"Progressive lit.": Amiri Baraka, Bruce Andrews, and the politics of the lyric "I".

Bruce Andrews's poetry and criticism have done much to establish the assumptions about dissent that became standard for readers of Language poetry during the seventies and eighties. For many readers, Andrews's position made oppositional poetry in the tradition of Whitman impossible to believe in: Beat poetry, (1) for example, seemed politically unselfconscious. Andrews assumes that the lyric poet's freedom to dissent is only the freedom to say "yes" to the American ideology--individualism. (2) Calling poems that fail to explode the lyric "I"--in other words, false dissent--"progressive lit.," Andrews tries to establish a consensus that exploding the lyric "I" is the only true dissent possible in poetry. (3) However, Amiri Baraka's poetry shows that Andrews's position is reductive and brittle. Baraka's lyric "I" is always already exploding, reinventing the social and the historical within individual and collective lyric.

Corrosively and with persistent monochromatic anger, Andrews's "Gestalt Me Out!" substitutes a particular kind of paratactic irony for the lyric "I." However, in sacrificing (certain modes of) representation, narrative, and expression, Andrews may unintentionally throw out the political "we" along with the lyric "I": "That's the way you spell it, dear, it's the way you look it up, arouse the beat, saccharine zip-a-tone ... wake the knees of the normals?" (Romanticism 97). Andrews's pastiche is neither a parody of "mainstream" culture and values nor a parody of Beat (individualist) nonconformity-as-opposition ("arouse the beat ... wake the knees of the normals?"). Instead, "Gestalt Me Out!" performs symptoms, acts out the poet's inability to transform alienation into prophecy ("that's the way you spell it, dear ..."). Andrews tries to develop a mode of opposition, a poetics of resistance, more genuine than what most readers still think of as political poetry. Andrews's stance toward opposition and resistance depends on his assumption that "progressive lit." ("Praxis" 23) is naive--and is always coopted into the ideology of American "freedom."

"Gestalt Me Out!" slaps repeatedly at the sort of themes and narrative trajectories readers expect to find in confessional lyric. Andrews's tone oscillates and wobbles, connecting camp, schizophrenia, and outrage: His mode is a cyberpunk version of what Fredric Jameson called "the hysterical sublime" (the sublime as schizophrenia--psychological liminality without reintegration). Andrews politicizes the surface of his poem in order to embody individualism, representative democracy, and representation as inextricable, as a single sinking ship:

   Sometimes you just get tired of sucking the same dick all the
   time. I'd never break a mirror. Religion=chucksteak; ego quits
   its sap. All elderly feel parental. (Romanticism 97)

Andrews's staccato concatenation empties potential plots, one after another, of lyric force, and these unstable micro-narratives obviously are not "believed" the way the fictions animating "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" or "Kaddish" are "believed." Through tropes, allusions, and routines (as in stand-up comedy), Andrews calls attention to the problems that bedevil subjectivity and identity. For example, "ego quits its sap" is a thumbnail parody of the vital continuum--a language rather than a single analogy--among the self, the body, and nature--a continuum central to Emerson and Whitman and countless gorgeous (and valid) poems.

"I'd never break a mirror" hints at magical thinking and the (proposed) connection between magic and schizophrenia in a faux-naif voice. The trope recalls the fragility of self in Marvell's "The Mower's Song"--

   My mind was once the true survey
   Of all these meadows fresh and gay
   And in the greenness of the grass
   Did see its hopes as in a glass (109)

--or the catastrophic/gothic recognition in Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" ("the mirror crack'd from side to side" [24]). By mocking the trope Andrews (paradoxically) activates its force and pathos. The mirror as trope for the exploding and/or reconstructed self invokes Lacan--and it is logical even dutifully "academic," that "Gestalt Me Out!" smirks directly at Lacan: "It's true I am more thoughtful, that puts a damper on spontaneity grassroots Lacanianism, watch them work the fortune cookie up into my nostril ..." (Romanticism 97).

