Of course you’re free to write as you please, the liberal editor answered,
But take the red flags out of your poem—we mustn’t offend the censor—
And change this stanza to mean the reverse, and you must tone down this passage;
Thank God for the freedom of the press and a poem with a message!
(Thomas McGrath, Ars Poetica: Or:
Who Lives in the Ivory Tower?)

1Loneliness is how a very good, maturing young poet described her (our) situation, awakening to the postmodernist academic assumptions toward which her gifts were carrying her. She didn’t mean “literary” loneliness, as never before have as many little department and program magazines, e-zines, and anthologies flooded classrooms as do now, as many densely populated regions of theory pressed in on all sides as do now, as many slam poets, student and guest readings, reading groups, inhabited Poetry as do now.

2An intellectual, historical, loneliness is what she described, a sense of having been cut adrift from the large questions that provoke great writers the world over. We’d read a copy of a talk given at Oxford, “Globalization and Culture,” by Aijaz Ahmad, and for many of the young poets in the class, it was a new and memorable look at United States academic culture. Ahmad’s international leftism, his grasp of post World War II global political struggles, made his charge unignorable when he pointed an accusatory finger at the academic institutions of the West, especially those of the United States. Framing the rise of a global working mass with our postmodernist theories of “meta narrative,” indeterminacy, “culturalism,” and disengagement, he dramatized the human cost of losing the term “class” in academic discourse.

3How do we engage these ideas with young writers, young poets? We do not. Speaking about American writers, in general, novelist and past president of the International Parliament of Writers, Russell Banks, laments that loneliness that my student discerned in a June 2002 Harper’s article, “Who Will Tell the People?” Not since Whitman and Twain have American writers taken seriously their responsibility for the condition of our democracy, he says, and no wonder. Poorly educated, by any standards, and untraveled (“tourism” is a different thing, he would say), young writers are prey to the same market forces that already contain education and publishing. When Banks presented a version of this essay in his keynote address at the 2002 Kachemak Bay Writers Conference, in Homer, Alaska, he was, predictably, criticized for urging us to write across and through racial lines so that we may eventually mature to a literary position that embraces the real issues, he says, class and economics.

4What has happened to poetry in the US is what has happened in the classrooms that dominate it: two or three generations of ambitious, more or less linguistically talented young people, often from non-elite backgrounds, have learned that their greatest authority is subjective and personal, and that one multicultural identity or another constitutes that personhood. In the creation of niche markets, a ferocious territorializing of identity has taken place, with of course one single identity considered naive, old hat, useless or worse: class.

5The relevance of Thomas McGrath to this alienation among thinking students is his pointed absence from the list of taught and teaching poets in the institution of academic creative writing. Inviting the term “syndicate,” the creative writing phenomenon in the US is represented by the Associated Writing Programs, which according to its 2010 website “supports 34,000 writers, 500 member colleges and universities, and 100 writing conferences and centers.” Intermittent and localized efforts to include him fail because his work gives the lie to the implicitly alleged progressivism of the Syndicate. He is not simply a poet of the (past) American left. He is a poet of the contemporary international left. It seems basic to an appreciation of both his achievement and the urgency of our need for McGrath’s work to read him in this primally integrated way. Certainly, to answer my student’s loneliness we must. During a career in which his lived American history as a grassroots “organic intellectual” was torn ever more violently into pieces and parceled out to a host of expertises—arrayed largely throughout the academy, which was, at times, his sworn enemy—he held a radical vision of the present, carried from wellsprings utterly stopped in the United States, and, as we globalize, smothered throughout the world.

6Poetry, as his entire body of work demonstrates, is the point in society at which the political meets the alchemical language of imagination. All art stands more or less at this juncture, verifying or denying public life and ideals through the lens of conscience and by means of their several media. The art of language, however, carries the greatest consequence, because it cannot escape meaning, even in its many historical attempts at anti-meaning. Modern poetry, as Michael Hamburger posits in The Truth of Poetry, is defined by its self-aware occupation of the tension between the revolutionary and the reactionary perspectives. Poetry is the point at which “the order from above” meets and is rendered by the “order from below.” Hamburger cites British poet Christopher Middleton to offer one of the reasons for America’s naive disregard of this context for poetry:

Modernism in Central Europe and Spain was at most points connected with a strong sense of social revolution, a catastrophic sense of history, in which poets affiliated themselves to the progressive democratic and left wing movements. In English-language modernism, on the other hand, we have never really had a democratic tradition. Eliot and Pound’s poetry of that time was concerned with redefining and purifying traditional values rather than with trying to generate ideas that would point forward.

