So a Poet Walks Into a Bar: The Poetry Reading as Rhetorical Situation

Here’s the full text of  “So a Poet Walks into a Bar: The Poetry Reading as Rhetorical Situation,” my contribution to this year’s ALSCW conference.  If you want to cite it, the format would be:

Archambeau, Robert.  "So a Poet Walks into a Bar: The Poetry Reading as Rhetorical Situation."  Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers Conference.  Boston University, Boston MA.  16 October 2011.  Conference Presentation.

So a Poet Walks into a Bar: The Poetry Reading as Rhetorical Situation

So a poet walks into a bar to read his work to an audience.  But what if it isn't a bar?  What if it's a university auditorium, or a bookshop specializing in, say, works by women writers?  What if it's a conference room at the A.W.P. Convention, where the creative writing professors slap one another on the back and try to 'place' grad students and manuscripts with English departments and their journals?  What if it's the 92nd Street Y, or a presidential inauguration, or a funeral?  What if it's not a bar the poet walks into, but a recording studio, where he'll make a podcast or mp3 for an audience he's unlikely to meet?  What if it isn't a poet who walks into a bar to read poetry to an audience, but a reader who walks into her study to read aloud to herself from a favorite poet's work? 

            Venue matters, when poetry is read aloud: indeed, in few situations does Walter J. Ong's assertion that “a writer's audience is always a fiction,” seem less convincing than in a poetry reading, where the poets stand in the presence of the bodies of their listeners (9).  Who speaks, where, to whom, and to what end? — answering these questions can tell us a great deal about the nature and meaning of performed poetry.  One way to explore these questions is to adapt rhetorical theory—which has long been concerned with the specific relations of speaker, venue, and audience—to the study of poetry readings.  There are obvious limits to such an approach.  For example, it can tell us little of interest, perhaps nothing at all, about reading poetry aloud when one is alone, which may well be the most common form of spoken poetry.  What is more, there are those who would argue that whatever situation a poetry reading creates, it is not in any meaningful sense a rhetorical situation.  I'd disagree with this last criticism, but only because I'm willing to define what counts as a rhetorical situation marginally more broadly than does that most expansive of rhetorical theorists, Lloyd Bitzer.

            Bitzer, an emeritus professor of the University of Wisconsin, is generally regarded as one of the most respected rhetorical theorists of his generation, and is best known for introducing the notion of the "rhetorical situation" in an essay of that name in the inaugural issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric.  For Bitzer, there are several components to a rhetorical situation.  Firstly, and most importantly, there must be “an exigence” — a problem to be solved— “which strongly invites utterance” (5).  Situations are rhetorical when the exigence, or problem calling out to be addressed, can be altered by the “bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change” (4). The exigence, which may or may not be consciously perceived by the speaker and the audience, is “an imperfection marked by urgency” (6); while an audience, to truly be a rhetorical audience, must consist “of those persons who are capable of being influenced by the discourse” (8): the obdurate and the obtuse alike may be an audience, but stuck in their views, or incapable of growing through engaging with discourse, they aren’t an audience susceptible to change.  As Bitzer puts it, the situation is rhetorical if "an actual or potential exigence… can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence" (6).

            In addition, a rhetorical situation contains two types of constraints.  The first are those inherent in the pre-existing situation, such as the audience’s beliefs and attitudes, as well as pertinent pre-existing “documents, facts, traditions, images, interests” (8).  The second type of constraints originate with the speaker: personal character, established style, and the like.  (Those of you with a background in rhetoric will recognize these as Aristotle’s “inartistic proofs” and “artistic proofs”).  So when a speaker enters a rhetorical situation, he or she enters a situation where some kind of change is wanted, a change that can conceivably be affected by discourse.  The speaker faces people capable of being changed, if their beliefs and ideas, and the character and style of the speaker, come together in some perfect discursive storm.

            Of course rhetoric doesn’t take place under test-lab conditions of purity.  Some rhetorical situations are simple, others much more complicated, even muddy.  There may be multiple exigences in any situation, some incompatible, and an audience may consist of multiple constituencies, concerned with different exigences and with different constraints regarding the kind of discourse that will appeal to them.

            Bitzer allows fairly broad latitude when defining what sort of situations count as rhetorical.  While his examples include political debates and Socrates’ “Apology,” he also includes situations where the simple need for information is rhetorical, if the providing of that information will have an effect in the world: the need for reporters to give details about the assassination of President Kennedy in order to calm a panicked population, for example, counts as a rhetorical situation for Bitzer, one that he seems to have struck him quite powerfully.  The exigence, in this case, is a lack of information that could lead to panic; the audience is capable of receiving information and being calmed by it, if only because they are no longer bewildered.  The speaker, knowing that he faces a worried population, and capable of projecting a certain gravitas in reporting the facts, will be successful in solving the exigence.