In an essay Andrews would know well, Fredric Jameson has argued that Language poetry is the paradigm of postmodern lyric because it recapitulates Lacan's characterization of schizophrenia. (4) Similarly, "Gestalt Me Out!" proclaims delightedly that the self is not natural but social, an ideological construct, a "subjectivity-effect" produced by liberal culture: "When depressed, retreat into conventional middle class lifestyles. Cheap squirt. Carry whip in traffic" (Romanticism 98), At once ridiculous and useful, these admonitions remind the reader of poetry's traditional function as wisdom (or, if one prefers, as socialization, culturally determined self-fashioning) even as they take that function away. Such admonitions manage to sound both commonsensical and debauched: Janus-faced, like the unexpected appearance on-stage of Benjamin Franklin ... as portrayed by William S. Burroughs. In phrases such as

   You can really become yourself with
   money. I was attracted to he poverty
   and he pinhole tart, but the mind
   operates like an interest group

   hidden hazards of air

   stands on your head to get tired
   (Romanticism 97)

Andrews seeks to resist the "naturalizing" (or the mimetic) power of the lyric "I." The mind operates like an interest group. Whitman inherits his democratic/individualist poetics from Emerson (especially "The American Scholar," "The Divinity School Address," "The Poet," and "Nature"). For Andrews the power of Whitman's lyric "I" to sustain the collective (the culture imagined as an organic unity) embodies capitalism and individualism in poetic form; Whitman's lyric "I" becomes the object of Andrews's opposition/resistance.

Andrews calls attention to lyric's complicity in a complicated ideological activity (to say or write "I" is to participate) that extends beyond "private" or "aesthetic" uses of subjectivity. "Gestalt Me Out!" attacks voice and the representation of a sustained self in relation to a place (a sustained fictional world) in order to oppose American culture and ideology. From the viewpoint of "Gestalt Me Out!," any Language poem is radical; any poem written without consciously desiring to explode the Emerson/Whitman tradition is reactionary. No matter what it "expresses" or "argues," a post-romantic poem cannot, according to this position, be oppositional. It is merely "progressive lit." ("Praxis" 23), false consciousness.

For Andrews, the lyric "I" stands for individualism's false dissent--that allegory makes his writing practices intelligible as dissent. He tries to distinguish his writing practices from well-meaning liberal protest poems; he argues in "Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis" that post-romantic oppositional poems and individualist definitions of dissent are "conventional," and therefore part of the problem: "Conventionally, radical dissent in writing would be measured in terms of communication and concrete effects upon an audience.... " These are insufficient measures for a poem's politics, Andrews insists: Poetry must explode the lyric "I" in order to recover its political force. Failing that, the work is only "progressive lit.," which, he argues, "means either a direct effort at empowering or mobilizing--aimed at existing identities--or the representation of outside conditions, usually in an issue oriented way" ("Praxis" 23).

Exhortation or representation--these two "conventional" choices always, Andrews claims, aim "at existing identities"; for Andrews, post-romantic lyric can only mimic genuine political praxis. "Progressive lit." is hopelessly unselfconscious: "The usual assumptions about unmediated communication, giving 'voice' to 'individual' 'experience,' the transparency of the medium (language), the instrumentalizing of language, pluralism, etc., bedevil this project." Whereas language poetry is real opposition, Beat poetry fails because it fails to "self-examine writing as a medium"--fails, in other words, to explode its own narrative and resist its own power to absorb, mesmerize, and convince the reader. The Wordsworthian appeal to sympathy (5) or the didactic appeal to reason and ethics sounds to Andrews like ineffective propaganda. Such appeals impose a normative value on readers, coercing and, in effect, deceiving/insulting them. And the normative value imposed by "progressive lit." is, for Andrews, false dissent, because "progressive lit." fails to explode "existing identities."

Come on. Writing, has always tried to explode existing identities." Andrews desires a materialist basis for defining, then exploding, "identities--but how does really Melville? No matter how transgressive Language poetry seems to "mainstream" poets and critics, the debate about whether the "I" can "oppose" or correct society is one that has haunted all American post-romantic writing. For Andrews, belief in transformation within the self is part of the problem, is the very fiction that prevents genuine transformation in culture. Amiri Baraka's poetry, however, evokes and celebrates transformation of both self and community; he imagines that transformation of self and community reinforce one another. (6)

Baraka's early (Beat) poems--such as "A Contract (for the destruction and rebuilding of Paterson)," "Black Dada Nihilismus," the "Crow Jane" sequence, and "Poem for Democrats"--locate agony and struggle simultaneously within the self, within minority communities, and within the idea of the larger and problematic multi-ethnic polls (which is undermined by institutionalized racism and economic exploitation):

