Makeshift Solutions: Serial Poetry and Secular Stagnation, 1965 to Today

“Makeshift Solutions: Serial Poetry and Secular Stagnation, 1965 to Today” tells a story about poetry and imaginative prose patterned in ways commonly described as serial. It is also a story about value, both as a category of aesthetics and as the restless social substance of capitalist relations. In chapters on George Stanley, Bruce Boone and Robert Glück, and Claudia Rankine, I illustrate how, in response to precarity and political uncertainty in an age of secular stagnation beginning in the mid-1960s, a countercurrent in North American letters took leave of poetry’s claims to timelessness to elaborate a poetics of ongoingness. On one hand, the writers I examine posed challenges to existing conceptions of the aesthetic value in poetry, emphasizing the partial and provisional nature of their work while destabilization distinctions between the figural and the literal, the fictional and the real, in order to assert the its entanglement with living social practices and ways of relating. On the other, these writers sought strategies for exceeding mere repetition and adjacency, which they confronted both in experiments with serial form in poetry and in a pervasive experience of inert cyclicality and social separation arising from their moment. By recurrently indexing relations of social dependency—upon others, and upon the wage—their serial writing endeavors to disclose forms of connectedness across time and social position not easily reducible to language or the aesthetic, and to forward these as means both for understanding the present and for locating and eliciting solidarity and hope