            As broad as Bitzer's definition of a rhetorical situation is, it doesn't extend to poetry: in fact, he specifically excludes poetry from his scheme, apparently out of a belief that poetry (as Auden so famously put it) "makes nothing happen."  It's my contention that Bitzer is too modest about the scope of his own theory, and that poetry readings tend to have some sort of raison d'être, that they tend, in one way or another, to ameliorate some kind of situation.  In fact, one way to understand the significance of poetry readings is to look for what sort of exigence a reading seeks to address, what imperfection in the world they seek to remedy through addressing an open-minded audience.

            So a poet walks into a bar. Let's say it's the Green Mill in Chicago, where (according the PBS documentary The United States of Poetry), "a strand of new poetry began… in 1987 when Marc Smith found a home for the poetry slam."  For Smith, there was certainly an exigence behind the slams, with their Dionysian audience participation, ad hoc systems of judging poetic value, liberally-flowing booze, and general informality.  The exigence was the perceived dryness and audience-unfriendliness of more formal poetry readings, and a resulting alienation of poetry from potential enthusiasts.  As Smith put it, the slam was to be an "up yours" to poorly attended, more effete poetry readings.  Smith wanted to change the culture of poetry by holding these readings, "because no one was listening to the poets" (see Wiltz).  In the end, the exigence was the perceived removal of poetry from informal, non-academic contexts, and the resulting marginalization of poetry.  Poetry may or may not make "nothing happen," but the poetry slam certainly attempted to make something happen.  In addressing a perceived exigence, it created a rhetorical situation.  The audience-based constraints (resistance to the idea of spending an evening sitting quietly in an uncomfortable chair listening to someone read) are addressed by physical comfort, alcohol, and a whole series of methods (foot stomping, hissing, woofing, and finger snapping are all encouraged, and have specific meanings) by which the audience is invited to participate in the performances as they happen, and in judging them when they're done.  Certainly poets performing in these circumstances may face certain constraints of their own: in order to succeed they must not consider themselves or their work above spur-of-the-moment criticism, and they tend to need either a quick wit or the ability to emote convincingly in order to ameliorate the exigence.  Poetry slams, of course, have evolved and changed, and can address many different exigences—my point here is simply to assert, contra Bitzer, that the poetry reading can indeed present a rhetorical situation.

            The poetry readings associated with the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s present what may be the clearest case of the poetry reading as a rhetorical situation in modern American literary history. The defining characteristic of the Black Arts Movement was its African-American nationalism, which in the early years manifested as a form of separatism.  Such separatism was spurred on by events of 1965 on the national level—the assassination of Malcom X—as well as on the local level—the destruction of the relative racial harmony of the Lower East Side poetry scene of the sixties through racially-motivated violence at key reading venues (see Kane, 54-55).  Although the movement quickly became national, the founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School (BARTS) was of central importance, as was the move to Harlem by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka).  Poetry in the Black Arts Movement was linked with, even subordinated to, the large exigence of creating a radical culture for African-Americans outside the institutions and norms of the nation at large.  As Kaluma ya Salaam has argued, the Black Arts Movement is "the only American literary movement to advance social engagement as a sine qua non of its aesthetic…. The two hallmarks of Black Arts activity were the development of Black theater groups and Black poetry performances… and both had close ties to community organizations and issues" (Salaam).  Community formation was a central goal of the movement—its primary exigence—and ideas of individualist art or art for it's own sake were anathema.  "Black art," wrote Ron Karenga in his manifesto "On Black Art," "must be for the people, by the people and from the people. That is to say, it must be functional, collective
 and committing." "All art is collective," he continued, "there is no such thing as art for art's sake" (Karenga).  Larry Neal, another founder of the Black Arts Movement, echoed these sentiments when he proclaimed, in 1968, "the Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept" (28).

            So the exigence of Black Arts poetry readings was radical consciousness-raising and separatist community-creation.  Audiences were potentially resistant for a number of reasons, not the least being that many in the potential audience were white liberals, and others were African-Americans committed to social and cultural integration, like the writer Ishmael Reed, who was never permitted to be a member of the movement for this reason.  One controversial technique to render the crowd a "rhetorical audience" was simply to forbid white people from attending the readings. As the critic Daphne S. Reed points out,

…this very policy was endorsed by both the original Harlem venture and a number of other black arts theatres established later in several major cities. The rationale was that the presence of whites would be potentially inhibitive… and in any case whites should not be permitted to occupy seats needed for black people for whom the performance was intended and, allegedly, exclusively relevant. (54)

Beyond such extreme (and short-lived) measures, other steps were taken to overcome audience resistance in pursuit of ameliorating the exigence. These included bringing the readings to places where the communities gathered, as well as adopting a mode of address that evoked the most respected institution of African-American life.  Lorenzo Thomas describes both in a passage from his essay "Neon Griot":