7Hamburger’s thesis—this organic intellectual backdrop—is uniquely useful to illuminating the domestication of American poetry in and by the academy since WW II. McGrath’s fate in the academy, too—both that of his genius person, potentially teaching in a classroom, and that of his work, potentially taught—is clearer in this light. The revolutionary impulse, old as poetry itself, and restored to contemporary awareness by Terrence des Pres in his Praises and Dispraises; Politics and Poetry in the 20th Century—describes the most recently viable and unbroken example of the tradition in its Irish bardic form, social and political in nature, grounded in a radical egalitarianism rooted in the social contract. Des Pres includes an essay on McGrath, as well as others on Brecht, Breytenbach, Yeats, and Rich, to point to contemporary voices descended from that tradition, the voice that presupposes that power expects to hear truth spoken to it, and expects to be required to respond.

8Bardic poetry—revolutionary poetry—is therefore public and historical, not intrapsychic and timeless. The poet speaks for the safety of the tribe in a voice that is neither insubordinate nor supplicatory, and certainly not irrelevant. The academic and literary hierarchy that makes of the lyric mode the measure of all poetry can only find such work “second string.” Hamburger’s work relocates that privileged lyric mode from above to beside the bardic, thus requiring that it explain itself along the same political and intellectual driving tensions that the bardic acknowledges.

9Apart from such assertions as underlie Hamburger’s and Des Pres’s valuation of the bardic as the equal to lyric norms, literary legitimacy can be summoned that anticipates postmodern critical insights, which themselves are generally cut off from the Syndicate poetry that creates student loneliness today. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism (Rhetorical Criticism, a Theory of Genre) categorizes poetry as either lyric or bardic according to the “radical of representation,” or posture of address, of the speaker. In an essentially dialogic gesture, he answers Mill’s famous dictum that poetry must be “overheard,” i.e. uttered by a voice figuratively turned away from its audience, with the tradition most commonly recognized in the epic, in which the poem is spoken facing its audience, figuratively, and therefore engaged in time, place, and social context.

10As a woman poet, Eavan Boland has plumbed this tension in Irish poetry, with memorable delicacy and precision. Over the course of what must be called her intellectual development, in and by means of her writing, she has deconstructed her country’s nationalism and, she would say, dead-ended dominant poetic tradition, by means of gender. Object Lessons, her memoir of intellectual and poetic inheritance, situates her artistic challenge in a recurring scene of herself as a young woman writer at her own primordial writing table. Each of her volumes of poetry, moreover, plumbs ever more deeply and resonantly the crack in the monolithic façade of poetry as “lyric.” Most recently, in Domestic Violence, she has referred to this as “the toxic lyric, to which there is no antidote.” And Robert Hass, generally read and praised as a nature poet, continues in a parallel course, saturating the archipelagoes of image and discourse with his ethical poetic gaze. Few American poets writing today, however, and especially student poets, have taken—or been extended by their mentors—this view of a dialectic that forges the unique problem of modern poetry, the dilemma to which they are heir, but which, unnamed, creates a field of aesthetic battles that float free of all human relevance except, perhaps, those that forge alliances of ambition.

11When Carol Muske, reviewing The Wild Iris, says, “The world of Louise Gluck’s poems has always been conventional, her god the God of Revelation, the family milieu bourgeois and patriarchal, the sexual ethos unrelievedly Freudian,” she seems not to equate these terms with a political position at all, let alone one that must exist in dialectic with its antithesis. Describing in psychological and social terms the reactionary perspective—authoritarian, monologic, committed to the immutability of the world as we know it, and to the most conservative ways of knowing it, Muske fails to evaluate Gluck’s work’s major ideological labor against what Tillie Olsen calls “change-making consciousness.”

