Multicultural Poetics

Nissa Parmar

Description

Multicultural Poetics provides a new perspective on American poetry that will contribute to the evolution of contemporary critical practice. Nissa Parmar combines formalist analysis with cultural studies theory to trace a lineage of hybrid poetry from the American Renaissance to what Marilyn Chin deemed America's "multicultural renaissance," the blossoming of multicultural literature in the 1980s and 1990s. This re-visionary literary history begins by analyzing Whitman and Dickinson as postcolonial poets. This critical approach provides an alternative to the factionalism that has characterized twentieth-century American poetic history and continues to inform literary criticism in the twenty-first century. Parmar uses a multiethnic, multigender method that emphasizes the relationship between American poetic form and cultural development. This book provides a new approach by using hybridity as the critical paradigm for a study that groups multiethnic and emergent authors. It thereby combats literary ghettoization while revealing commonalities across American literatures and the cross-fertilization that has informed their development.

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• Poetry
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 21 décembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438468464
• Langue: English

Extrait

MULTICULTURAL POETICS
SUNY series in Multiethnic Literature

Mary Jo Bona, editor
MULTICULTURAL POETICS
Re-visioning the American Canon
NISSA PARMAR
Cover art: GLQC Collections – Baca – Mary Ann Henio – Navajo – Thoreau,
New Mexico 1994 / courtesy of Michigan State University Museum.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Parmar, Nissa, author.
Title: Multicultural poetics : re-visioning the American canon / Nissa Parmar.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series in multiethnic literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017013956 (print) | LCCN 2017029623 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438468464 (e-book) | ISBN 9781438468457 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: American poetry – Minority authors – History and criticism. | Multiculturalism in literature. | Multiculturalism – United States – History. | Other (Philosophy) in literature. | Poetry – Social aspects – United States. | Poetics – Political aspects – United States. | American poetry – History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PS153.M56 (ebook) | LCC PS153.M56 P378 2018 (print) | DDC 810.9/3529--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013956
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
In “the American Strain”
Chapter One
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman: The “Beginners”
Chapter Two
William Carlos Williams: “A Sort of Song”
Chapter Three
Adrienne Rich: “A Whole New Poetry Beginning Here”
Chapter Four
Marilyn Chin: “The End of a Beginning”
Chapter Five
Sherman Alexie: “Tradition Is Repetition”
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FIGURES
Figure 1
Mourning Picture
Figure 2
A Lady of Baptist Corner, Ashfield, Massachusetts (the Artist’s Wife)
PREFACE
This book is, beyond a lineage and hybridity study, an argument for a comparative approach to American literary studies. This argument does not reduce the importance of anthologies, courses, departments, or critical approaches based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Instead it asserts the necessity of reading in addition to and beyond such designations to generate a fulsome understanding and view of the development of American Literature, which did not evolve in the discreet pockets suggested by contemporary critical approaches.
Even as diverse American literatures flourish and postracial, postethnic, and postfeminist claims are made both inside and outside the academy, we are as culturally and socially divided as we have ever been. This is evident in the necessity of Black Lives Matter, the talk of great walls, and the misogynistic, racially, and culturally divisive rhetoric that convinced nearly half of American voters to elect Donald Trump president. Even as scholars tout globalism and transnationalism, voters from the United States and beyond are clinging to “bad old” nationalisms and xenophobia. The anxiety level in the United States is palpable and, while we are perpetually in the process of constructing our national identity, the country is clearly experiencing an identity crisis. Stephen Burt recently posed the question “Is American Poetry Still a Thing?” We could as easily ask, “Is America Still a Thing?” If yes, then what are we?
Burt explores several models for answering the question and ultimately emphasizes process and open-endedness. While my study acknowledges that we are a country of poetries, we also have poetic traditions. The tradition of American poetry explored through the lineage of this study similarly emphasizes process, open-endedness, and frequently challenges critics to rethink the questions: “What is poetry?” and “What is its purpose?” The lineage represents a (r)evolutionary tradition of democratic forms and content that present a national identity that does not compromise but explores, celebrates, and critiques individual and community identities. Just as the poets and poetry examined here assert the relationship between poetic form and social structure, this book is a reassertion of the relationship between canons and culture. Now, more than ever, it is essential to desegregate and deghettoize American Literature to promote cultural exchange and social equity inside and outside of the academy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Alex Goody, Eric White, and Niall Munro of Oxford Brookes University for their time and advice on this project and several other endeavors.
COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSIONS
Thank you to Hanging Loose Press and Robert Hershon for granting permission to use the first of the “Totem Sonnets” from The Summer of Black Widows , by Sherman Alexie, © 1996 by Sherman Alexie. Thank you also to New Directions for use of “A Sort of a Song,” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962 , copyright © 1944 by William Carlos Williams, reprinted by permission of New Directions. Permission for “The robin’s my criterion for tune” J 285/ F 256, “I saw no way—the heavens were stitched” J 378/F 633, “Unfulfilled to observation” J 972/F 839, “Revolution is the pod” J 1082/F 1044, from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition , edited by Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP), copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson. Permission for use of Edwin Romanzo Elmer’s Mourning Picture and A Lady of Baptist Corner, Ashfield, Massachusetts provided by Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts.
INTRODUCTION
In “the American Strain”

The American poem came from Whitman and Dickinson. 1
—Marilyn Chin
We haven’t had our Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. 2
—Sherman Alexie

Marilyn Chin’s observation reflects the widely held critical and poetic opinion that the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson marked the start of American poetry as well as their place at the center of the American poetic canon. Sherman Alexie’s comment implicitly echoes this view but simultaneously places himself, as part of a Native American “we,” outside the American poetic tradition initiated by these progenitors. While Alexie’s observation speaks to the dominant cultural construction of America and Americans as “white” and European-descended, it also reflects the American literary culture of categorization, factionalism, and exclusion that, in its contemporary form, serves to marginalize Alexie and Chin from “American” literature and culture via ethnic literary labels, Native American and Asian American, respectively. Alexie observes that such labels are used by publishers and academics to group together authors who employ entirely different literary styles and define them against a white male “norm” (“World” 153). Alexie suggests this practice serves as a publisher’s marketing strategy to “exotic[ize]” the ethnically labeled authors but usefully helps to “focus the market” (154). However, in academia, Alexie asserts, “Such labels are often used by critics to diminish works, or by supporters to promote [them]” (154). His comment reflects the national cultural and curricular debates of the 1980s and 1990s that are now commonly referred to as the “canon wars.” In university English departments, these “wars” were waged between traditional critics and cultural studies critics. 3
While cultural studies critics aimed to incorporate or “promote” minority literature, ethnic labels were used by traditional (i.e., formalist) critics during the 1980s and 1990s to “diminish” and exclude ethnically labeled poetry. This tendency resulted in what Alan Golding describes as the “structural opposition of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘poetry’ ” (31) and contributed to the critical marginalization of ethnically labeled poetry. This marginalization is also evident in the so-called “death of poetry,” a concurrent critical phenomenon, purported by critics such as Joseph Epstein, that audiences and, in turn, the cultural significance of poetry had dramatically declined. Many of the critics enforcing the ethnicity/poetry binary further argued and implied that