With self-appointed missionary fervor, Black Arts poets extended the venues for their performances beyond storefront theaters to neighborhood community centers, church basements, taverns, and to the streets.  Not surprisingly, the dominant mode of poetry that proved effective in such settings drew upon the rhetorical conventions of the black church, which is the matrix of African-American culture. (312)

The church-based conventions, which work with what Thomas calls "…the speaking voice that trespasses into song; and an antiphonal interaction with the congregation" (314) invoked cultural authority and stressed the link between performer and audience.  So important did the specifics of the speaking voice of the Black Arts poet become that at least two poets of the movement, Sonia Sanchez and Johari Amini, came to see the written text of the poem as a performance score, akin to sheet music, with the printed poem indicating exactly how the poet wanted it to be read (see Kane, 85).

            Nowhere do we see the exigence of separatist community-creation more clearly than in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's short poem "S.O.S."  Here, in a poem clearly written for oral delivery to a racially specific audience, we begin with a strong sense of the phatic function of language, with the poet seeking, apparently desperately, to connect to his community:

Calling black people


Calling all black people, man woman child


Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in


Black People, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling


You, calling all black people


The voice is like that of a lost radio operator seeking to connect to home base.  But the radio-operator's voice changes, in the final lines, to something else: rather than a voice in the wilderness, trying to find contact, we suddenly get something like a host's voice, or a carnival barker's, welcoming people into whatever desirable location he inhabits:

Calling all black people, come in, black people, come


on in.

From "come in" to "come on in" is a big step: the outsider becomes the insider, and the audience, at first sought desperately, is now welcomed warmly.  It is a rhetorical performance of the creation of a specifically African-American community, and when Jones/Baraka read it, he showed that the poetry reading could indeed be a rhetorical situation.

            As Bitzer pointed out, rhetorical situations can be complex things, and may involve multiple exigences, and multiple audiences, in a single occasion.  I'd like to end by gesturing toward one such complex rhetorical situation: the situation of the contemporary African-American poet in the most prominent form of contemporary poetry reading: the academically-sponsored poetry event.

            The exigences of university poetry readings vary considerably, of course; and I've been privy to more than one conversation in which it became clear that the sponsoring poet-academic and the visiting poet saw the main rationale for the reading in terms of personal career logrolling, a matter of "I'll help you put an item on your vita by hosting your reading if you help me in much the same way."  But the more legitimate exigence of the university poetry reading, the reason generally given to the deans and chairs who hold the purse-strings, tends to be pedagogical.  That is, the imperfection the reading seeks to ameliorate is some combination of a lack of student knowledge about poetry, and a lack of student sympathy for poetry, which the presence of a (charismatic, one hopes) poet will change. 

            When an African-American poet walks into a university reading situation, though, we tend to enter one of Bitzer's complex rhetorical situations, with multiple exigences and multiple audiences.  To some degree, the exigence is the same as in most university poetry readings: there's a need for the audience to learn about poetry-as-poetry.  But the complex web of American social history, including one of the main legacies of the Black Arts movement — identity politics — means that there's another exigence, having to do with the politics of representation.  As anyone who has ever tapped an academic cultural diversity fund as a means of bringing an African-American poet to a campus knows, universities tend to recognize two real or perceived exigences related to cultural diversity: the need to show African-American students that their community is represented in university cultural programming, and the need to expose non-African-American students to African-American culture, as part of the mission of spreading appreciation for cultural diversity.  So an African-American poet walks into a university auditorium.  He or she is there for a multiple exigence: to increase knowledge of, and sympathy for, poetry, and to represent African-American culture for African-American students, and to non-African American students.  It's a kind of palimpsest, with a more moderate, pluralist version of the Black Arts exigence of cultural representation overlaid with the discipline-specific logic of the modern university, in which poetry readings are held for the advancement of knowledge of poetry.

            As we've seen with slam poetry and Black Arts poetry, the rhetorical situation of the poetry reading matters for how poetry is performed.  Consider Harryette Mullen, whose success in both academic and identity politics-centered poetic contexts is rarely paralleled (she has won an award from the Black Arts Academy and taught in an ivy league university).  Her work sends out signals to a number of communities, referencing the classical canon, the modernist and avant-garde forebears of contemporary experimental work, and iconic elements of African-American culture: Mullen has described her work as a textual confluence of Gertrude Stein, Sappho, and the blues, in which "Sappho meets the blues at the crossroads" (see Bedient 654).  The work combines these influences in such a way that allows her, in performance, to emphasize any one of these elements in a single poem.  This is accomplished largely through the polyvalent nature of her language.

