Cambridge Companion

Lytle Shaw is the author of the chapter “Whitman’s Urbanism” in the Cambridge Companion. He is Associate Professor of English at NYU, where he teaches courses on such topics as “New York Poetry and the New Left,” “Theorizing the Archive,” “Very Contemporary Poetry,” “The Source of the Hudson: Landscape, Theory, History,” and “Specters of Enlightenment in Postwar Poetics and Theory.” His scholarship centers on American literature with emphasis on poetics, art and theory.  A prolific writer, Lytle’s scholarly books include the monograph Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006) and two forthcoming studies: Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics and Specimen Box (on new modes of institution critique in art and poetry). He is also the editor of Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology (2007) and the author of several volumes of poetry, including Cable Factory 20 (1999) and The Lobe (2002).

Lytle is a contributing editor for Cabinet, and has recently published catalog essays on Robert Smithson and Zoe Leonard for DIA Center, on Gerard Byrne for Koenig Books, and on The Royal Art Lodge for the Drawing Center.  His collaborative work with the artist Jimbo Blachly has been exhibited widely and is collected in The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse (2008). To see an example of Chadwickiana,  visit the Winkleman Gallery’s website, which features photographs of an installation called “The Genretron.” Lytle discussed his work on the Chadwicks at the Lost New York conference last fall. You’ll get some of the flavor of that presentation by looking at Shaw and Blatchly’s account of “Fort Chadwijk” in The Brooklyn Rail.

Lytle’s contribution to the Companion is really a meditation on the impact of urban experience on Whitman’s poetics and on the poetic legacy that he bequeathed to such followers as Hart Crane, Federico García Lorca, George Oppen, Frank O’Hara, and Allen Ginsberg. Here is an excerpt:

Rather than see Ginsberg, however, as simply clouding the blue Whitmanian skies over Manhattan, it is more accurate to understand him as focusing in on, and exploring, tensions already latent in Whitman’s celebration of urbanism -– his situating of the city at the center of his democratic, corporeal poetics. Before accounting for these tensions, let me elaborate on the special position of the city in Whitman’s seemingly all-inclusive poetics. Like several other passages in the poem, section 15 of “Song of Myself” presents a kind of macro-panorama of American trades, genre scenes embracing a broad array of regions, classes, social identities – from duck-shooters and deacons to spinning girls, whale-boat mates, and paving men, from “quadroons” and “half-breeds” to “squaws” and “newly-come immigrants”; this within the West, the Yankee East, the Great Lakes, the Southwest, with its “walls of Adobie,” and the Missouri plains. Passages like this propose that, with Whitman’s help, we might zoom across space to bring these disparate people and activities into a neat paratactic list – and that as we do so we experience American democratic possibility not just thematically through this array of variable vicarious occupations, subject positions, and regions but in a sense formally too through their conjoined equivalence. And yet part of the reason why the poet was so insistent upon identifying himself as “Walt Whitman, a Kosmos, of Manhattan the son,” was that the city seemed to offer a micro-Kosmos for its sons.

Next: Trysh Travis.

Martha Jane Nadell, the author of the “Writing Brooklyn” chapter of the Cambridge Companion, is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. Martha received both her bachelor’s degree in Afro-American Studies and her doctorate in American Civilization from Harvard.

Martha is the author of Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (Harvard UP, 2004), which explores the relationship between the literary and the visual in African American literary culture. At the heart of the book’s analysis are works from the 1920s through the 1940s that used visual elements in tandem with literary texts, such as the magazines and anthologies published by Alain Locke and Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston’s investigation of Southern folk culture, Mules and Men, which featured illustrations by Mexican caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias.

Martha is presently at work on a literary and cultural history of Brooklyn that examines the rise of Brooklyn as a central site in the American cultural imagination.

Here’s the opening of Martha’s chapter:

In an 1862 article in the Brooklyn Standard, Walt Whitman imagined, less than four decades hence, Brooklyn’s prominence among the cities of the world. At the time of his writing, Brooklyn was the United States’ third largest city. Home to more than 260,000 people, Brooklyn rivaled New York, its neighbor across the East River, in size, industry, and population. Residents lived and worked densely on streets designed in 1839 as a grid; they rode the numerous ferries that daily crossed the East River. In an earlier article in the six-month series entitled “Brooklyniana,” Whitman envisioned among future generations a widespread interest in the narratives of Brooklyn’s diverse inhabitants, their stories of daily life, “personal chronicles and gossip,” and most of all their “authentic reminiscences” and “memoirs” of urban life. Whitman was prescient. Although it is no longer its own city – the consolidation into Greater New York City occurred in 1898 – Brooklyn’s inhabitants and landscape are a recognizable and indeed iconic element of American arts and letters. Yet although Whitman foresaw the prevalence of Brooklyn memoirs, he did not anticipate the range and complexity of Brooklyn’s literary history, one that both complements and complicates that of New York City as whole.

Next: Lytle Shaw.