12A further example of a critical aesthetic framed politically by Hamburger’s international thesis is David Wojahn’s classically classist essay “Generations I,” in which he measures the authority of a poem of brute reality by Bruce Weigl, by the yardstick of a poem of privileged ignorance and fantasy by Susan Mitchell. Wojahn, for all the intelligence and commitment to “the tradition” apparent in his reflections, fails utterly to plumb the deeper dialectic in which, clearly, the poem Weigl, but not Mitchell, has to write.

13Apart from their habitation in any critical discourse, these apodictic essays and the poems to which they refer, are the stock in trade of the MFA experience, the material out of which students will construct— not simply the collection of nuanced gestures that seem to lead “up”— but the very democratic or autocratic assumptions they deliver. Is it any wonder that many of the best of these apprentice poets feel, as they become conscious of international arts and ideas, like wallflowers waiting to be asked to dance by partners forbidden to come into the dance hall?

14These tensions exerted their claims on McGrath from the beginning, of course, old and primal as this struggle between demotic and autocratic forces in poetry is. With the US “democratizing of education” associated with the GI Bill, McGrath found himself at the heart of increasing political pressures inextricably entwined with the arts and higher education. As the United States peeled ever more sharply away from the socialism accepted as essential to the political dialectic in the rest of the world, an internationalist like McGrath could become only ever more marked. Though we tend today to revisit the “McCarthy Era” as though it were a discrete period, an illness from which the body politic recovered, many of its victims, like McGrath, did not.

15The political and aesthetic template abandoned by the Old Left when it broke apart and away under the pressure of its own conflicts and that of Cold War ideology was never to be re-inhabited in the US academy by socialism. The civil rights and women’s movements of the 50s and 60s, in fact nurtured and often allied with the American Communist Party, never realized their transformational potential, but succumbed to the academic allure of “professionalism” and “success.” Multiculturalism—the “New Left” of identity politics, as we know this force now, especially among academic poets—co-opted its own revolutionary origins. Literary niche writing, and marketing, are now themselves part of the mechanism of co-optation by which class conscious dissent is ever more efficiently digested.

16For the end of the Old Left, in the United States, saw the breakdown of working class solidarity, in the academy as well as out, in favor of a solidarity drawn vertically along racial, ethnic, and gender lines, each instance of which contained its own little capitalism, with its own stratification of class, and the-across-the-board essential marker of upward identification by lower classed individuals who wished to “rise.” Thus the subtle forms of ideological self-censorship that everyone of any race or ethnicity has known on the road to “moving up,” became, again, the shared aesthetic idiom, distinguished one from the other by costume—not conceptual—difference. Outside of the academy, class identification—labor identification—was evanesced, at best, and at worst, reduced to stereotypes of ignorant redneck racism. To be a non-academic member of the working class was to shut up or to “get with it” by “going to college.” To acknowledge oneself as a working class academic was unthinkable until recently, a situation that took a high toll on many such teachers. Even now, the phrase “working class academic” registers as an oxymoron to most ears, as the chief allure of “college” to first generation students remains the promise of liberation from the working class.

17Many of Hamburger’s contemporaries in prose, leftists exploring this shift in more acutely social or socialist terms, went out of print in the 70s and 80s. In poetry, especially as it attached to Latin American political struggle, in social psychology, and other disciplines, this extinction paved the way to today’s high-handed dismissal of Marx as long out of date and unusable, though the philosophical interface between Marx and Freud has remained a steady point of inquiry for intellectuals at least since early in the 20th Century, when Valentin Voloshinov published Freudianism: a Marxist Critique. This Stalin-era analysis has about it now the air of Samizdat Nouveau, dredged from the intellectual cellars of supposedly apolitical semiotics, especially when one considers the possibility that it might have been authored by Bakhtin. In the US, the long-running controversy over authorship of this and two other texts rested in large part on a post Cold War naturalized bias against Marxism as reductionist.

18One of these writers whose major work fell out of print at the time was Richard Lichtman, scholar of Brechtian aesthetics and social psychologist whose Production of Desire updates the bruising, irresolvable class conflicts between Freud’s philosophy and Marx’s. The cornerstones of “bourgeois, patriarchal Freudianism” have remained remarkably well-anchored, however, and its texts in print, continuing to shape popular as well as academic thought. Far from viewing “social justice” as an obligation that grows from our very nature, Americans reframe the idea into “kindness” and “compassion.” Our “million points of light” and our “church-based charities” are for most Americans today’s locales for what is left of the social contract. Yet the revolutionary conflict of these two paradigms—justice as “spiritual” and optional largesse vs justice as organic and obligatory—persists, with the dialectic reasserting itself again and again, even in the United States, after it seems to have been utterly subsumed by the monologue. Always it is new, painfully complex in its simplicity, all but unutterable. I-it; I-Thou: from countless sources of urgent thought it resurges.

