The Justice of My Feelings for Frank O’Hara

This chapter examines two problems presented by Frank O'Hara's poetry: one of which is related to aesthetics and the other to ethics. It argues that O'Hara's dependence on preference does not restrict the extension of his poetry. Rather, by totalizing the scene of judgment—by treating the whole world as a magnification of the art world—O'Hara dramatizes the consequence for social life of using a single scale—not taste, but love—to determine the value of a thing, regardless of what sort of thing it is. In his effort to respect both the particularity and the abstraction of his loves, O'Hara reimagines a world in which any kind of person has the potential to be valued, whether or not any particular person happens to value him.

Oppen’s Silence, Crusoe’s Silence, and the Silence of Other Minds

This chapter examines the long silence at the center of George Oppen's poetic career, arguing that it was driven in part by his early choice of left-political activism over art. After the 1934 publication of his Discrete Series, Oppen stopped writing poems and lived, starting in 1950, as a “known subversive” in Mexico. He would resurface in 1962 with the publication of The Materials. Focusing on the figure of Robinson Crusoe, this chapter offers an account of Oppen's poetic knowledge in relation to aesthetics and to the idea of a poetic politics. It also considers Oppen's reconceptualization of what it means “to know” and its relevance to the question of social recognition. It suggests that Oppen's return to poetry was contingent upon his conceptualization of the rigorous charity of his silence and his discovery of a way to make such silence audible.

We Are Reading

In this concluding chapter, the author makes a sort of experiment in imagining his argument about the history of poetry as a prescription for reading rather than writing. The author addresses the two concerns he has raised in this book: to think about the nature or structure of collective intentions, and to offer a defense of a kind of intense and deliberated inattention to poems. The discussion is partly autobiographical, taking the author's own use and abuse of poetry as a case study. The author reflects on how he sought to read a poem, A. R. Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year with another person, but at a distance—“together apart.” He explains how reading poems together may promote an attitude of indifference toward the specificity of any poem in the greater interest of solidarity with other persons. He also proposes an alternative to models of poetic community built around conversation, interpretation, or translation.

Language Poetry and Collective Life

This chapter examines the logic behind Bob Perelman's wish to produce an account of poetry as an enterprise deeply involved in manifesting the possibility of social life, or in producing confidence in the ground of social life. Focusing on Language poetry, the movement Perelman represents, the chapter discusses the disparity between imagined and actual forms of collectivity that arises from two contradictory commitments that Perelman's story allegorizes: a commitment to a radical concept of freedom on the one hand, and to a repressive hypothesis of cultural determinism on the other. It also analyzes the theory and practice of collaboration in the book Leningrad and relates it the account of the person implicit in the generative linguistics deplored by the Language poets. Finally, it considers how the Language poets' appeal to grammaticality regrounds personhood.

Poems, Poetry, Personhood

This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.

White Thin Bone

This chapter examines the philosophical origins and political urgencies of William Butler Yeats's demand for “perfection” and “completeness.” It begins with a discussion of Yeats's conception of extreme and paradoxical theories of poetic agency and why such an excessive account of poetic agency might have appeared necessary in his historical situation. It then considers Yeats's early and abiding commitment to the esoteric roots of symbolism and his late interest in eugenics, both of which addressed the local project of forging a counterfactual identity. It also shows how Yeats's poetry bridges the gap between the perfected Ireland he envisioned and the degraded one he conjured. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Yeats's explicit rebellion, not against his universalist notion of personhood, but against his own will to poetic mastery.