Imagining otherwise : experimental U.S. antiwar poetry in the 21st century

Abstract

Imagining Otherwise traces the emergence of a newly vital American political poetry. Whereas “antiwar” poetry has generally been understood to oppose specific, geographically- and temporally-bounded conflicts, this dissertation contends that twenty-first century American antiwar poets recognize the U.S.’s perpetual and diffuse warmaking as one front of precaritization intersecting with manifold others: neocolonialism, ecological crisis, racial and homophobic injustice, and neoliberal capitalism in the U.S. and worldwide. The antiwar poets at the center of this study respond to the U.S.’s ideological embrace of war and militarization as an entry point to help map collective responses to collective precarity. Examining recent works by Craig Santos Perez, Don Mee Choi, and CA Conrad, I show how these poets’ formal and linguistic experiments at once interrogate the language that underwrites U.S. warmaking, and chart possibilities for collective political and poetic agency that lie beyond lyric’s imagination of the sovereign textual subject. But even as the works under discussion take up American avant-garde traditions of linguistic materialism and skepticism of the lyric “I,” they do not abandon the lyric. For these poets, I argue, lyric concerns—immediacy, strong feeling, the construction of a first-person speaker, however destabilized or destabilizing—cannot be unyoked from the world-historical stakes of politics, particularly the ongoing aftermaths and current forms of war. Instead, these poets push the limits and capacities of the lyric to look outward and to invite others to join in. Chapter One surveys recent articulations of poetry’s relation to politics, tracing the predecessors of current debates back to the Vietnam War era. I propose that a relational, post-lyric poetics offers a poethical alternative to our own era’s institutionalized view of poetry as above or outside politics. Chapter Two considers Craig Santos Perez’s “oceania composition” as a first example, tracing how it expands an already-robust decolonization and demilitarization movement through a specifically literary decolonial politics. In Chapter Three, I show how the purposeful “errorism” of Don Mee Choi’s “geopolitical poetics” collapses the specularized distances of lyric witness, promising a new, anti-neocolonial relation between self and other. Chapter Four turns to CA Conrad’s practice of composition-by-ritual, arguing that it extends conventional representational politics into a particularly performative form of presentist politics as a way of resisting war’s intimate penetration of our bodies and relationships. Instead, Conrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals enable risky, rewarding relations with our beloveds, with strangers, and with the other-than-human world. Ultimately, in their engagements with American warmaking, these poets rethink political agency and community, giving metaphorical and performative shape in their poetry to new articulations of collective agency. In so doing, they enact a renewal of the alignment between formal experimentation and critical politics, mounting a challenge to both the canonical assimilation of avant-garde poetry as impersonal and elitist, and to the pervasive critical assumption that American poetry ought to stay out of the trenches of American war.