10th June 2024
Dr. Erin Yanota, University of Virginia’s College at Wise
Joshua Logan Wall, Situating Poetry: Covenant and Genre in American Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022)
How did voices at the margins of modernism in the United States – and the United States of America itself – create publics by appealing to the civil religious discourses central to national self-definition? This question is one that Joshua Logan Wall sets out to answer in Situating Poetry. The book focuses on four poets – James Weldon Johnson, Charles Reznikoff, Lola Ridge, Louis Zukofsky – and one ‘limit case’ (15), in Robert Hayden – and it recontextualises these writers’ poems in the original settings of their publication and circulation.[1] Using a multiethnic approach, Situating Poetry shows how these five poets use modernist formal strategies – like those that characterise documentary poetics, for instance – to political effect. These strategies enable the poets to establish relations of solidarity. But they also use poetic form to identify, critique, and even seek to repair the broken covenants of national discourses like the American Dream, or the biblical typologies that claim the United States as a safe haven and ‘Promised Land’ for other nations’ exiles.
Wall’s argument extends historical poetics scholarship, which typically focuses primarily on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone poetics, into the study of twentieth-century poetries in the English language – including, notably, poetry in translation. A range of historical poetics approaches informs Situated Poetry; that said, Wall’s book most generatively builds on the work of Virginia Jackson. Jackson’s ‘lyricization thesis’ and attention to nineteenth-century literary circulation in Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) enable Wall to show effectively how reading these five poets together brings into focus what Wall calls their ‘covenantal poetics’ (190). He makes a compelling case, indeed, for how the ‘situated’ nature of these poems render their meaning and their social function illegible when decontextualized in the classroom anthology or the single-author volume of collected poems. Such publications detach the poems not only from the temporality of their original circulation but also from their original function as public speech acts.
Wall divides Situating Poetry into three parts, each focused on one facet of the argument: covenant, circulation, and the ‘limit case.’ The first section comprises one chapter focusing on Johnson’s God’s Trombones and another chapter on Reznikoff’s Testimony as well as his translations of biblical Hebrew. Wall brings these two poets together not only through their attention to covenant as a form of judgement but also through their poetry’s prosody and its invocation of the rhythmically distinct genres of sermon and recitative, respectively. Whereas Johnson’s sermons call upon white individuals within racist mobs to recognise how the nation fails to uphold the covenant with its Black citizens, Reznikoff uses the dialogic structure of operatic recitative to invite the poem’s public to respond to testimonies of injustice; the deferred response will renew the covenant and, it follows, refound the nation.
The second section follows a similar structure to the first, with one chapter reading Ridge’s ‘The Ghetto’ and ‘Stone Face,’ and another chapter focusing on Zukofsky’s A. This section pairs the two poets on the basis of their ‘self-fashioned publics’ and their agreement that patterns of immigration define the United States, before the phrase ‘a nation of immigrants’ took hold in the national consciousness. Ridge’s status as a neglected modernist rests, Wall argues, with the circulation and ‘situation’ (context plus social function) of her poetry: its full meaning arrives only when one encounters the poetry as locus of political activism, and any other encounter engenders ‘incomplete’ meaning. In the case of Zukofsky, whose translations of poetry from Yiddish to English inform his approach to ‘covenantal poetics,’ the poetry itself serves as a covenant that not only creates its ‘motley’ public but also requires individuals in that public to engage in acts of reading in community with one another.
Finally, the third section and ‘limit case’ focuses on Robert Hayden’s commemorative poems for John Brown and Malcolm X. Here, Wall reads Hayden’s poetry not through its contentious relationship with the Black Arts Movement, as is often done. Instead, he argues that Hayden’s poetry assumes a lyrical posture that also operates as a public speech act, while it offers a distinction between apprehending and comprehending the covenant. In Wall’s reading, Hayden provides a model of public-creation whereby that public recognises the covenant but understands it only partially. The public’s role as a public is to determine how to exist collectively in relation to the covenant.
The book’s argument is perhaps at its strongest in the second chapter’s discussion of Reznikoff, due to that chapter’s strong textual evidence to justify its approach to contextual analysis. This methodological justification is a crucial piece of the book’s argument, which urges its scholarly audience to expand what it accepts as ‘context’ within the interpretive act. The book as a whole occasionally lacks sufficient evidence to substantiate its ambitious – at times, polemical – claims. In some cases, this effect may derive from assumptions about the reader’s prior knowledge concerning poets like Zukofsky in particular; readers who know these poets’s lives and writing well may encounter this quality of the book’s argument as a relatively minor deficit. Some may also find striking omissions in the content: merely passing mention of postwar nativism, despite the book’s focus on immigration, or absent discussions of Native American history, despite the book’s frequent appeal to ‘indigeneity.’
Situating Poetry is nonetheless a valuable contribution to modernist studies in its invitations to envision a ‘prosocial’ modernism helmed by racial, ethnic, religious, and political ‘outsiders’ to mainstream national literary projects and to so-called ‘cosmopolitan’ modernisms. It engages in innovative ways with civil religious discourse as, specifically, a discourse rather than a form of religious practice and belief. Moreover, the book opens productive pathways into considering ethnic identity and/as a form of counterpublic as well as modernism’s relationship with Western secularisation and religious pluralism. Finally, as a welcome extension of historical poetics scholarship, and through its careful attention to both poetic form and the socio-political contexts in which poetry circulates, Situating Poetry provides a useful model for reconsidering how we recognise a modernist poem and what that poem can, to invert W.H. Auden’s famous phrase, ‘make . . . happen.’[2]
Sources
Image Credit: Situating Poetry cover, 2022, John Hopkins University Press
[1] As a ‘limit case,’ Hayden’s poetry serves as a case study that enables Wall to define more precisely the boundaries or ‘limits’ of his central concept of ‘covenantal poetics’ ( 190).
[2] W.H. Auden, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 248.
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