            The critic Kate Pearcy has described Mullen's poems as involving a great deal of "homophonic punning and word play," and noted that "reading possibilities are therefore highly provisional" (2): one may perform the poems with varying degrees of ambiguity or clarity.  Here, for example, is the prose poem "Of a girl, in white," which I and others experienced, when we heard it performed, as a poem about eros and about word play—a poem, that is, in the traditions of Sappho and of Gertrude Stein:

Of a girl, in white, between the lines, in the spaces where nothing is written. Her starched petticoats, giving him the slip. Loose lips, a telltale spot, where she was kissed, and told. Who would believe her, lying still between the sheets. The pillow cases, the dirty laundry laundered. Pillow talk-show on a leather couch, slips in and out of dreams. Without permission, slips out the door. A name adores a Freudian slip.

Once, after I spoke on Mullen's work, the African-American poet Tyrone Williams approached me to say that he'd attended a reading by Mullen in which the African-American audience, coming with their own expectations and interpretive norms (with, to use Bitzer's terms, different external constraints than I and my group brought when we heard the poem) received the poem as primarily about racial 'passing.'  The fact that Mullen's work admits of such interpretations, and makes itself so readily available to different emphases in performance, gives an indication of one reason why Mullen's work has been so successful in the complex rhetorical situations where it is so often performed.

            We get a clear sense of the possibilities for different emphases in performance in Mullen's work from this stanza of an untitled poem in her 1995 collection Muse & Drudge:

you can sing their songs

with words your way

put it over to the people

know what you are doing

Is singing "their songs" with "words your way" a matter of the contemporary, postmodern poet appropriating tradition (of Stein riffing on Sappho)? Or is it a matter of the African-American poet appropriating white or Eurocentric traditions (the blues meeting Stein and Sappho at the crossroads)?  It's all in how the pronouns (which lack specific referents in the poem) are performed, how the poet chooses to perform them with the audience in the room.  Contrast these lines to Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka's "S.O.S.," and the importance of the rhetorical situation for the poetry and its performance becomes clear: Mullen, who habitually enters complex rhetorical situations with multiple audiences, is ambiguous and flexible, where Jones/Baraka, entering clearly defined rhetorical situations, is emphatic, community-oriented, and identity-group specific.

            I don't mean to suggest that I've done anything like perform a proper taxonomy of types of poetry readings here, nor do I want to claim I've covered all of the possibilities for slam poetry, Black Arts poetry, or the contemporary academic poetry reading (for poets African-American or otherwise).  Rather, I've hoped to indicate, in what can only be a preliminary manner, that we will enrich our interpretations of the performance of poetry by understanding the rhetorical situation of those readings, and that we have much to gain by bringing the tradition of rhetorical theory to bear on poetic performance.

Works Cited

Bedient, Calvin.  "The Solo Mysterioso Blues."  Callaloo 19.3 (Autumn 1996): 651-669.

Bitzer, Lloyd.  “The Rhetorical Situation.”  Philosophy and Rhetoric 1.1 (January 1968): 1-14.

Kane, Daniel.  All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s.  Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.

Karenga, Ron.  "On Black Art."  Modern American Poetry, the University of Illinois.  .

Neal, Larry.  "The Black Arts Movement."  The Drama Review.  12.4 (Summer 1968): 28-39).

Ong, Walter J.  “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.”  PMLA  1975 90:1 (1975): 9-21.

Pearcy, Kate.  "A Poetics of Opposition? Race and the Avant-Garde."  Paper read at the Conference on Contemporary Poetry: Poetry and the Public Sphere, Rutgers University: April 24-27, 1997.

Reed, Daphne S.  "LeRoi Jones: High Priest of the Black Arts Movement."  Educational Theater Journal.  22.1 (March 1970): 53-59.

Salaam, Kaluma ya.  "Historical Overview of the Black Arts Movement."  Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois.

Thomas, Lorenzo.  "Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the Black Arts Movement."  In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1998: 300-324.

The United States of Poetry.  Dir. Joshua Blum and Bob Holman.  Washington Square Films/PBS, 1995.

Wiltz, Teresa.  "Slam Dunked: Poets Duke it Out in Chicago."  The Washington Post (August 18, 1999): C1.

In Solitude, In Multitude: Crowds and Poetry

Near the beginning of his strange, brilliant book Crowds and Power, the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti claims that our most primal fear is the fear of being touched: the hand in the dark, something reaching out and grabbing hold of us. We only really lose this fear in crowds, says Canetti, since it is in crowds that we allow the boundaries of the self to melt away. We touch and are touched in the scrum and bustle of the crowd, but in the crowd we don’t feel touch as a violation. It doesn’t bother us, because we don’t think of the crowd as other than ourselves: an angry mob, a multitude gathered in protest, a pack of like-minded sports fanatics surging back and forth and chanting in unison: when we’re part of such groups,  we don’t experience the crowd as separate from ourselves: we’re part of an us, and the only threat is from whomever we’ve collectively designated as them. From this Canetti builds a fascinating, and at times terrifying, theory of the crowd.


