Tonight No Poetry Will Serve Adrienne Rich’s Interstitial Living, Lyric’s Cruel Optimism

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Adrienne Rich’s Interstitial Living, Lyric’s Cruel Optimism Jeffrey Neilson, Brown University What does one make out of a poem written late in the day, at the end of a lengthy career, and at the threshold between living and dying? How common expectations for a poet’s late work to provide a summative artistic statement and a make peace with one’s mortality foreclose less optimistic readings of one’s life work? If a poet’s death can be seen as remunerative—whether cosmically, in the sense of Walt Whitman’s claim that “to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” or literally, as when an influential poet’s death occasions the publication of the Collected Works and opportunities for acts of public commemoration—what might be the scope or stakes today of distinguishing a poetic “vocation” from a poetic “career”? In the following talk, I will meditate upon what I see as one mode of poetic vocation’s present-day downward mobility—a non-linear, though not necessarily circular, engagement with the unachieved ends and diminished returns of lyric as a lifelong practice I will focus on the melancholic attachment to poetic activism that one of Adrienne Rich’s last poems, “Powers of Recuperation,” formally re-imagines The title of Adrienne Rich’s last collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, self-reflexively disavows final poetic “offerings.” Rich’s refusal of poetic “service” syncs up with the contemporary struggles of younger generations of poets and readers of poetry who pursue their work in the form and/or spirit of political activism In “Powers of Recuperation,” as throughout her last book, Rich’s lifelong political engagement resurfaces and in the process transposes the Protestant tenor of Max Weber’s famous reading of modern vocations into a non-teleological sense of poetic endurance This sense of poetry’s unachievable ends in precarious times resonates with Lauren Berlant’s recent articulation of how various modes of “cruel optimism” saturate contemporary lives The recuperation of a lyricized activism in this poem leaves us with some haunting questions: what are the affective and formal resources for re-imagining the “good life” vis-à-vis the practice of the lyric today? What, beyond “imagining” such a life, might lyrics do? How “activist lyrics” reach closure? Or should they? How can poets dedicated to not serving, through poetry, the oppressive and exploitative powers of late modernity still recuperate, through poetry, something like the courage for truth? We might pursue the questions that Rich’s late writings pose by doing what we have always been told not to do—to judge the books by their covers A quick glance at the cover art of Rich’s Collected Early Poems (1995) and her posthumous Later Poems (2013) reveals the semiotic form of the poetic career to be as unchanging as day and night: What I propose here is to approach Rich’s poetic achievement as a whole not in terms of what is often formalized into a collection (such a “complete” works, or less complete “selected” works), but in terms of how Rich’s work kept or keeps on keeping on Rich’s final “passage” enjoys no retirement plan, no inevitable sanction by the sponsoring institutions of the day The epigraph of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve—a six-part definition of the transitive verb “serve”—parses out the ways in which poetry’s resistance to political or cultural servitude might critique the career’s discursive appeal.1 Yet such a refusal to “serve” also risks diminishing poetry’s utopian promises, visionary missions, or dreams of a common language In such a vocational doublebind, Rich’s late lyrics throw into relief how the democratic vistas of poetry’s intransitive “will to change” persistently ends up one word short The will to change what? This is the challenge of Rich’s last poems –both what Rich as a poet struggles with and what she forces her activist readers to confront In turn, the unraveling of poetry’s social agency in the neoliberal context of freedom’s excessive privatization forces Rich and her readers to face the precarious nature of their respective callings It is in this sense that “Powers of Recuperation” inflects lyric’s contemporary condition as a peculiar kind of “cruel optimism.” Through this term, Lauren Berlant distinguishes an assemblage of personal and social fantasies embedded in the present, fantasies held in place by the constitutive impasse of being both “bound to life” and inhabiting a “scene of negotiated sustenance that makes life bearable as it presents itself ambivalently, unevenly, incoherently” (Berlant 12) Rich’s late poems reflect the affective patterns traced by Berlant’s work insofar as they embody a structure of attachment, or poetic habitus, that poses unanswerable questions again and again, and endure in the project of self- and world-construction despite the socialized constrictions by which poetry is understood not as a “vocation” but an “avocation”—something done in one’s free time as a diversion from “making a living.” “Powers of Recuperation” imagines free time otherwise and reorients a late modern subjectivity, as Berlant writes about a poem by John Ashbery, “toward being lost, or suspended in a process” (Berlant 35) This art of suspension is a facet of lyric’s lost, or last, or even lasting (though perhaps not everlasting) labors In her essay “How Does a Poet Put Bread on the Table?,” Rich describes poetry’s sense of beleaguered freedom as a “sacred” mode of labor that realizes a chronic human need to actively make one’s time free For Rich, poetry’s forms of life and work involve modes of what she calls “interstitial living” (Rich 1994, 39).2 With this appeal to poetry’s capacity for freeing time comes a fraught sense of poetry’s freedom as class privilege: Most, if not all, of the names we know in North American poetry are the names of people who have had some access to