   Even speech, corrodes.
   I came here
   from where I sat boiling in my veins,
   cold fear.
   at the death of men, the death of learning in
   cold fear, at my own. Romantic vests
   of same death
   blank at the comer, blanks when they
   raise their fingers.
   Criss the hearts, in dark flesh staggered
   so marvelous
   are their lies. So complete their mastery,
   of these
   stupid niggers. Loud spics kill each
   other, and will not
   make the simple trip to Tiffany's.
   (Transbluesency 56)

An image such as "the simple trip to Tiffany's" is part of Baraka's surrealist violence--and surrealist violence appears in different (more and less motivated, more and less historically determined) guises throughout the three phases of Baraka's poetry. In Baraka's overlay (of culture and individual), the self is not unitary or fixed: It is in transformation--shaped by culture and trying to transform culture. Werner Sollors writes that Baraka,

   the self-declared "prodigal" son of the
   "shabby" Black bourgeoisie, thus
   protested against his cultural matrix,
   using patterns that
   that culture had first
   conveyed to him.
   His first form of
   protest against the
   middle class was an
   aesthetic rebellion,
   formulated as an
   indictment, not of
   racism, capitalism,
   or the Cold War, but
   of middlebrow
   taste.... Defining
   his antiobjective art as an act of liberation
   and self-liberation, Baraka
   embraced contradictory literary prototypes.
   He opposed the bourgeois
   notion of art as an object both from
   "above," in the name of avant-gardism
   and modernism, and from "below," in
   the name of people's and popular culture.
   (13-14)

This double process is self-consciously analytical and irrationally destructive. Baraka transforms Olson's trope of the polis into the riot, within the city of Paterson and the lyric self.

Is Baraka an example of "progressive lit."? Andrews is not referring to Baraka: he's talking about poems in The New Yorker or The Iowa Review. However, doesn't the category he tries to establish also inevitably include Baraka? The answer is yes, and Andrews's thoughtful but finally counter-productive dichotomy fails to answer Baraka's poetry, as well as the writing of many other multicultural poets who work from Baraka's example. Baraka's poetry, in each of its phases, is unabashedly post-romantic in its exploration of the lyric "I," yet Baraka's lyric "I" extends its search for transformation toward economic/historical analysis and multiculturalism. Baraka becomes a Marxist poet who argues that the lyric "I" is formed by culture and history; however, unlike Language poets, he locates that argument within the lyric "I." Baraka's work disrupts the paradigm Andrews tries to establish, and contradicts Andrews's claims about the politics of the lyric "I."

Baraka's example suggests that the lyric "I" does not always reduce oppositional poetics to "progressive lit." Therefore, when Geoff Ward makes Language poetry's case in Britain, he represses or willfully ignores Baraka's example:

   Whatever their
   differences, the
   Black Mountain,
   Beat, and New
   York Schools
   shared a commitment
   to poetry as individualist expression....
   A stress on self-expression ...
   unites the poetry, painting, and music
   of the postwar years. This was the
   period in which jazz found a ... new
   cultural respect [with] John Coltrane
   and Albert Ayler pushing ... into fabulously
   extended improvisations [and]
   the [improvisational] paintings of
   Jackson Pollock and Willem De
   Kooning.... Michael Davidson has
   coined the useful term expressivism to
   cover the artistic developments of the
   post-war period. (12)

Here Ward collapses the politically and aesthetically various poetry, painting, and music of the post-war era into a single "useful" term, expressivism, while ignoring Baraka's political differences with Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. (Baraka sets these differences out very explicitly and self-consciously in "A Poem for Rich Painters.") After establishing his straw man, Ward approvingly quotes Andrews and Charles Bernstein, who insist on Language poetics as "an analysis of the social order as a whole and of the place that alternative forms of writing and reading may occupy in its transformation.... [This] involves repossessing the sign through close attention to, and active participation in, its production" (Ward 12-13). When Andrews and Bernstein claim, "it is our sense that the project of poetry does not involve turning Language into a commodity, they assume that other kinds of poetry, including other kinds of oppositional poetry, are commodities for consumption.

One need not overstate the case for Baraka's considerable achievement: What matters here is that Ward's and Andrews's critique does not account for Baraka's poetics. From a point of view after Language poetry, Baraka's example means that certain uses or manifestations of the lyric "I" are capable of reinventing the trope and the genre, capable of political, cultural, and historical self-consciousness. In many poems from each of his phases, and in the very fact of his own self-transformation, Baraka's lyric "I" disrupts Language poetry--and all easy binary oppositions between post-romantic poetics and Neo-marxist theory.