Poets, of course, have also expressed revulsion from the crowd, but also the seductive bliss of immersion in the collective. Indeed, the two oldest and most revered modes of poetry — the lyric and the epic — respectively express the individualistic ethos of private emotion, and the collective ideals and aspirations of the group. But unless I miss my guess, it’s really at the beginning of the nineteenth century that we see an uptick in the frequency with which poets consciously meditate on the meaning of the multitude. And this poetic examination of the relation of the individual to the crowd has continued up to the present.


Monstrous Ant-Hills: The Crowd in Romanticism


Romanticism is a large and various literary movement, and it certainly has its moments of collectivism, especially in the more peripheral nations of Europe, where nationalist sentiment, even to the point of atavism, was an important part of the reaction to Enlightenment universalism and the spread of standardized, deracinated laws and customs under the banners of Napoleon’s conquering armies. But the dominant relation to the crowd in English Romanticism is certainly revulsion. Here’s Wordsworth describing London in book seven of The Prelude:

Rise up, thou monstrous ant-hill on the plain;

Of a too busy world! Before me flow,

Thou endless stream of men and moving things!

Thy every-day appearance, as it strikes--

With wonder heightened, or sublimed by awe--

On strangers, of all ages; the quick dance

Of colours, lights, and forms; the deafening din;

The comers and the goers face to face,

Face after face; the string of dazzling wares,

Shop after shop, with symbols, blazoned names,

And all the tradesman's honours overhead:

Here, fronts of houses, like a title-page,

With letters huge inscribed from top to toe…

What really strikes Wordsworth about the crowded streets of London is the signage. It’s hard for us to put ourselves in a state of mind where the presence of shop signs is a strange and alienating thing, but that’s were Wordsworth is coming from. For him, the need of shops to spell out in gigantic letters the nature of their services indicates how impersonal a place the crowded city had become. In small villages such as those Wordsworth knew in the Lake District, one knew the individuals with whom one bartered, but in the city every shop needs to shout out its identity to a rushing crowd, lest it remain anonymous. No one really knows where they are or who they’re with, not in the way the characters in, say, Wordsworth’s “Michael” know each other. In “Michael,” each little pile of stones has a story about the generations who lived around it, and all those stories are known to the locals. They know who they are and where they live in a way the inhabitants of the monstrous ant-hill cannot.


Wordsworth is also a bit put-off by the internationalized, multicultural space that London had already become. Here’s a small piece of a long passage on a marketplace:

...another street

Presents a company of dancing dogs,

Or dromedary, with an antic pair

Of monkeys on his back; a minstrel band

Of Savoyards; or, single and alone, 

An English ballad-singer

Camels, monkeys, and Italian musicians from Savoy: the poor ballad-singer, a representative of indigenous culture, hardly stands a chance, surrounded as he is by a noisy array of exotics, including:

…every character of form and face: 

The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south, 

The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote 

America, the Hunter-Indian; 

Moors,Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese, 

And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.

But what really throws Wordsworth off balance isn’t anything so banal as the presence of the culturally different. It’s a version of the anonymity and alienation that we saw earlier in the shop signs:

How oft, amid those overflowing streets, 

Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said 

Unto myself, "The face of every one 

That passes by me is a mystery!" 

Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed 

By thoughts of what and whither, when and how; 

Until the shapes before my eyes became 

A second-sight procession, such as glides 

Over still mountains, or appears in dreams; 

And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond 

The reach of common indication, lost 

Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten 

Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare) 

Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face, 

Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest 

Wearing a written paper, to explain 

His story, whence he came, and who he was. 

Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round 

As with the might of waters; and apt type 

This label seemed of the utmost we can know, 

Both of ourselves and of the universe; 

And, on the shape of that unmoving man, 

His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed, 

As if admonished from another world.

The old blind beggar has no relation to the people swarming around him. In a village he’d be known to everyone, and they to him, and if it were his home village, he’d be connected to the community by webs of family obligation. His story would be well-known, and he’d have a place. But here, in the crush of bodies pouring through the streets of London, he’s no one at all. His only claim to any connection to others is through advertising his own story, in letters much like those of the shop signs we saw before. He has to assert his humanity and individuality and particularity, and in the passing rush this assertion takes on both a pathos (he’s so small, he’s so vulnerable, he has so little claim on making us care) and a sublimity (he’s so small and vulnerable, yet he endures and is not destroyed, his small light held against the darkness). If you live in America, you’ve passed some homeless man, most likely a veteran in a wheelchair, and seen exactly this sort of life-story scrawled in marker on a piece of cardboard. I don’t know what the sight made you feel, but Wordsworth would see in it “the utmost we can know/Both of ourselves and of the universe” — an emblem of our condition as little orphaned individuals in the largeness of space and time.