freedom in time—that privilege of some which is actually a necessity for all The struggle to limit the working day is a sacred struggle for the worker’s freedom in time To feel herself or himself, for a few hours or a weekend, as a free being with choices—to plant vegetables, and later sit on a porch with a cold beer, to write poetry or build a fence or fish or play cards, to walk without a purpose, to make love in the daytime To sleep late Ordinary human pleasures, the self’s recreation Yet every working generation has to reclaim that freedom in time, and many are brutally thwarted in that effort Capitalism is based on the abridgment of that freedom (Rich 1994, 43) A late modern poet’s “interstitial living” includes moving through part-time jobs, temporary positions, and forms of subsistence living that have become “more difficult, risky, and wearing” in a time of shrinking arts funding, lack of public support, “censorship-by-clique,” “censorship by the Right,” and “censorship by distribution” (Rich 1994, 43) In other words, these economic and cultural pressures force poets to negotiate time as chronology and as duration Whether poetry’s “passing on” manifests itself as an event, such as a final rite, or as an ongoing process of transmission is a choice that Rich’s poem refuses to, or simply cannot, disambiguate or resolve Examining this closural double-bind is key to understanding how the citizen-poet of “Powers of Recuperation” moves interstitially, as she walks through city “without a purpose” and bearing fragmented but necessary witness to acts of irresolvable parting Yet the normative compulsion toward closure implicit in such ambiguous movements nonetheless breaks into the poem’s rhetoric Like all of Rich’s poems, “Powers of Recuperation” is dated (2007), thus inscribing a lived and living history into the poem The date suspends the reader in a particular time Without the date, the reader would be suspended without historical closure Also, like the ending section of many of Rich’s collections, this final poem is an extended sequence of fragments, episodes, or passages whose internal coherence and external references refract across a series of verses In the opening section, the speaker begins by interrupting her own anachronistic process: “A woman of the citizen party—what’s that— / is writing history backward” (TNP 76) This self-portrait of the aged poet as an “endless beginner” dramatizes an irresolvable impasse of final poetic passage—of living and leaving one’s life as a poet The first five sections tour through the deserted city of the poet’s mind, pondering the ubiquity of appropriation, or capitalist “recuperation,” in the present Whether it is the “citizen,” the “Ministers-in-exile with their aides,” the “child squatting,” or the “civil / engineers”—all are survivors who breathe the same air, or as Rich writes, are “conspiring by definition” (TNP 79) These survivors live off the realization that concludes section IV, that “every built thing has its unmeant purposes” (TNP 79) Yet this turn of phrase, “unmeant purpose,” turns, with the turn of the page, into a new beginning constructed across the enjambment and caesura of section V’s opening lines: “Every built thing with its unmeant / meaning unmet purpose” (TNP 80) Along with the micro-rhetorical recuperation of words and phrases across lines, line breaks, and sections, Rich also “recuperates” fixed poetic forms such as “Ballade of the Poverties.” The latter is a powerful Villon-esque critique of the sociopolitical “powers of recuperation” involved in the 2008 financial crisis As in Rich’s experiments with the ghazal, this poem responds to socio-economic and ecological precarity within the formal constraint of the ballade Rich’s haunting refrain—“There are poverties and there are poverties”—formalizes an impulse to lyric activism that risks blurring the line between forceful critical perceptions and exhausted inventory of the contemporary moment Or perhaps crudely put, the line between lyric as a mode of stasis or a mode of change Rich’s refrain can thus be read as repetition with and/or without a difference, and readers must decide on this difference if the poem is to enact any kind of change at all—of mind or world The last section of “Powers of Recuperation” superimposes Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 etching, Melencolia I, upon a poetic figure whose imaginative melancholy resounds with interstitial life The final section reads: Bends under the arc walks bent listening for chords and codes bat-radar-pitched or twanging off rubber bands and wires tin-can telephony to scribble testimony by fingernail and echo her documentary alphabet still evolving Walks up on the bridge windwhipped roof and trajectory shuddering under her catpaw tread one of seven built things hold her suspended between desolation and the massive figure on unrest’s verge pondering the unbuilt city cheek on hand and glowing eyes and skirted knees apart (TNP 81) Like Dürer’s figure, the poem’s wanderer measures an unseen and possibly absent object The discursive terrain of Melencolia I’s compass is also indeterminate, for art historians continue to debate whether the etching allegorically represents geometry, astronomy, or an abstraction of these in a kind of abandoned Platonic pursuit of the beautiful.3 Likewise, Rich’s anti-closural clauses approximate the interstitial measure of an activist poetic working out new lines and poems that are “suspended between desolation.” But suspended between desolation and what? This “massive figure on unrest’s verge” dangles, in the suspended closing section, between two incompatible callings of the lyric: one bringing the self and other together, and one that keeps them apart Of these two callings, parting has the last word in Rich’s last published collection The final figure holds a posture with “skirted knees apart,” thereby juxtaposing the unresolved semantic, symbolic, and ethical tensions between reproduction, erotic desire, and sexual violence that Rich’s corpus has brought