"Gestalt Me Out!" extends the post-romantic American lyric by allegorizing it. However, American poets have consistently depicted the self as something that can fall apart without warning, something that can contradict itself fatally and for no reason, or even something that can suddenly turn out to be hollow, empty, absent. In American writing, self can always be reduced to/revealed to be a fiction. Moreover, as Walter Benn Michaels has shown, selves in classic American writing can also be (have always been) revealed to be commodities. This is precisely what Andrews asserts--and, in fact, Andrews's work depends on readers who will recognize this possibility as being inherent in "classic" American literature, in the way American culture has developed a poetics of anxiety within individualism. Andrews's poetry is traditional--very much of and in the American grain:

   Suspicious of crowds, the pathetic
   individual hangs on. (Romanticism 97)

   Diversion of entire midwest into giant
   moonies camp; you are cute, compared
   to hamsters. So cash, no gash, so defeat
   the British Empire instead. Riot act is
   new name for cops. (Romanticism 96)

"Gestalt Me Out!" is fascinated with authoritarian powers and the pressures they exert on "identities." At every turn, the individual is reduced to/revealed to be an effect of currents and whims within the social unconscious:

   The social is really clumsy in interaction
   procedures--and we punish
   repercussions. That's where we're
   interning our next ethnic scapegoats.

   I'm starting to think that just having
   a bed is oedipal. She'll be naked
   and I'll be big guns we have these
   crude little summations, commerce
   cleanses. School for Movement Rehash,
   kill killers, drones bleed us dry.

   Stalk my balk! (Romanticism 98)

"These crude little summaries" could be Andrews's (crude, little) summary of post-romantic lyric--experience, as he sees it, derived from the (erotic) fiction of the individual--packaged, canned, post-confessional epiphanies to be bought and sold.

"Commerce cleanses" evokes in a single phrase the troubled antithesis and counter-dependent uncertainty that characterize American writing and its marketplace, from Melville to contemporary avant-gardes. The voice that speaks these words is either wrong (faux-naif) or lying (bitterly ironic), and as with much in "Gestalt Me Out!" this indeterminacy of voice resolves into all of the above. Likewise, "stalk my balk!"--like a surrealist biomorphic abstraction--is at once recognizable as an imperative and indeterminate: a floating fragment of "Song of Myself" turned inside out semantically, poised, or stalled, between the organic and the political.

Throughout "Gestalt Me Out!" Andrews's feeling tone (bitterness, humor, wiseass lyricism) transcends determinate referentiality. In place of individualism, Andrews tries to substitute corrosive self-consciousness regarding ideology. In place of liberal consensus politics (with its "safe" model of dissent), Andrews tries to substitute reduction--the material reduction of the "I" as a cultural artifact. (In Andrews's poetics, the "I" is just another object made by culture, like a red wheelbarrow: "Gestalt Me Out!" is a kind of objectivism without sincerity.) In place of "voice," Andrews tries to substitute revelation--the "I" as a convention in the process of exploding. "Gestalt Me Out!" must try to assert that its exploding "I" is representative. In this way, the "me" in "Gestalt Me Out!" extends Emerson's and Whitman's individualist poetics even as it demystifies individualism.

Jerome McGann situates the "social value" of the "act" of Language poetry this way:

   The sense is that poetry and writing
   generally have been colonized by
   Imperial forces, and the power of this
   monopoly has to be broken. The object
   of writing must be to set language free,
   to return it from the domains of the
   abstract and the conventional ... to a
   world of human beings and human
   uses. (207)

Re-writing this passage, Andrews could substitute "liberal, individualist culture" for "conventional" uses of language, and "the exploding 'I'" for Language "returned." Andrews assumes that the American lyric "I" depends on conventional uses of language, and, like McGann, he assumes that these uses have been colonized by imperial forces. (7) Andrews establishes a counter-intuitive poetics: One dissents from the America of Ronald Reagan not by declaring one's opposition to American materialism or conformity or imperialism but by exploding the lyric "I" established by Whitman. Nonetheless, when Andrews explodes such tropes as voice and the lyric "I" in order to resist the ideological assumptions that have "colonized" American poetry, he places himself in the American lyric tradition.