Crowds like this are, for Wordsworth, threats: threats to the dignity and rootedness of the individual. And he’s not alone in his aversion to the crowd: Byron introduced us to Childe Harold (the Ziggy Stardust to Byron’s Bowie) by saying:

… soon he knew himself the most unfit
 

Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held 


Little in common; untaught to submit
 

His thoughts to others, though his soul was quelled,
 

In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompelled,
 

He would not yield dominion of his mind 

To spirits against whom his own rebelled;
 

Proud though in desolation; which could find
 

A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.

To be with others in a crowd is to “herd” — to be subhuman, animalistic, erased as an individual. What a psychologist now might describe as the imperfect socialization of a severe narcissist, Byron sees with pride. Harold was “untaught to submit his thoughts to others” — he retains his swaggering individualism and independence, which gives him an isolation that is both a curse (“desolation”) and a mark of specialness.


We find variations on the revulsion from crowds in all the major English Romantic poets, though in Coleridge it is tempered by a kind of nostalgia for a lost sense of community (the Ancient Mariner was only ever unselfconsciously part of a group before he killed the albatross, and at the end of the poem he preaches a gospel of community he cannot embody); and in Shelley it is combined with a yearning for a small community of the likeminded (as we see in “Epipsychidion” and the deeply under-rated “Alastor,” and in the pathos of “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”).


I imagine the exalting of the individual, and the praising of the small community against the crowd, has to do with both the large-scale social conditions of the time, and with the particular circumstances of poets in the Romantic era. The French Revolution and the incipient industrial economy had uprooted old social order. This both unleashed the power of the individual to find his or her own course through the world and bequeathed to those atomized individuals a host of anxieties about anonymity and dislocation. And poets, shut out of the old patronage networks and unaccommodated by the market, felt particularly out of place, alienated from (and therefore critical of) the dominant institutions of their age. They had their individual pride to fall back on, and dreams of happier days in closer communities.


The Poet as the Flâneur in the City


Of course not all poets felt alienated from the crowds of the growing cities of the nineteenth centuries. As the century wore on, cities increasingly became the natural habitat of poets. How did these figures relate to the crush of bodies around them? Baudelaire, in “Les Foules” (“Crowds”) admits to a taste for the multitude, but he begins by noting such a taste isn’t for everyone:

   It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.

What makes it possible for Baudelaire to appreciate crowds? It’s something having to do with imagination:

   Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.

   The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be both himself and someone else, as he wishes. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

   The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

   What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all it poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

For Baudelaire, the experience of the individual going out into the crowd is a matter of the individual more-or-less disappearing, becoming an egoless emptiness into which all passing things flow. It’s much like what Emerson was getting at when he wrote “I become a transparent eyeball—I am nothing; I see all the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me,” though Emerson was thinking about nature and wilderness, not the crush of humanity on the streets of Paris.


Baudelaire concludes by changing things up a bit. So far he’s been following a kind of via negativa, an erasure of self in order to take in and become at one with all he encounters. Here, in the final paragraph of his prose poem, he compares this experience to the experience of Moses-like figures who create a community around themselves:

   It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.

In the end, I suppose, there’s not much to choose between the two paths: whether one’s union with the crowd comes from self-erasure, or from the kind of assertive, paternal leadership of the “founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples,” it all ends in the same place: blissful, promiscuous union in the crowd. Here, I think, is what Elias Canetti was getting at when he said that the crowd was the key to losing the fear of being touched: there is only touch, and no self to be touched from the outside.


Walt Whitman, another urban poet, takes a similar approach in “There was a Child Went Forth.” The poem starts out with something like Baudelaire’s self-loss in the encounter with the objects around one:

There was a child went forth every day; 

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became; 

And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part ofthe day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.…. 

And the old drunkard staggering home from the out-house of the tavern, whence     he had lately risen, 

And the school-mistress that pass'd on her way to the school, 

And the friendly boys that pass'd--and the quarrelsome boys, 

And the tidy and fresh-cheek'd girls--and the barefoot negro boy and girl, 

And all the changes of city and country, wherever he went.

Soon, though, we see that Whitman isn’t giving us a self-erasure, but a kind of building up of the self: everything the child encounters enters into that child and “becomes part of him.” That is, the child takes in and comprehends the world, digests it, and makes it part of an enduring and expanding self. All the people the child encounters “became part of that child who went forth every day,” and if there’s an encounter with the eternal, it isn’t that the child enters a unity larger than himself. Rather, he gathers the passing faces of the crowd into himself, and it is there that they survive, as he “now goes, and will always go forth every day.” Talk about the egotistical sublime!


