Institutionalized Lyric: American Poetry at Midcentury, forthcoming (Oxford University Press)
“Yaddo is a sort of St. Elizabeths without bars.” So joked the poet Robert Lowell, in a letter that he sent, in the fall of 1948, from the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, NY, to a patient whom he had recently visited in the federal insane asylum in Washington, DC. That patient, himself a poet, was Ezra Pound. Lowell’s joke about two kinds of institutional life—and their surprising intersection, in the midcentury United States, with the life of poetry—cuts to the heart of this book’s argument. On the one hand, poetry was increasingly folded into and reliant upon academic, bureaucratic, and cultural institutions. On the other, breakdown, madness, and psychiatric institutionalization emerged in the period as central themes, both as topics for poems and as crucial experiences upon which many of those poems were based. This book sees those two phenomena not as dichotomous but as fundamentally related. It understands their relation as responsible for producing—by supplying poets with a model for being impersonal about the personal—a new kind of autobiographical poem (estranged but intimate, ad hoc but formal) that became a recognizable period style. This new kind of poem is what I call the “institutionalized lyric.”
Sometimes what you see belongs to another world. Stars. City streets on a movie screen. The remembered face of someone gone. You know it is another world because you cannot touch what you see, or because it cannot see you.
Where, in a poem, is “here”? Suppose a poem depicts a scene. When you read it, do you feel yourself transported there? Or do you feel in the presence of the poet at her desk, recalling the scene and telling you about it?
Ninety-three days before she died, my sister sent me a message. Five and a half years earlier, Bita had been diagnosed with stage four intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and deadly form of cancer. She was forty-three. There was a thirteen-centimeter mass—roughly the size of a grapefruit—in her liver.
What is a coffin for? To give the living the comforting fiction of the dead being ‘laid to rest’. To contain. To prevent odour, to forestall decomposition, entropy. To make the encounter between the living and the dead tolerable, legible – to do so by keeping the dead from view.
Rhyme, like love, is embarrassing. Ludicrous to think that the word you mean is one that happens to share a final sound with one you’ve just used. What sense does that make? What sense does it make, moreover, that any person, even one with whom you share a bed, should shape your life?
And yet sometimes, quite apart from anything you intend, that is how it goes. When it does—when, say, you find yourself in love with someone new—you might wonder not only who this other person is but who you are, who you have become, who you ever were. Such is the experience recounted (in rhyme!) by the poet Maggie Millner in her new book, “Couplets: A Love Story”
If what you want is on the other side, a closed door might become an image of your desire. In ancient Greek poetry, this motif had a name: paraclausithyron, “a lament beside a door.” In Latin poetry it was called exclusus amator, “excluded lover.” “Closed doors are useful,” complained Ovid in the Amores, “as a defense for besieged cities, but why, in times of peace, do you fear arms?” “Unscrew the locks from the doors!” Whitman demanded in “Song of Myself.” “Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” In moments like these, the closed door is not merely a barrier; it becomes a screen onto which longing is projected—and thereby made plain for all to see.
Certain losses change your grammar. The writer Victoria Chang lost her mother six years ago, to pulmonary fibrosis. Six years before that, her father had a stroke, then slid into dementia—there but not there, another kind of lost. In “Obit” (2020), a book of poems written in the form of newspaper obituaries, Chang observes the effect of these absences on language: “The second person dies when a mother dies, reborn as third person as my mother.” The lost loved one is no longer a “you”; she is someone Chang can describe but can never again address.
As far as I can tell, it is an accident of history that certain languages, such as English, came to be written from left to right, and others, such as Farsi, are written from right to left. What determined a language’s direction were the tools available as the technology of writing took hold. If you were right-handed, so the theory goes, and wanted to carve letters into stone, you held the chisel in your left hand and the hammer in your right, forming letters while moving from the right edge of the surface to the left. But if in your right hand you held a pen, you would want to move across the page from left to right, lest your hand smudge the marks as you made them. You would want, in either case, to leave your words behind.
I believe in swimming, flying, crawling, and burrowing.
(Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, July 27 1960, WIA 335)
When Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979, James Merrill fondly remembered his late friend’s aversion to shoptalk: “Why talk letters with one’s gifted colleagues? They too would want, surely, to put aside work in favor of a new baby to examine, a dinner to shop for and cook, sambas, vignettes.” Merrill recalls both Bishop’s geniality and her reluctance to allow work to displace, in conversation, the position properly accorded to life. In his account, Bishop’s reticence on matters of poetics was a piece with her famous modesty and extended to her professional persona. In an era in which most poets held academic positions from which they could be expected to make critical pronouncements, Bishop spent nearly two decades in Brazil-far from the North American academic poetry world.
