Staking a claim: Contemporary American poets rework the terrain.

摘要

The voice of the poet is often imagined to be linked intrinsically to the location from which that voice emerges, a relationship predicated on the idea that place is a bounded, homogeneous space of belonging and origin. The poetic voice cannot simply arise organically from a place, however, because place itself is not natural, cohesive, or coherent. I cut across lines of poetic schools and traditions to map a diverse group of contemporary American poems, which, I argue, represent place as contested and conflicted, constructed by intersecting forces of culture, ethnicity, history---and literature. These particular representations of the complexity of place, which resist problematic narratives of essentialism, authenticity, and (exclusive) belonging or origin, correspond to fragmented, multiple, and oppositional poetic voices. The first chapter focuses on poems by Thomas Lux, Lucille Clifton, and Susan Howe that intervene in a pastoral literary tradition that casts rural or wilderness landscapes as romanticized and ahistorical. These poems highlight the complicity of the pastoral with national and imperial ideologies; in so doing, they challenge the centrality of New England as the point of origin for an Anglo-American nation and literature. The second chapter brings together poems by Joseph Bruchac, Michelle Cliff, and Adrienne Rich in which travel and tourism destabilize constructions of belonging or origin, thereby revealing an anxiety about authority, about who can speak for or about place. These poems ultimately unsettle problematic dichotomies between home and away, traveler and native, and between objectivity and experience as bases of knowledge and authority. In the third chapter, I argue that poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Antonia Quintana Pigno, and Simon Ortiz use dialogic strategies both to counter Anglo-American cultural dominance and to construct place as the site of an unbroken historical narrative and a cohesive community. These poems foreground the role of poetry itself in working towards resolution of situations of cultural and territorial contestation. I begin with poems that cast literature as a problem, an exclusive narrative that must be interrupted, and end with poems that cast literature as the solution, a means of writing coherence and continuity.