What's striking about both Baudelaire and Whitman is the way there's a kind of meeting of the individual and the absolute through the medium of the crowd: the crowd is the way the self opens up to a connection with something like the infinite.  It's a very abstract kind of community that's at stake here: not a matter of getting to know others as particular people, but of finding a mystical union between self and all.  It may be profound, but it's hardly sociable.  I doubt Wordsworth, who dreamed of communities where people knew one another's life-stories, would find it satisfactory.  But it is a way to live in a city and find something other than horror and revulsion at the sight of the multitude.


Modern Ambivalence


Something about twentieth century experience in America seems to have made many of our best poets ambivalent about crowds. My great touchstone for all this is William Carlos Williams’ “At the Ballgame,” which includes these lines:

So in detail they, the crowd, 

are beautiful

for this 

to be warned against 

saluted and defied—

It is alive, venomous 

it smiles grimly 

its words cut— 

The flashy female with her 

mother, gets it— 

The Jew gets it straight— it 

is deadly, terrifying— 

It is the Inquisition, the 

Revolution 

It is beauty itself 

that lives 

day by day in them 

idly— 

This is 

the power of their faces 

It is summer, it is the solstice 

the crowd is 

cheering, the crowd is laughing 

in detail 

permanently, seriously 

without thought

The crowd is beautiful, happy, deeply-rooted in the past of human experience (it’s important, I think, that “it is the solstice,” with all of the freight of pagan festivals that time of year carries). But then again, as Canetti knew, where there’s an exalting us, there’s also a threatened them. The flashy female is likely to find herself objectified — which is a form of not belonging, of being set apart. And the Jewish character has plenty of historical reason to distrust crowds as they thoughtlessly celebrate their oneness and togetherness.


George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous presents another ambivalent meditation on the relation of solitude and multidude. Images of shipwreck and an isolated Crusoe figure haunt the 39-section poem from which the book draws its name. But no matter how deep Oppen’s fears of isolation run, he remains committed to solidarity with others: “Obsessed, bewildered / By the shipwreck / Of the singular,” he writes, “We have chosen the meaning / Of being numerous.” Again, we see the desire to come together. But the urge for community is counterpoised to a skepticism about public platitudes: committed to concrete observation, Oppen cannot fathom those who, with such ease and abstraction, “talk/Distantly of ‘The People.’”


The series ends with a quotation of a piece of Walt Whitman’s prose, in which he looks on the capitol building rebuilt after the Civil War:

The capitol grows upon one in time, especially as they have got the great figure on top of it now, and you can see it very well. It is a great bronze figure, the Genius of Liberty I suppose. It looks wonderful toward sundown. I love to go and look at it. The sun when it is nearly down shines on the headpiece and it dazzle and glistens like a big star: it looks quite
curious...

The choice of Whitman, the great American Everyman, is significant: his presence signals an interest in a poetry of national community. But the break mid-sentence, together with the lineation, put a great deal of stress on that final word, “curious.” What is Oppen’s take on the idea of community? Is he skeptical? Intrigued? He certainly can’t bring himself to yawp with a full-throated Whitmanesque enthusiasm. The questions are left hanging there in front of us.


Crowds and Countercultures


The countercultural movements of the sixties and seventies put different spins on the theme of solitude and multitude. Gary Snyder, for example, clearly feels the pull of the crowd in one of his most famous poems, “I Went Into the Maverick Bar.” The poem begins like this:

I went into the Maverick Bar 

In Farmington, New Mexico. 

And drank double shots of bourbon 

backed with beer. 

My long hair was tucked up under a cap 

I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay 

by the pool tables, 

A waitress asked uswhere are you from? 

a country-and-western band began to play 

“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie” 

And with the next song, 

a couple began to dance. 

They held each other like in High School dances 

in the fifties; 

I recalled when I worked in the woods 

and the bars of Madras, Oregon. 

That short-haired joy and roughness—America—your stupidity. 

I could almost love you again.

Certainly Snyder’s speaker (let’s call him “Snyder,” since he pretty much is Gary Snyder) feels alienated. He is, after all, disguised in the enemy camp: long hair tucked away, earring hidden, while the anthem of the hippie-bashing multitudes plays. But he feels the allure of the warm embrace: dances, horseplay, all that unselfconscious human community. I love the ambivalence at the end of the third stanza. In fact, I’ve always thought the poem would be better if it ended there. But instead we have another stanza, one truer, perhaps, to what Snyder really felt. Or perhaps only truer to what he thought he ought to feel:

We left—onto the freeway shoulders— 

under the tough old stars— 

In the shadow of bluffsI came back to myself, 

To the real work, to 

“What is to be done.”