In February, 1903, a nineteen-year-old Austrian military cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus received a letter whose contents, he hoped, would teach him how to live. “The envelope,” he later wrote, “bore a blue seal and a Paris postmark, weighed heavy in my hand, and presented the same clear, beautiful, confident handwriting on the envelope as the letter itself had from first line to last.” The confidence that Kappus saw in the hand of his correspondent offered an inverse image of the self-doubt that had led him, months earlier, to write to that man—the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Kappus wanted to know if his own poems were any good; he wanted to know what to write and how to be.
In the early morning hours of December 6, 1962, having broken his ankle, afraid that he was on the verge of a more general breakdown, the poet John Berryman woke up in a hospital bed. He was forty-eight years old, a year into his third marriage, a new father for the second time. From bed he transcribed his dream:
First, at vast party I was giving, Randall said “You’ve just got to stop writing these pseudo-poems. Come back & write real ones and we’ll all be with you.” Many guests about—all heard—but not said for them: to me, sincerely, and I felt that he was right—all my work was a stupid farce. I promised never to write again—even grateful to him—but no one was satisfied; I must die. Only question: method—& to leave the party unnoticed.
Hours after watching her twenty-six-year-old brother die, Virginia Stephen wrote a letter to one of her dearest friends. In that letter, written on November 20, 1906, she did not utter a word about her brother’s death; she did not so much as mention his name. Virginia was twenty-four—six years from marrying and becoming Virginia Woolf, nine years from publishing her first novel. She and her three siblings had just returned from a trip to Greece and Turkey, which had ended in disaster. Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s eldest brother, had been infected with typhoid.
I was 11 years old the summer my big sister came home with Tracy Chapman’s first CD. To this day, when I hear the opening notes of “Fast Car,” I feel like I’m overhearing someone else’s music, remembering a memory—not even mine—rather than an event. A decade earlier, when our family left Iran to live in the United States, I was only a toddler, barely aware of anything outside our home, and she was already a six-year-old kid, homesick for one world and navigating first grade in another. Periodically, over the years, she’d fall very hard for something—an album, say, or a way of dressing or talking—and I’d take note of her tastes as markers on a path to being cool. “Fast Car” was like that. She’d grow moody and quiet at Chapman’s wounded, rueful refrain, “I had a feeling that I belonged,” while I, not really knowing what her silence meant, merely had a feeling that I’d had that feeling.
That same song appears briefly in Solmaz Sharif’s extraordinary poem “Master Film,” set in 1988, the year “Fast Car” was released.
Two hours before dawn, one Monday morning when I was sixteen, I was thrown out of bed—I mean, really, tossed straight out of bed and onto my feet—by the most violent force I have ever felt. A blind thrust fault had slipped beneath Northridge, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, ten miles from where I slept. I can still remember the sudden wash of dread that always accompanied the first tremor of an earthquake; this was like that, and then more, and then more, and then more. It felt like a giant had picked up our house and was slamming it repeatedly against the ground. I remember the night sky through my bedroom window flashing with distant bursts of light—power lines going down, I now think. I remember, after the shaking stopped, the wail of car alarms and the dim smell of what I would later learn was concrete dust, rising with the morning sun.
For some time now, I’ve been wanting to sit very close to someone and look together at something very far away. This desire, the kind you don’t know you harbor until you hear yourself declaring it, preceded the pandemic but has intensified since its arrival. Sometimes the fantasy gets very specific: two lawn chairs side by side under the stars in Joshua Tree, maybe a small campfire, music dimly audible in the distance. As I understand it, the fantasy is about a kind of close intimacy and about a kind of radical isolation—or rather it is about how those two conditions might coexist. It’s a fantasy of one kind of love (and one, I now realize, that I may have stolen from the poet Frank Bidart: “The love I’ve known is the love of / two people staring // not at each other, but in the same direction”). I think it’s also a fantasy about reading.
