Remembrances of Left Pasts

Remembrances of Left Pasts History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935-1968 by Jobn Lowney Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. 287 pages Tyrus Miller 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 breatb: Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabetb Bisbop, 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 "The 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 AUen gatbering of deceased greats, where William Blake and Einstein will anatomize the vicissitudes of human existence alongside Shakespeare, Hitler, and Moses. It is, bowever, the burden of Lowney's argument tbat be bas 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 sbaped by tbe Popular Front of tbe 1930s and its aftermath, holds these otberwise divergent poets in unforeseen and mostly unacknowledged community. Despite some of tbe examples it discusses. History, Memory, and the Literary Left is not for tbe most part a book tbat deals witb the 1930s as a distinct chronological slice in which such-and-such a writer produced such-and-such a set of works. It is rather about tbe "long 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 tbe century in tbe lives and works of certain left-wing poets. More tban just a focused study of a period or literary group, Lowney's book can tbus best be seen to contribute to tbe ongoing reappraisal of twentietb-century American left-wing writing impelled by tbe arcbeological salvage work of scbolars sucb as Cary Nelson in Repression and Recovery and Michael Twentieth-Century Literature 54.3 Fall 2008 396 Review 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 hterary 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 poHtics, 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 pubhcs 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 1930s 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 süicosis scandal of the early to mid1930s; Elizabeth Bishop's Key West poems fix)m 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 earher Popular Front politics and a developing Black Arts mihtancy); 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 1930s and 40s with the social realities of 1960s New York in Of Being Numerous. The poets and texts Lowney has selected allow him not only to illustrate the overall issue of how midcentury leftist poetry adhered to, memorialized, and worked through the recent past, especially the cultural 397 Tyrus Miller pohtics of the Popular Front. They also give him the means to explore the complex, contradictory, and internally conflictual nature of a heterogeneous social aUiance, a counterhegemonic bloc like the Popular Front. Thus, in addition to his main theme—or, better put, as a specification and concretization of it—he also explores the roles that race, gender, geographical location, and location in the rural-urban divide played in these specific poets' treatment of the 1930s legacy. He is particularly attentive to the difference that geography makes in poetic memory, as well as to the economic unevenness that accompanies the United States' great geographical diversity. Rukeyser's West Virginia, Bishop's Key West, Hughes's Harlem, Brooks's Chicago, McGrath's North Dakota, and Oppen's NewYork thus, in Lowney's view, represent radically different poetic perspectives on a shared experience of social crisis. Indeed, because of the notable geographical span of Lowney's selection—I raise this more as an observation than a criticism—Cahfornia as a sociogeographical perspective is likewise notable in its near absence here; it appears only marginally through the Los Angeles of McGrath and the San Francisco of late Oppen. Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen, for example, who shared analogous trajectories from their commitments to 1930s proletarian poetics to an anarchist-tinged. West Coast visionary romanticism, might have offered an instructive alternative perspective on Lowney's theme from what Oppen called "the edge of the continent" (22), which for California's left-wing writers was as much a condition of poetic and pohtical subjectivity as it was a geographic site. Lowney does not cast his poetic examples in a merely documentary or illustrative mould. He has a distinct case to make about the role of poetry in the process of remembering, memorializing, mourning, and extending the cultural legacy of the 1930s, and as a consequence he attends to rhetorical and formal-stylistic aspects of the poems as well as their evidentiary value in a historical argument. Typical of his attempt to grasp the works as articulate wholes in context is his appreciation of how form, rhetorical address, social reference, and material context (in this case, pubhcation) work together in Hughes's Montage: The dialogic sequencing of poems throughout Montage suggests how Hughes is dramatizing a Harlem "community in transition" through his translation of bebop's rapid rhythmic and harmonic changes. The sudden, unpredictable shifts in voice, mood, and 398 Review dramatic scene convey a sense of anxiety, fragmentation, and urgency... .The continuities and discontinuities between established public and emerging counterpubHc spheres are impHcit not only in Hughes's bebop sequencing of poems but also in tbe sites where the poems were initially published.... Like the dialogue of performative styles that takes place throughout Montage, the impHcit dialogue of literary publics suggests Hughes's simultaneous appeal to emergent black counterpublics and more established African American and Popular Front pubHcs. (101—02) Lowney's social-rhetorical approach (publics and counterpublics) and historical investigation of material context (philological information about pubHcation contexts) thus do not preclude his attending to compositional features of the poems such as sequencing, sound structure, and image (which with Hughes often means socially inflected images of voice as much as visual image or figurai language). On the contrary, such formal analysis is a necessary complement and concretization of the social and historical analysis, which for its part moves the results of formal analysis beyond self-legitimating "formalist" relations. One of the salutary aspects of Lowney's work is that it demonstrates in practice that it is possible to get past the artificial but debilitating critical impasse that unfortunately— despite important efforts to the contrary—continues to impose itself between historicist or cultural studies methods and formaHst readings of poetry, often to such an extent that cultural studies scholars and historicist critics leave poetry aside in favor of other materials apparently more tractable to their critical methods. More impHcitly, therefore, Lowney also suggests that socially engaged criticism should not shy away from poetry, even poetry of the highest density and complexity. The crux of the matter may be the often-blurred distinction between immediacy, in which other media and genres may indeed surpass the possibiHties of poetry, and sociopolitical efficacy, to which poetry should not too easily reHnquish its claim. Rather, poetry must ask—and Lowney suggests that it has asked, consistently, since midcentury—what sort of efficacy and in accompHshing what? One could say specificaHy that for Lowney, the poems he has selected for critical discussion constitute as much metahistorical models as they do historical documents, and hence such poetry functions as much to shape and differentiate historical contexts as to illustrate and reflect them. ImpHcidy, to take this argument to 399 Tyrus MiUer its logical conclusion, Lowney may also be claiming that in its abihty to reshape our understanding of history, in its complex integuments with our memories and life experiences, lies one of poetry's most authentic possibilities for engagement in social and historical work, for being "political." By revealing the degree to which society, history, and individual experience are not simply givens to which poetry responds or ignores but rather domains that are themselves symbolically shaped and reshaped, poetry resonates with other forms of individual and collective transformative practice. Although poetry's role in this process may be more indirect and complexly mediated than, say, an agitational proclamation or speech, its effects may ultimately be more far-reaching and enduring, persisting for decades and—literally—changing the lives of individuals touched by its insights and perturbations.This, for Lowney, is ultimately the message that post-Popular Front left poetry labored long and hard to elaborate, and which lends it, even to the present day, an enduring actuality. Work cited Oppen, George. "A Conversation with George Oppen." Conducted by Charles Amirkhanian and David Gitin. Ironwood 5 (1975): 21-34. 400