“What is to be done,” of course, is the title of a famous revolutionary tract by Lenin. If there’s solidarity in this last stanza, it’s not to any actually experienced crowd, like the one in the Maverick bar. Rather, it’s to an abstract idea of a class-based community. Maybe it’s this shift from the warmth of a real crowd to the coldness of allegiance to an abstract multitude that irks me. And believe me, I want to be on Snyder’s side.


If the culture/counterculture animosity could vex Snyder’s relation to crowds, it caused another kind of poet to seek to draw a crowd together. Consider the Black Nationalist aesthetic of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s poem “S.O.S.”:


Here, in a poem clearly written for oral delivery to a racially specific audience, we begin with a strong sense of the phatic function of language, with the poet seeking, apparently desperately, to connect to his community:

Calling black people
 

Calling all black people, man woman child
 

Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in
 

Black People, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling
 

You, calling all black people


The voice is like that of a lost radio operator seeking to connect to home base. But the radio-operator's voice changes, in the final lines, to something else: rather than a voice in the wilderness, trying to find contact, we suddenly get something like a host's voice, or a carnival barker's, welcoming people into whatever desirable location he inhabits:

Calling all black people, come in, black people, come
 

on in.

From "come in" to "come on in" is a big step: the outsider becomes the insider, and the audience, at first sought desperately, is now welcomed warmly. The move is from solitude to the hope of multitude. One senses that Jones/Baraka wants to become one of Baudelaire’s “founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples,” gathering “a vast family created by their genius.”


Otherhood, Understood


One of my favorite contemporary poems to take up the theme of multitude and solitude in Atsuro Riley’s poem “Diorama.” Riley, a half-Japanese southerner, gives us a powerful, non-judgmental sense of a community gathering as a crowd at a small town summer fair. I was fortunate enough to hear Riley read the poem earlier this year, and the man who’d introduced Riley, himself a southerner from Memphis, couldn’t contain himself after the reading, and burst out saying “when I heard your poem, all I could think was those are the sounds, those are the words, I grew up with!” I get it. Riley does a great job of giving what I suppose we could call the audio landscape of a southern crowd of his youth. But then, right there in the middle of the poem, we get a moment where Riley’s main character, a half-Japanese boy, overhears a conversation in which he’s being talked about as an exotic alien:

The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped (and fenced) and sized.
This side holds the waffled-tin (and oven-hot) huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock, the streamer-hung display-stages where girl-beauties twirl and try for queen. There's rosette-luster (and -lusting), and the marching band wearing a hole in Sousa. And (pursed) gaggles and clutches of feather-white neighbor-women, eyeballing us like we're pig's feet in a jar. 

I wonder does her boy talk Chinese? 

     You ever seen that kind of black-headed? 

          Blue shine all in it like a crow. 

This other wing (the one I'm back-sneaking, side-slipping, turnstiling into) dips and slopes down to low-lying marsh-mire: whiffs of pluff-mud stink and live gnat-pack poison, carnie-cots and -trailers camped on ooze. They've got (rickety) rides, and tent-shows with stains, and rackety bare-bulbed stalls of Hoop-La Game (RING-A-COKE!) and Rebel Yell and Shoot the Gook Down. Stand here, on this smutch-spot: don't these mirrors show you strange?
Crowds are gathering. Yonder there and down, the yolk-glow of a tent is drawing men on (and in) the way a car-crash does, or a cockfight sure enough, or neon. The ticket-boy's getting mobbed at the fly of the door.No sign in sight, except for the X of the Dixie-flag ironed across his t-shirt.I am bone-broke but falling into line.The men upwind of me are leaking chaw-spit and pennies.That, plus the eye-hunger spreading like a rumor through the swarm.The rib-skinny doorkeeper's hollering: bet now, bout's bout startin!Over his shoulder, a ropy yellow light.Also: circles of white tobacco-smoke, and bleacher-rows of (cooncalling) men who know my daddy.—And there he is, up in front with some tall man, iron-arming two black-chested boys toward the ring.

The remarkable thing about Riley’s poem, for me, is the way the central moment in which we feel the main character’s otherness remains undramatic. I don’t mean to say that it lacks impact — it has plenty of that. What I mean is, it isn’t a dramatic climax, it doesn’t result in anything like the crowd turning on the part-Asian boy. It doesn’t lead to a direct confrontation. In fact, it’s the very ordinariness of it that makes it important: the people who ask “I wonder does her boy talk Chinese?” aren’t mean-spirited or malevolent. But nevertheless we feel the sting of their words. Like the Jewish character in William Carlos Williams’ “At the Ballgame,” we “get it straight” about what it means to be “other.” That Riley can approach this topic, one that clearly gives him much pain, with a kind of distanced, nuanced understanding is remarkable. It’s one of the things that places him among the best poets I know of working on the old theme of solitude and multitude.