"Beyond my outrage or my admiration": postnational critique in Robert Pinsky's An Explanation of America.(Essays)(Critical essay)

Robert Pinsky has devoted his career to promoting the idea of poetry as a social presence. His writings concern themselves with the place of poetry in American life. They include not only poetry volumes--Sadness and Happiness (1975), An Explanation of America (1979), History of My Heart (1984), The Want Bone (1990), The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems (1996), Jersey Rain (2000), and Gulf Music (2007)--but also works of literary and cultural criticism, The Situation of Poetry (1977), Poetry and the World (1988), and Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002). Pinsky is an untiring popularizer of poetry in the United States-indeed, something like a "cultural pundit" (Maxwell 2004, 307). He has served three terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States, appeared regularly as "America's Wordsmith" on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and co-directed the multimedia Favorite Poem Project, a large-scale portrait of today's American poetry readership; three anthologies of verse appeared in conjunction with the project, Americans' Favorite Poems (1999), Poems to Read (2002), and An Invitation to Poetry (2004). (1) As the public face of American poetry, Pinsky has accumulated enough prestige to receive invitations to the White House from Bill Clinton (which he accepted) and Laura Bush (which he declined). (2) In his efforts to legitimize poetry's role in the United States, he has fashioned himself as a citizen poet speaking directly to his fellow Americans, even as "America" goes through profound transformations.

Considering Pinsky's steadfast interest in the idea of U.S. national and cultural heritage, as well as his central position in today's American poetry scene, it seems counterintuitive to discuss his work as an example of postnational critique. The term usually refers to the study of rhetorical forms and social identities that emerge from the breakdown of the nation-state in the aftermath of globalization. The postnational view challenges the notion of a unified (in this instance American) national identity; the prefix post indicates skepticism about "nation" as a valid category of social relation and greater interest paid to economic, linguistic, religious, as well as gender-, ethnoracial, and sexuality-based models of community. In the area of literary studies, postnational critique takes the form of wide-ranging examinations of the concept of "American literature" not as an isolated, self-contained phenomenon that functions as an extension of the United States' national borders but as a product of interplay between local and global discourses. As scholars keep rethinking U.S. literature through the postnational lens--or through related transnational, cosmopolitan or environmental lenses--they especially focus on the study of discursive frictions, ruptures, and slippages embedded in literary texts that exist in problematic relationships to their national framework. John Carlos Rowe, for example, calls for an advancement of methodologies based on "the terms of intracultural and intercultural affiliation by means of which we can transcend successfully the monolingual and monocultural myth of 'America' that is both a political and intellectual anachronism" (2002, 4). Paul Giles looks at the critical process of "virtualization" of America in transatlantic narratives of dislocation and estrangement, showing how they "denaturalize what is supposedly familiar and consequently reveal the strange and sometimes sinister components that go to make up formations of a 'national psyche'" (2002, 3). Wai Chee Dimock urges scholars to replace the nation-based approach to literary study with the concept of "deep time" or "a set of longitudinal frames, at once projective and recessional, with input going in both ways, and binding continents and millennia into many loops of relations, a densely interactive fabric" (2006, 3-4). (3)

In this essay I look closely at Pinsky's book-length poem An Explanation of America (1979) to argue that, although it practically embodies his commitment to the unitary idea of American nation and culture, it also serves as a useful vantage point from which to study postnational critique in late twentieth-century U. S. poetry. The poem explores the idea of American identity in the period following the Vietnam War, a critical juncture in the United States' self-definition as a world superpower. Robert von Hallberg calls it "one of the markers by which the literary history of this period will be known" (1985, 237). (4) But the poem's focus on the meaning of patriotic attachment in the era of the United States' political, economic, and cultural hegemony around the globe renders it as much worth reading today as it did nearly three decades ago. In an online Q & A session hosted by Smartish Pace in 2001, Pinsky talks about it as "strange and weird, a book-length poem experimental beyond anything I've dared try since--but I'm very proud of it, would have no problem reading from it to you" (2001). A self-described "Compulsive explainer" (1979, 6), Pinsky places some of the most salient features of the United States' national self-construction--exceptionalism, expansionism, individualism--against the backdrop of the emerging ideology of multiculturalism. He upholds the value of patriotism as a primary form of social attachment, but also acknowledges the role of cosmopolitan consciousness in the construction of American identity. He suggests that the divided, fragmented society signified by that much contested term--"America"--can be made whole by a shared act of the imagination.

In the pages that follow I'm going to focus on those passages in An Explanation of America that demonstrate Pinsky's productive (in my view) hesitation about the concept of American nationhood. Even as he seeks to mobilize his fellow citizens to a sense of common identity, Pinsky recognizes the presence of irreducible difference at the heart of American self-definition. He attempts to respond to the demands of identity politics that was beginning to emerge in the decade he was writing the poem, as an alternative to the national model. (5) Robert Archambeau reads An Explanation as

 
  an affirmation of a view of American identity that rejects the 
  identity politics that began to take hold in America around the time 
  Pinsky was launching his career. The book's "explanation" of the 
  nation proposes a rather conservative rebuttal to the identity 
  politics of the 1970s, a rebuttal that fits the ideology of the 
  rising dominant class of the United States in the '80s and '90s. 
  (Archambeau 2004, 108) 

Archambeau correctly points to the importance of class component in An Explanation of America, but he takes little notice of the stoical distance that characterizes many parts of the poem, best exemplified by Pinsky's reference to the United States as "The plural-headed Empire, manifold / Beyond my outrage or my admiration" (1979, 15). As I argue, Pinsky's equivocating poem offers not so much a reaction to the rise of identity politics as a recognition of the weakening bonds of nationhood in the multicultural, multilingual, indeed multinational America. Though Pinsky offers his eight-year-old daughter (the supposed addressee of his poem), his audience, and by implication his fellow citizens an opportunity for patriotic education, he speaks in the mood of acceptance of the difficulty of identification with "others" unless it is through a deliberate exercise of the imagination. The conclusion he reaches in the poem--that even the feeling of patriotism requires a great deal of social imagining and therefore parallels the similarly demanding feeling of cosmopolitanism--sheds much light on the problems of identity, alterity, and multiculturalism at the heart of current conversations about American postnation.

Metaphors and Memories