Search Results

Chapter one takes up the paradigm of recycling in Walt Whitman’s first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855 and 1856). While scarcity of materials meant scavenging and reuse were common practices in the nineteenth century, organic material recycling first emerged as a scientific principle during the antebellum period. Whitman’s documented journalistic and poetic interest in “compost” has led scholars to elevate the once-overlooked Whitman into the ecopoetic pantheon. Chapter one challenges this increasingly standard reading by placing Whitman’s interest in compost and organic recycling alongside his even more famous poetic investment in an indiscriminate, “omnivorous” consumption. Compost emerges as the twin of appetite in Whitman’s poetic environment, which reveals how recycling authorizes consumption without limits and yields a fundamentally static, and therefore nonegalitarian and anti-ecological vision of community. The last part of the chapter explores resistance to this paradigm in the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a twentieth-century African American poet self-consciously rewriting Whitman’s vision of democratic and environmental community. Ultimately, chapter one suggests that while Clifton resists the dream of cyclical, effortless material recycling and consequence-free consumption, it is nineteenth-century Whitman’s fantasy of the earth endlessly recycling and renewing human waste that remains more characteristic of contemporary U.S. life.

Twenty-first-century poets use humor to examine and convey different kinds of knowledge—cultural, scientific, and emotional. Laughter in the work of poets like Raymond McDaniel, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, Albert Goldbarth, Kim Rosenfield, Jamaal May, Patricia Lockwood, and Lucille Clifton prompts us to examine competing epistemologies. These poets examine how we exchange the material of laughter, and expose the ways that affective responses can determine what we think we know. They show how laughter can re-shape our sense of canons and render unfamiliar material accessible, expanding our literary knowledge and the sympathetic capacities that knowledge carries with it. They demonstrate how laughter breaks down categories like “science” and “literature,” expanding the kinds of knowledge that we value as “fact.” At the same time, they warn that laughter’s power to heal trauma or mediate other minds is limited, and that we should not trust humorous insights too far.

The African American women discussed in this chapter use the Black Samson tradition to focus on the complex intersections of race and gender. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement, the major artistic and literary movements that helped shape African American culture throughout the twentieth century involved women who found something in Samson’s story that resonated with them deeply. One might think that the story of a hyper-masculine biblical hero would not provide much material for reflections upon the intersections of race and gender in America. Yet, from the playful audacity of Christina Moody’s claim that she could defeat Jack Johnson to the painful predictions from Gaza in Lucille Clifton’s poem dedicated to Ramona Africa, the twentieth century witnessed African American women claiming a place within the Black Samson tradition.