We live in networks; we think through them. Increasingly, we have been asking questions, both within the academy and without, about the ubiquity of networks in contemporary life: about information exchange, digital media, and social connectivity more broadly construed. Ours is also a time of new questions for literary studies, as the deeply felt presence of such networked living has brought added attention to the ways in which literature not only represents forms of mediation and connection but also operates as its own kind of discourse network (Kittler 1990) or social assemblage (Latour 2005). This attention has even given rise, in recent years, to a new field of inquiry—call it a network studies—devoted to investigating how a “vocabulary of networks” might be usefully applied to a broad swath of modern literature stretching from at least the turn of the last century onward (Beal 2015, 7). In many cases, such literature reflects the experience of authors who were themselves directly bound up with the “new informatic webs” of novel communication and information technologies (Purdon 2016, 16). But at some point during the twentieth century, these network technologies also became so diffuse, so life-shaping that a “feeling of connectedness” began to stand in for the default condition of modern life more generally (Jagoda 2016, 2).
At its midpoint, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) asks us to recall the violence of the Middle Passage. Rankine’s words cast the poem’s lyric subject as an unspecified second person: “if you let in the excess emotion,” she writes, “you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads” (73). This image—of the oceanic violence of the Atlantic slave trade—returns in Citizen’s final pages, which reproduce the seascape in J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship (1840) and then a detail from the painting’s foreground: the shackled limb of an enslaved person, breaking the surface of the water, a human body preyed upon by fish and fowl. This, then, is an image of “the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads”; this is what Rankine’s poem, at its midpoint, asks us to recall.
Your brother has moved a great distance away—so far, in fact, that you can’t be sure you’ll ever see him again. You know that it will take a letter weeks to reach him, and yet you have news—urgent news—to report: your youngest brother, at whose sickbed you have been keeping vigil, has just died.
What use is art? I suspect that I have not been alone, among this journal's readers, in asking that question recently. What use, in particular, might have been imagined for a kind of art that, in its heyday, defiantly insisted on its autonomy, its aestheticism, a form of art that seemed to express, at every turn, hostility towards bourgeois society and the political institutions and economies of utility upon which that society was built? What use, in other words, might have been imagined for modernism? Greg Barnhisel's latest book, Cold War Modernists, gives that question a richly researched and intricate answer, one with important implications for our understanding of the history of modernism's reception and endurance in midcentury American and European culture.
Through the window of his first room in Center Building in St. Elizabeths Hospital, Ezra Pound could see the dome of the United States Capitol. When, over a century earlier and on the other side of the Atlantic, Shelley wrote that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he did not have in mind anything like the literal example of Pound, whose unmetaphorical attempts to be a political actor on the world stage had left him acknowledged by his own government as a traitor. Pound’s confinement within St. Elizabeths put him in more than merely literal, geographic proximity to the sources of official power that he had allegedly betrayed. From December 21, 1945, until his release on May 6, 1958, Ezra Pound, in a manner of speaking, held office in Washington, DC. Pound served as an unofficial poet laureate in the postwar period, both embodying and crucially helping to construct a powerful model of what a poet was—dangerous, dissenting, visionary, marginal, and, above all, mad.
Having just recorded a group of new poems, including several for which she is, today, most well-known, Sylvia Plath was asked by the British Council in late 1962 to explain the choice of subject matter in her recent work. She answered by gazing back across the Atlantic, to the writing of two of her contemporaries.
On the evening of April 11, 1973, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill shared a stage at New York City's 92nd Street YM-YWHA. The Y had been trying to get Bishop to read there for many years; when at last she accepted their invitation, June Fortess, the executive secretary of the Poetry Center, wrote a jubilant letter of thanks to the poet, predicting, "April 11th will surely be one of the greatest evenings in Poetry Center history" (92nd St. Y Archives, Fortess to Bishop, 1/17/73).
On 5 January 1935, Marianne Moore wrote to her old friend Ezra Pound in defense of a new one, a poet and a recent college graduate named Elizabeth Bishop. Moore claimed that “her letters and T. C. Wilson’s are the best letters from young people that I have ever seen.” Now, seventy years later, Moore’s praise seems simultaneously prescient and preposterous. No longer as poet or letter writer does Bishop need Moore’s introduction or Pound’s approval; she has secured a place in the canon of twentieth-century American poetry at least as exalted as those of her modernist predecessors. But perhaps the oddest aspect of Moore’s praise is her equation of Bishop with a largely forgotten contemporary. Who was T. C. Wilson, anyway?