| In a world of shifting borders and the increased mobility of people and resources around the globe, what does it mean to stay in one place and write a poem? In Enduring Modernism, I investigate the stakes of remaining local in the emergent world-system of the mid-20th century, paying close attention to long poems that coalesced over a period of decades, each assembled around a singular, disparate location: William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger, John Montague's The Rough Field, and long sequences by Thomas Kinsella and Leopold Senghor. While poetry scholars insistently claim the long poem as an American genre rooted in the democratic breadth of Whitman, my project is the first to assemble a world survey of the form, revealing it to be fundamentally transnational in its origins, techniques, and midcentury trajectories, even (or especially) when the poet chooses to stay home.;In addition to restoring poetry in general to a central place in studies of postimperialism, post-colonialism, and globalization, where it has remained marginalized beside favored allegories of nation and narration, I argue for the long poem in particular as a signal genre for indexing shifts in geo-political scale. The poets I study prolong their engagements with place through a form intrinsically geared to questions of scale, duration and containment, vulnerable to the mid-century history of modernization and thus all the more ready to redirect its flow. Scholars of world literature tend to privilege the local as much for its embodied authenticity and ethno-cultural texture as for its tragic vulnerability in the face of late capital's steamrolling reach; by contrast, I claim the local as a more resilient and ironically more portable way of apprehending the world by arguing that these poets saw their regional places not as the direct opposite of internationalism but as a twinned mode of international perception, a critical counterpoint to cosmopolitanism. If the cosmopolitan embodies the transnational by being at home in the world, the localist references transnational pressures by being world-weary at home, writing out of the uneasy tethers of affiliation in order to express how global influence strains and re-shapes a single, intimately known territory.;Composing an institutional history of transnational poetry between the 1930s and the 1970s, I encounter the local at a point when regional concerns were broadcast as never before. Recovering neglected archives of cross-cultural literary trade, I pursue the agencies and organizations that amplified these poets' steadfast modernist locations in a variety of international forums after WWII and across the Cold War, including the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright programs, regional heritage and tourism bureaus, and James Laughlin's Intercultural Publications. By turning to this previously unwritten history of diplomatic modernism, I map "world texts" in a period that witnessed what Paul Blackburn described in 1962 as "the sack of world literature by the American publishing industry," and encounter the local site in the age of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. |