19Though as primary sources, Marx and Freud have undergone so many genetic transfers and exchanges over the last thirty years in the academy that their imprint on received ideas is faint. We have here, in the Vatican of Capitalism, adapted seamlessly to the bourgeois ethos of atomized radical individualism. To most, competition in “upward mobility” is an acceptable description of the human condition. It is all but impossible to track back beyond this trickle-down idea of human nature to its essential, collective, alternative—the dropping of the other shoe. McGrath’s socialism presents us with a rare American instance of the other paradigm, the lateral, dialectical one, which he calls “the generous idea.”

20It is this social wholism—this systole/diastole—that radical feminism attempted to restore. As Adrienne Rich observes, however, in “Credo of a Passionate Skeptic,” feminism, and identity politics in general, have failed to make radical social change. Without Marx, she has come to believe, that transformation cannot adequately be conceptualized. Simply admitting a wider range of contenders into the same old structural arena has not changed that arena, its monologic processes. Thinkers such as Rich and Raya Dunayevskaya agree that, without feminism, socialism must fail, and without socialism, feminism must. In this regard, McGrath’s politics disappoint. Compared inevitably and effectively with Whitman’s, McGrath’s work does not reflect an embrace of the intellectual and political resource that second wave feminism presented him. Whitman, on the other hand, who referred to his Leaves of Grass as a woman’s book, “the cry of the right and the wrong of the woman sex,” was profoundly and integrally shaped by first wave feminism, especially by Scots feminist, abolitionist, and freethinker Fanny Wright.

21Adrienne Rich’s only-late career reconsideration of the socialist/feminist relation, and McGrath’s failure to fuel his own radicalism with what Beauvoir called “the philosophy of the other,” point to the ruptures and displacements in the left during McGrath’s career, as does his embrace of Native American, rather than feminist, “knowledge sets” in Letter to an Imaginary Friend.

22For me, this is the source of the most disturbing lapse of potential in his work, for perhaps the most interesting shorthand for notating socialism’s intersection with “capitalist thought” lies at the root of radical feminism: the Mother has not been usurped by “Patriarchy.” The Couple has been usurped.

23This deep, far-reaching and indelible historical metaphor for the struggle between paradigms employs gender to deconstruct class. And when James Scully, another long-time out-of-print US socialist poet and thinker, deconstructs Auden’s famous remark that “poetry makes nothing happen,” we are riveted to hear those easy words unmasked as injunction and apologetics. All syntax, Scully is all concept, and McGrath’s poetry is dangerous in the same way. Sustaining the life of the one idea that is indigestible to US capitalism and its global venture, class, it applies conceptual analysis to everything his eye and voice touch:

. . .
Yes, lovely twilight up there: the ladies, in electronic nightgowns
Watch while a stone cutter, snatched by night from below,
Is chiselling in granite, over the graveyard entrance:
NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS
And right behind him, another,
(Free-lance) AND NO THINGS WITHOUT SOME GODDAMN KIND
OF IDEA ABOUT THEM!” . . .1

24So McGrath retorts to the great American icon of the (static) image in “The Underground,” demanding syntax, relation, responsibility in composing utterance. “No ideas but in things” is so naturalized now in poetry that the noun, the image, in provocative undemanding arrangement, constitutes poetry. “Flint and Steel” conveys a small fractal of his overall obsession with how language in general, and poetry in particular, means or does not mean2:

25McGrath’s tenacious refusal to accept the gradual erosion of American poetry’s ability to contain the critique proposed by “the generous idea,” rests on the igneous intelligence that forged, throughout a lifetime of variations, the metaphor of resistance that reconstitutes the world: McGrath rendered the physical world as a syntax.

