Who we are, who we aren't

Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics

by Michael Davidson

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 281 pages

Michael Davidson's new study impressively complicates the conventional narrative that literary historians have continued to use to define the literary writings of the postwar years. Especially when describing the role of poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, literary historians have traditionally seen the field as sharply divided between the apologists for the establishment and the renegades or mavericks--or the "cooked and the raw," as Robert Lowell defined them in an influential 1961 interview. Lowell drew on terms from Claude Levi-Strauss (from a book excerpt that had just been published in the Partisan Review) that carried within them a judgmental weight. Tribes that cooked the day's catch were more advanced than those that simply fell to devouring it. What was strikingly unfair about such a characterization, of course, was the notion that the renegades were in some way unsophisticated, as if they were driven to spontaneous objections because they didn't know any better. Correcting such a simplification has, in the decades following Lowell's pronouncement, been an important task for many. Impressive careers were developed by those who defended these postwar outsider poets, from Sherman Paul's innovative "journal-entry" type meditations from the 1970s, which addressed Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, David Antin, and others, to Marjorie Perloff's how-to-read models for linguistic experimentalists in Europe and America. Indeed, Davidson himself actively participated in that rehabilitation. His important first book of criticism, The San Francisco Renaissance (1989) remains a significant introduction to the alternate poetry of Black Mountain, of the beats, and of those who made a community for themselves in San Francisco in the 1950s.

Guys Like Us continues Davidson's examination of poets of the postwar years (here he defines the Cold War as extending from the close of World War II to the beginnings of detente in the 1980s), but he now views those poets within a framework that he has widely expanded. That Davidson makes considerable demands on the poets he studies is not surprising, given the ambitions in his own poetry. In work he started to publish in the 1980s--beginning with The Landing of Rochambeau (1985)--he joined with Michael Palmer and Ron Silliman, among others, to design a poetry that flourished as it investigated those places in which sharply different facets of cultural life overlapped. It follows, then, that he would hold poets to a high standard, conceiving of them as participating fully (if subtly, complexly, even secretively) in the shaping of postwar culture--or perhaps more accurately, in resisting the dominant culture's idea of how to shape the postwar years. Focusing in different chapters on the work of such poets as Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Amira Baraka, and Jack Spicer (with extended attention to individual works by Kenneth Rexroth, Edward Field, John Wieners, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others)--and emphasizing the pioneer work these writers accomplished in the decades just after World War II--Davidson consistently challenges poems by placing them within larger contexts, even viewing them alongside popular films or prose potboilers. He involves Orson Welles's Lady from Shanghai (1947) with Rexroth's Love Poems of Marichiko, or he evokes Michael Curtiz's treatment of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce (1945) as a prelude to discussing Bishop and Plath.

Crucial to so bold a project is Davidson's ability to discern a Cold War cultural imaginary both vast enough to encompass diverse materials and precise enough to generate meaningful interpretations. "Agency panic" (the phrase is credited to Timothy Melley in his Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America [2000]) fuses fears of insecurity at the global and local level and assumes that a "fatal feminization" threatens agency that is presumed to be "the domain of strong masculine figures" (8). For Davidson, "citing masculinity" is virtually inevitable during these decades in which a masculine norm always looms as a "solution" to signs of conflict or threats of disorder. Quick to identify variations on this masculine norm, Davidson sometimes recalls the many texts by poets (and others) in which that norm is addressed only to be reconstituted idiosyncratically by writers who dally disrespectfully in their work, demonstrating the ingenuity of survivalist tactics. At other times, Davidson foregrounds texts that actively dispute that masculinist norm, developing outright alternatives that stand apart as extravagant and compelling. At still other times, he locates texts that surround and harass that norm, raising questions that puncture its pretensions or undermine its framework, revealing it as neither inevitable nor natural. Davidson is quick to show that these poems are not simply devoted to analyzing or exposing cultural problems or social issues but participate in a kind of playful engagement that leads to a sharply mocking, fiercely skeptical probing that provides either moments that are satisfactory in themselves or that open onto a bracingly clear overview that stands as alternative critique. Within this wide (but always tightly focused) perspective, Davidson moves freely and usefully among various feminist theoreticians including Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam as well as drawing upon queer theory and a range of socially active cultural historians.