Paul Vangelisti describes Baraka's self-transformation, his reinvention of "the figure of the poet," as a movement from lyric self-consciousness (a kind of opposition based on what Walter Benjamin called "individual renunciation") to "lyrical communism" (xix). Vangelisti argues that even during the period of The Dead Lecturer Baraka worked "from the assumptions of a highly politicized avant-garde":

   The ideological lucidity which generally
   defined the Third World and
   European poetries of the 1960's
   claimed the right of the poetic act to
   establish itself as the "conscience of
   communication." The poem was conceived
   as a total, linguistic act, uniquely
   capable of posing the problem of
   language: a human product critical of,
   and invaded by, mass media, government,
   etc., as well as remaining a primary
   symptom of reality.... Thus, the
   leap in 1969 from The Dead Lecturer to
   Black Magic ... does not now [in 1995]
   seem as extreme as many ... would
   have it. The ideological concern and
   intensity of earlier verse ... can hardly
   be dismissed as bohemian. (xvi-xvii)

Vangelisti may overstate the ideological coherence of Baraka's early work, but not its ideological intention. Baraka was always trying to write poetry that situated lyric consciousness in an ideologically sophisticated representation of a public, political "field."

Baraka's early poems trace the hesitant and sometimes violent inner motion of consciousness moving toward the collective. Baraka's early poem "Short Speech to My Friends" enacts in syntax a dance of approach and avoidance:

   A political art, let it be
   tenderness, low strings the fingers
   touch, or the width of autumn
   climbing wider avenues, among the
   virtue
   and dignity of knowing what city
   you're in,
   who to talk to ... (Transbluesency 72)

The object of the approach and avoidance could be called revolutionary simplicity, since the poem, defined as a speech (but speech to friends rather than fellow citizens), makes art of the limits of its politics. Likewise, "A Guerrilla Handbook," whose title is at once political provocation and winsome introspection, invokes thought without venturing into language that solves anything:

   In their rightness
   the tree trunks are socialists
   leaves murder the silence and are brown
   and old when they blow to the sea.
   Convinced
   of the lyric ... (Transbluesency 101)

Vangelisti cites "A Guerrilla Handbook" as an example of The Dead Lecturer's "ideological intensity"; however, Baraka invokes "ideological intensity" as a goal rather than a fact.

Baraka's Beat poems locate social conflict within the topography of the lyric "I." Baraka reinvents Whitman's and Williams's analogy between self and place (or community) in an ironic, uncertain tonality. Baraka's lyric "I" is trying to become a political act, trying to "get to the we"--as, for example, in this passage from "Balboa, The Entertainer":

   (The Philosophers
   of need, of which
   I am lately
   one,
   will tell you, "The People,"
   (and not think themselves
   liable
   to the same
   trembling flesh). I say now, "The
   People,"
   as some lesson repeated, now,
   the lights are off, to myself,
   as a lover, or at the cold wind.
   (Transbluesency 54)

In sardonically Orphic poems such as "Balboa, The Entertainer" and "A Guerrilla Handbook," Baraka insists ironically--with equal parts despair and spite--that "we must convince the living / that the dead cannot sing." Baraka writes to and from the dead, the ancestors, but without the guarantee that belief in transcendence would provide. Baraka's lyric "I" seems to be waiting, in his early, individualist poems, for the collective speech that will sound itself in such later poems as "Poetry for the Advanced," "Am/Trak," and the Why's, Wise, Y'z sequence. The collective subjectivity--the lyric "we"--toward which Baraka aspires remains full of conflict and uncertainty. It is both a goal and a troubled source provoking poetic acts.

In his Third World Marxist period, Baraka withdraws somewhat from the powerful epistemological claustrophobia registered in poems like "A Contract ..."; instead, poems like Why's, Wise, Y'z offer explanation and "advanced" Marxist consciousness. In effect, the Beat charmed circle becomes the position of "advanced" consciousness: Anyone can enter who has understood the historical oppression of African and other third-world peoples. The sequence Why's, Wise, Y'z embodies in its discrete sections different African American historical situations. One voice after another bears witness to oppression, and this dramatic structure establishes a collective tone, a consciousness sufficiently representative to speak, as a chorus, of communal experience across time:

   So in 1877
   we all knew
   the heart dead
   the lie instead

   they talked in blood
   they put on hoods
   they paid for murder
   they closed the books

   no democracy
   no light
   primitive times
   returned (Reader 490)

Baraka's ritual/historical poetics remains post-romantic: Many passages in Why's, Wise, Y'z make ritual/communal speakers the embodiments of individual transformation, discovery, and expression:

   talk did I hear
   of fires and burning
   and death to the gods

   on the dirt where I slept
   such talk
   warmed me

   such talk
   lit my way

   I has never got nothing but hard times
   and punishment
   any joy I had I made myself, and the
   dark woman
   who took my hand and led me to myself

   I has never got nothing
   but a head full of blood
   my scar, my missing teeth ...

