’s” Desolation Row” and the poetic call to arms of the hardcore rock band, Strike Anywhere. But the threads that hold these various readings together, because they seem drawn with broad brushstrokes, are not always convincing. Spahr claims that what brings all the poets together is a ”vision of global solidarity that . . . refers . . . back to the economic structures that enable the exclusionary mechanisms of the modern world-system” (5). In general terms, this does seem to be true, but such historical and economic conditions are clearly very different for writers in the early years of the century— Edwin Rolfe; Arturo Giovannitti—from those at midcentury—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes— which are, in turn, different and changed conditions for contemporary writers and rappers, like Immortal Technique and Blue Scholars, that the book examines. So, while the general argument is sound, and the readings of specific texts excellent, A Poetics of Global Solidarity never quite resolves the question of why these poets and their particular cases, and not some others, exemplify the general case. This question is important because it leads to two other important considerations (it is not, thus, the usual reviewer’s complaint about why something hasn't been dealt with in a book). First, the book’s selection of poets is exclusively North American (and predominantly US), and this rather undermines the claims being made for, and about, ideas of the global and world-systems analysis on which the overarching argument rests. For example, Immortal Technique is described as a ‘Peruvian American rap artist’ (169), but the specific Peruvian conditions of his music-making are elided by a reading that places his work exclusively within a literary history of African American freedom struggles (the Harlem Renaissance; the Civil Rights movement of the 60s), rather than global political movements. And what of other politically engaged poets, not included in the book, whose work is inflected by and reflects upon the legacies of “Modern American poetry,” poets in the Caribbean, Europe, Africa? The exclusion of even any mention of such poets, and their poetic and political engagements, devalues Spahr’s overall argument. It is hard to see how the reframing of nationalist paradigms that this study proposes can be carried out from such a solidly nation-based (US) set of poetic examples. The problem here is that very discourse of “Americanness” that the book seeks to disrupt is actually reasserted by the poets it chooses to examine. And second, if the poets selected could be substituted equally by other ones to furnish the same larger argument, then what are the principles of selection in operation? Whether Spahr has chosen his poets on the basis of the evidence they supply for an

ALH Online Review, Series X 3 argument about global solidarity (that is, on account of their effective political engagements) or on the basis of their affective poetic power (whether they are considered “good” poems) is never really clear. Now, this comes down to an important question about how the legacies of modernity within US poetry have led to particular ways of thinking about instrumentalized poetics. The play between the aesthetic and the political (between poetry’s value as poetry and as an instrument of social change) sustains such distinctions. Indeed, it can be seen as the ground upon which the grand antagonisms that have characterized histories of US poetry (the “anthology wars” of the 60s, for instance) in the last century have organized themselves. Sadly, Spahr’s analysis ducks the issue. At one point, in its discussion of Rolfe and Dynamo magazine, the “tendency” of writers of the 1930s left “to conceive of poetry from a rigidly instrumentalist perspective” (35) is mentioned. The implications here – on questions of poetic value, on literary judgment, and on how poetry might engage in ideological critique—remain largely unexplored, as they are elsewhere ignored too. This is a shame because questions of how poetry does, or doesn't, operate within such a rigid perspective would illuminate more clearly the course of Spahr’s argument throughout. By asking more pressing questions about how the poems under discussion act as instruments of global solidarity would have allowed Spahr to develop a more pointed intervention into issues of how identity, power, and poetic force (both aesthetic and affective) operate within US literary production, and within global frameworks. Nevertheless, the book’s daring challenges to conventional models of US poetic history serve well to develop (in broad terms) debates, already initiated by Cary Nelson, about the powers of the poetic within the realm of “Modern American” acts of nation-making, and about the bearing this has on a global economy of ideological production. The slippages in the argument outlined above notwithstanding, this is a very worthwhile addition to Palgrave Macmillan’s leading Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics series.