into critical relief for over a half century What holds this resonant image together is paradoxically its evocation of separation and falling short The figure’s “glowing eyes” ponder an unbuilt city that must be rebuilt with an evolving alphabet and unmet, or unmeant, purposes Despite the citizen-poet’s inability to access the unknown and equivocal ends to which the poem bears witness, in Rich’s final crossing, the language of gender unequivocally has the last word There is a lot more to say about how “Powers of Recuperation” re-imagines an ethics of poetry in a cruelly optimistic moment when “no poetry will serve.” Despite the states of exhaustion witnessed by and experienced in the lyric today, Rich’s late version of lyric’s reconstructive ethos is unwilling to capitulate to the pre-formed closure of the career Lyric’s cruel optimism refuses to “serve” the powers that be, but the process of making this refusal is not an entirely hopeless pursuit To refuse the logic of the career generates an alternative lyric power that suspends ultimate terms in its own passionate attachment to poetry’s living endurance and its fragility In reconsidering the question of poetry’s survival outside the conventional climactic trajectory of the career or lifetime achievement—indeed, with no clear end in sight—why poets with a radically democratic “will to change” go on working? Beyond the supposedly exhausted or ambiguous parameters of the lyric in late modernity—the shattering or shuttering of the self, the broken or buffered life, the “insatiable desires and vain fears”—what kinds of returns even later modernist lyrics enable in terms of a connective or collective sense of living? It is in this spirit that an even later “last” poem by Rich, entitled “Endpapers,” serves as an important reminder I end, then, with Rich’s very last published poem, the final entry in the “New and Unpublished Poems” of her Later Poems Written in 2011, this poem echoes an earlier “late” poem called “Living Memory.”4 “Endpapers” calls to mind what the poet’s vocation does not serve and what Rich’s poems cannot contain Moreover, it challenges its reader to engage again in a mode of lyric’s activism that her work enduringly passes on: The signature to a life requires the search for a method rejection of posturing trust in the witnesses a vial of invisible ink a sheet of paper held steady after the end-stroke above a deciphering flame (LP 512) Works Cited Berlant, Lauren Cruel Optimism Durham: Duke University Press, 2011 Doorly, Patrick “Dürer’s Melencolia I: Plato’s Abandoned Search for the Beautiful.” The Art Bulletin 86.2 (June 2004) 255-276 Povinelli, Elizabeth Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism Durham: Duke University Press, 2011 Rich, Adrienne Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970 New York: W.W Norton & Co., 1995 Tonight No Poetry Will Serve New York: W.W Norton & Co., 2011 What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics New York: W.W Norton & Co., 1994 Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012 New York: W.W Norton & Co., 2013 Notes 10 “SERVE (v.t.): to work for, be a servant to; to give obedience and reverent honor to; to fight for; military or naval service for; to go through or spend (a term of imprisonment); to meet the needs of or satisfy the requirements of, be used by; to deliver (a legal document) as a summons” (TNP 7) Elizabeth A Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) ix Povinelli understands “late liberalism” to be “the governance of social difference in the wake of anticolonial movements and the emergence of new social movements” (ix) As Povinelli analyzes how to live in “spaces of abandonment, exhaustion, and excess radically reduces being,” she postulates how it might also be true that to inhabit these spaces “provides the possibility of being otherwise” (129) Povinelli’s line of questioning ultimately confronts the problems of materialization or embodiment that are endemic to these spaces, and thereby grapple with problems to which Rich’s lyric commitments seek to make palpable and active in poetic discourse rather than to transcend Thus what Povinelli asks of contemporary critical theory’s ability to practice an “ethically informed politics” is what Rich’s poetry asks of itself: “To what are we committing ourselves if we commit to a freedom that is the undefined and undefinable trajectory of a radical otherwise in our world’s scenes of abandonment?” (129-130) Povinelli’s critical alternatives also resonate with how I have read the longue durée Rich’s career: “This otherwise may lie in shattering the life-world in which a person finds herself situated, but it also might mean maintaining a life-world under constant threat of being saturated by the rhythms and meanings of another The conditions of excess always sit side by side with the conditions of exhaustion and endurance that put into question the neat capture of substance by capital and other biopolitical projects and complicates the simple ethical investment in the thresholds and transitions of becoming within biopolitics In these situations, to be the same, to be durative, may be as emancipatory as to be transitive” (130) See Doorly, “‘Melencolia I’: Plato’s Abandoned Search for the Beautiful” (2004) 255-276 “Written-across like nineteenth-century letters or secrets penned in vinegar, invisible till the page is held over flame.” (LP 208) ... W.W Norton & Co., 1995 Tonight No Poetry Will Serve New York: W.W Norton & Co., 2011 What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics New York: W.W Norton & Co., 1994 Later... ethics of poetry in a cruelly optimistic moment when ? ?no poetry will serve. ” Despite the states of exhaustion witnessed by and experienced in the lyric today, Rich’s late version of lyric’s reconstructive... keeps on keeping on Rich’s final “passage” enjoys no retirement plan, no inevitable sanction by the sponsoring institutions of the day The epigraph of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve? ??a six-part definition