   Song to me, was the darkness
   in which I could stand
   my profile melted into the black air
   red from the flame of the burning big
   house (Transbluesency 224-25)

Why's, Wise, Y'z enacts a poetics of transformation, a pattern of destruction, re-birth, and transformed expression, that Baraka's work places within the lyric "I," within psyche and history:

   in those crazy dreams I called myself
   Coltrane
   bathed in a black and red fire
   in those crazy moments I called myself
   Thelonius
   & this was in the 19th century!
   (Transbluesency 225)

These poems ask how poetic language can transform the lyric "I" into the lyric "we." In so doing, they propose a rejoinder to Language poetry.

Baraka does not offer individualism unqualified assent, nor does he participate in what Andrews describes as the naive conventions of "unmediated communication" ("Praxis" 23). In the prefatory note for Why's, Wise, Y'z, Baraka combines the West African griot tradition and the (U.S.) tradition of the long poem including history:

   Why's/Wise is a long poem in the tradition
   of the Griots--but this is about
   African American (American) History.
   It is also like Melvin Tolson's Liberia,
   William Carlos Williams's Paterson,
   Charles Olson's Maximus in that it tries
   to tell the history/life like an ongoing-off-coming
   Tale. (Reader 480)

The continuity between Baraka's Beat poems and Why's, Wise, Y'z is that in each the lyric "I" is a mediation between individual and community--an agent of transformation in both self and history. Like Andrews, Baraka tries to record the valence between self and culture, consciousness and oppression, and unlike Andrews he makes the lyric "I" the instrument of such consciousness.

In describing Theodor Adorno's combination of Marxism and modernism, Charles Taylor sums up the back-formation that underlies Language poetry's opposition to the lyric "I," and narrative:

   [Adorno] sees a link between the
   process of reification of human activity
   in capitalist society, denounced by
   Lukacs, the domination and forced
   unification of the self under the instrumental
   ego, and the canonical meanings
   which late Romantic art attributes
   to things.... The rebellion against the
   canonical notions of the unity of a
   work of art is linked to the rebellion
   against the dominant idea of the unity
   of the ego.

      Adorno's model ... comes from the
   old expressivist source, via Marx and
   Lukacs. But he ... lived through such a
   traumatic period of disappointment of
   the Marxist hope, that he ceased to
   conceive full reconciliation as a possibility.
   (477-78)

Such disappointment with the possibilities of unity and expression in art was particularly inspiring (or consoling) to the Language avant-garde, which matured in the midst of disappointment at American radicalism of the sixties and seventies. Lyric consciousness does not quite become epic consciousness in poems such as Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra" or Baraka's Why's, Wise, Y'z--yet neither does it remain within Andrews's individualist paradigm of "progressive lit." In Baraka's poetry the Beat oppositional charmed circle of initiates can be extended--self-consciously, tenuously, with humor and an awareness of limitation--to any reader. His poetry suggests ways in which lyric can become collective and historical--and oppositional--without ceasing to be lyric.

Notes

(1.) Davidson argues against the belief that there are "any politics to speak of" in Beat writing (Renaissance 5). Davidson's position, and his critique of the lyric "I" (expressivism) as individualism, are thoroughly consistent with Andrews's critique of "progressive lit." ("Praxis" 23), Bernstein's critique of Ginsberg, and Watten's critique of Olson. The Language poets' argument that post-romantic dissent cannot be "political" is extended in the work of many critics, including Ward, Hartley, Reinfeld, and McGann.

(2.) Dissent functions as ideology within American individualism. Therefore, classic American poetry from Whitman to Ginsberg and Lowell has been read by both poets and critics through a lens of liberal ideology that privileges both individualism (in lyric, the lyric "I") and subversive or oppositional intent. The Language poets and related avant-gardes recognized that, within liberal American individualism, the lyric self is also the representative American self which, in speaking out against the actual America, legitimizes the symbol of America and the premises of liberal political culture (Bercovitch 176-210). By recognizing the paradoxes of American dissent and situating their critique of post-romantic lyric within a critique of individualism, Language poets differentiate their oppositional poetics from those of their immediate forebears in the avant-garde, the new American poets who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s.

