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theses

ETD doctoral

From the formalization of Cold War civil defense to the rise of homeland security, emergency management in the United States has always been structured by power and privilege. “Emergency Poetics and the Shape of Public Crisis” tracks how postwar poets have responded to this trajectory by illuminating crisis conditions at the margins of state-sponsored emergency powers. Historically, the project follows the legacy of civil defense, a Cold War security paradigm that prioritized domestic comfort and security in the face of geopolitical threats. This insular paradigm later served as the basis for handling natural disasters, public health crises, and terrorism—all forms of public emergencies, declared or otherwise, that have magnified social and cultural exclusions in the name of national security. While recent studies of poetry have focused on discrete crisis genres such as terror, climate change, or financial collapse, this study reveals how multiple crisis genres are normalized and obscured, thus giving form to the lives and histories that have been rendered disposable along the way. I turn to a variety of poetic forms, from the shorter, witness-based poems of Denise Levertov and Essex Hemphill, to the longform multimodal experiments of Claudia Rankine and Cheena Marie Lo, to examine the way their experiments with address, temporality, citation, and constraint bring into view more historically attentive poetic modes of public care. By elevating forgotten bodies, affects, and temporalities outside the narrow frames of state-sponsored emergencies, these poets probe the limits of poetry’s powers to imagine how crises are rendered socially, politically, and culturally legible. Individual chapters focus on Denise Levertov’s “empathic projection” of wartime experience, from the homefront to the distant violence waged in Vietnam, Essex Hemphill’s elevation of the sensualized black gay body in protest of the federal government’s burying of the AIDS epidemic, Claudia Rankine’s catalogue of “lonely” subjects who are silenced by the racialized noise of the national security state, and Cheena Marie Lo’s attention to the many forms of institutional and cultural neglect that magnify the devastation of “natural” disasters. These poets have a shared investment in extending the way poetic subjects are made imaginatively available as witnesses to disaster, members of communities, citizens of a nation, and imaginers of a world that endures beyond them. This is perhaps the most important outcome of an emergency poetics: to be more alert to possibilities for non-hierarchical survival, hope, solidarity, and exchange even when they may not be available in the politics of the present. In this way, emergency poetics make the most dangerous contours of normalized violence visible in order to remake the terms of their exclusions—and, in turn, to remake the way we think about our capacity to care for others.  

ETD_11177

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-pbpw-x496

The author owns the copyright to this work.