Imagine or remember how the road at last led us
Over bridges like prepositions, linking a drawl of islands.
The coast curved away like a question mark, listening slyly. . .
“Nocturne Militaire (Miami Beach: Wartime)”3

26From early to late, these architectural metaphors of natural and political history reconstruct what has been broken from story into estrangement. Here are a few, though you, too, may find this cognitive engine is at work on almost any of his pages:

Columbus, wearing a night- gown made from a treasure map,
Is sleepwalking on the giant avenues of an invisible sea.
He dreams he had discovered the Isthmus of Compound Interest
In his constant pursuit of the droppings of the One Historical Zero.
Tears fall through the meridians of his hands.
He is sad. His sadness makes the winds blow,
Filling his sails with the algebra of abstract labor.
Birds faint at his passing and the fish turn to stone.
He is looking for god that breathes and has dark skin
And can be renamed Slave. The birds revive, screaming.
In the dungeons of the King the dark zero grows wounds and weapons.
At sea the waves trudge off in search of a new continent.
from “Columbus”4

27And

In the blue hour
When the houses fall asleep in their shadows. . .
. . . as the darkness distributes crime
Unequally in the streets of the rich and the poor
Something human is elected out of the light. . .
In the blue hour.
And the lucky dead on all the roads that led from home to here!
from “The Citizen Dreaming”5
The end of the world: it was given to me to see it.
Came in the black dark, a bulge in the starless sky,
A trembling in the heart of the night, a twitching in the webby flesh of the earth
And out of the bowels of the street one beastly, ungovernable cry. . . .
from “The End of the World”6

28We don’t in these poems experience simply simultaneously the history and politics, urban and rural landscape, geologic and astronomic spheres, work and love, outrage and laughter that are his poems; we experience these dynamically, dimensionally, holographically. His cities are mountains are cellars are streets are soviets are oceans are family. Place becomes time, a radical view of history as the imminent moment for revolution, Walter Benjamin’s NOW. Cities filled with lives sail across history as a place, into a future which could be, at any moment.

29The power of his voice resides in McGrath’s intellectual and ethical instinct to subordinate the static to the dynamic, the pictorial and two dimensional to the analytical and syntactical. Pinsky writes of the challenges faced by the discursive poet in less urgent—because politically unburdened—terms in The Situation of Poetry. McGrath’s passion for meaning—for assembling the world over and over, from all quarters and all eras, by means of a syntax at once linguistic and material—is the earmark of his genius. Trounced today as “rhetorical,” such poetry as this is capable of deconstructing the capitalist mirage, its true (pre-critical cooptation) lyric power and bardic consciousness each a running scaffolding for the other, organic, inseparable.

30Who Good Will Hunting became at the far end of his journey down the Mass Pike in his birthday-present beater from Cambridge is—for a viewer such as I—Thomas McGrath, perhaps: an autodidact, a townie artist and intellectual, as artists and intellectuals often used to be, and in such instances as Russell Banks, still are. He would choose to remain a voice from the street, terrifying to the gownies, not to seek his forum alone or in the company of a chosen few from the balcony above. I don’t want to rise above my class, famous American socialist Eugene Debs said, I want to rise with it.

31The profound sense-making of McGrath’s mind restores the syntax of the obvious, and implicitly, illuminates the cost of the loss of that syntax: a world of two dimensional “things” careening around into one another like bumper cars, a world, today, in which writing students will be hard pressed to take an articulate stand as to why “Abel slew Cain” is not as wholly justified a statement as “Cain slew Abel.” His poetry must be read and taught, therefore, as antidote to the monologizing of sensibility, values, even language that poetry programs, even as they encourage costume identity, demand. The yearly loss of species of American English can be measured against McGrath’s work. Tact, propriety, kind-spiritedness, and community are the domesticated, gownie measures of success in the aesthetics of comportment that frequently govern MFA workshops around the country. The irrelevance, or at least absolute disputability of the need or possibility for truth of fact in nonfiction assertions of fact dissolve before McGrath’s work.

32Yes, McGrath is a thrilling, brilliant poet whose lyricism can neither be denied nor reduced to the posture (s) that have come to define it; his meditations command wider worlds richer in history and substance than most other writers aspire to. The flying tiger of his intellect remains always in the service of the poem, and the poem always in service of the world. What matters most today though—I think he would say—is this one forbidden consciousness, enacted as a syntax that reconstitutes the idea that holds for us as poets and readers the international vision that is antidote to the loneliness of the would-be-great ones.