(3.) Many poets and critics have compared Language poetry and the post-romantic oppositional poetry of 1945-1980, usually to the advantage of Language poetry. It would be impossible to summarize the literature on this question here. However, the turn (in oppositional poetry) away from individualism may be seen especially directly and cogently in criticism and statements of poetics by Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Geoff Ward, and Barrett Watten. Ward's dismissive use of "expressivism" (12) to define the limits of the new American poetry allows us to read (Beat/Black Mountain) opposition in Amid Baraka against Andrews's oppositional (Language) poetics.

(4.) See Jameson, "Consumer" 111-16.

(5.) For a particularly suggestive statement of the anti-Wordsworthian position, sea Andrews, "Praxis" 23; Davidson, "Discourse" 143.

(6.) For a discussion of this theme in Baraka's poetics, see Sollors 11-94.

(7.) Likewise, in Artifice of Absorption, Charles Bernstein makes a claim about Bruce Andrews's poetry and its political relation to American culture that mirrors Andrews's attempt to differentiate the oppositional poetics of Language poetry from those of "progressive lit." Bernstein argues that by presenting something like a political unconscious Andrews confronts the reader with cultural facts for which the reader is in part responsible and for which the reader must, in one way or another, answer. Bernstein claims that Andrews's writing procedures constitute a politicized textuality. And for Bernstein and Andrews, this politicized textuality is defined by opposition to false dissent, which would Include any oppositional poetry written within the post-romantic lyric paradigm. Yet Bernstein describes Andrews's politicized textuality in terms that are entirely derived from "voice" ("aggressive street slang ... scatological accusations ... probing questions")--and, of course, Bernstein pegs his claim on the idea that Andrews's speech acts are "the underside of our collective ... practices" (25-26).

Works Cited

Andrews, Bruce. Give 'Em Enough Rope. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon P, 1987.

--. I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism). Los Angeles: Sun and Moon P, 1990.

--. "Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis." The Politics of Poetic Form. Ed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Roof, 1990. 23-43.

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Ed. Charlie Reilly. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

--. The Dead Lecturer. New York: Grove P, 1964.

--. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1991.

--. The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. New York: Morrow, 1979.

--. Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amid Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995). Ed. Paul Vangelisti. New York: Marsilio, 1995.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.

Bernstein, Charles. "Artifice of Absorption." Paper Air 4.1 (1987): 25-26.

--. Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon P, 1986.

--. "Optimism and Critical Excess (Precess)." Critical Inquiry 16.4 (1990): 830-56.

--. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Davidson, Michael. "Discourse in Poetry: Bakhtin and Extensions of the Dialogical." Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. Ed. Michael Palmer. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1983. 143-50.

--. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983.

Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems: 1947-1980. New York: Harper, 1985.

Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985.

Hartley, George. Textual Politics and the Language Poets, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism and Consumer Culture." The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay P, 1983. 111-25.

--. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Marvell, Andrew. The Complete English Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Story Donno. New York: St. Martin's P, 1974.

McGann, Jerome. Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgement of Literary Work. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Reinfeld, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992.

Ross, Andrew. The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

--, and Barrett Watten. "Reinventing Community: A Symposium on/with Language Poets." Aerial 8: Barrett Watten. Ed. Rod Smith. Washington: Edge Books, 1996. 188-99.

Silliman, Ron. "Canons and Institutions: New Hope for the Disappeared." The Politics of Poetic Form. Ed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Roof, 1990. 149-74.

--. "Language, Realism, Poetry." In the American Tree. Ed. Silliman, Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. xv-xxiii.

--. "The Task of the Collaborator: Watten's Leningrad." Aeriel 8: Barret Watten. Ed. Rod Smith. Washington: Edge Books, 1996. 141-68.

Smith, Rod. "Introduction." Aerial 8: Barrett Watten, Ed. Smith. Washington: Edge Books. ix-xiv.

Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism". New York: Columbia UP, 1978.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Vangelisti, Paul, Foreward. Baraka, Transbluesency xi-xix.

Ward, Geoff. Language Poetry and the American Avant-Garde. British Association for American Studies Pamphlets 25. BAAS, 1993.

Watten, Barrett. Total Syntax. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1985.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplin. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Joseph Lease, the author of Human Rights and The Room, is Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts. Lease's poem "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was selected for publication in The Best American Poetry 2002.