Forms of a World

Walt Hunter's study of contemporary poetry and globalization, Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization, opens with two provocative questions, “What happens when we think of poetry as a global literary genre and when we think of the global in poetic terms?” (1). These questions situate Hunter's interdisciplinary examination of contemporary poetry by raising to the fore his most immediate contribution, which is to think “of poetry in global terms,” by turning to the writing of anglophone poets “from a variety of positions in the world economy” (120). Hunter argues for an analysis of globalization through poetic forms and an analysis of poetry through a global framework: both must be examined within the economic and political lineages that link them together inextricably. He ultimately creates an argument for global poetry to be taken up as an ally of globalization, specifically through a critique of global capitalism that attends to both the formal and historical concerns that mark poems.Forms of a World broadens the current frameworks we have for engaging poetry. As Hunter notes in the introduction, the novel, not poetry, has historically been the “accessible site for investigations” on globalization, specifically in regard to the ethics of precarity, the history of capitalism, and the politics of neoliberalism (3). Texts such as Nathan Suhr-Sytsma's Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature (2017) and Jahan Ramazani's Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001) and A Transnational Poetics (2009) engage with similar questions of globalization and poetry. Hunter's work adds to these discourses by taking on an ethical consideration of the global forces that impact poetic innovation and the sociological conditions that are sensed by these poems “before they are made fully present,” which allows for the possibility of social action (3). As he develops this account of contemporary poetry, Hunter also offers a critique of liberalism, suggesting that global poetry is working against a discursive liberal rhetoric that, as Lisa Lowe states, “proposes a new narrative which presupposes that freedom overcame enslavement, denies colonial slavery and erases the seizure of native lands” (qtd. in Forms 5). Forms of a World works to reevaluate the conceptions of the global beyond a neutral spatial terminology that overlooks the economic agents of globalization and the hierarchies they construct.Viewing poetry through a global sensibility of economics, dispersal, displacement, histories of citizenship, neoliberalism, and racism, makes visible the important role of globalization and national difference in a global economy of poetry. Hunter illustrates this by drawing from a rich array of poetic practices in the anglophone tradition, including poets such as Seamus Heaney, Kofi Awoonor, Sarah Clancy, Myung Mi Kim, Solmaz Sharif, and Claudia Rankine, and by utilizing the theoretical arguments made by figures such as Stuart Hall, Steph Burt, Jonathan Culler, and Walter Benjamin, among others. Hunter's examination of poetry from locales as disparate as Ghana, Ireland, the United States, and Iraq, presents him with the difficult task of thinking broadly about poetry and engaging with its cultural specificity without essentializing it or inadvertently negating the very globality, the relationality, that Forms of a World seeks to illuminate. In the end, it makes good on these impressive ambitions. This seemingly eclectic mix of poets and scholars emerges as dynamically well rounded in its attempt to account for a large tradition of poetry that exceeds the bounds of any specific geographical location.The great strength of the work lies in its swift yet contemplative comparative engagement with poems. Further, although the text engages with global poetry written in one language, it also opens up a methodological possibility for a comparative anglophone project. The book is divided into four sections sustained by close readings of poems, all delving into emergent narratives of globalization. For example, in the first chapter, Hunter investigates the work of Irish poets who wrote about landscapes and used “literary topoi in order to acknowledge the undoing of the social fabric and the human and ecological costs of the movement of capital” (29). Departing from views of Irish poetry that treat it as travel literature or “voyeurism,” Forms of a World grounds this analysis of land in Irish poetry to indicate a political sensibility, a “sense of place in a materialist critique of dispossession” (20). This critique connects the poems to histories of marginalization, neoliberal policies, democratic crises, resurgent nationalisms, and other displaced positions that emerge from a series of political concerns, such as land expropriation, the housing bubbles of the early 2000s, and the property speculation that came at the expense of housing and civil servants. Having all this in mind, Hunter makes the persuasive case that the centrality of land in Irish poetry has always pointed toward questions of globalization.Chapter 2 engages with citizenship in the American lyric, and its displacement for precarious persons. Through an analysis of Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, Hunter investigates the shift from “I” to “you,” ultimately arguing that Rankine redefines the lyric poem in order to confront limiting and exclusionary practices of citizenship. As Hunter notes, Rankine's malleable use of the lyric (as opposed to more traditional uses of the lyric utilized by poets such as Whitman) opens up the possibility for a new engagement with what constitutes the lyric. This new lyric opens up a new set of possibilities for the world; it is a new discourse that complicates the universal, global citizenship usually espoused by the lyric “I.”Chapter 3 examines the crowd, or what Hunter calls “commoning,” a resistance and refusal of the totalitarian essentialization of “we,” which produces a stylistic and aesthetic “culling and gleaning [of] the material” of the “we” for poetic repurposing (66). Forms of a World situates the formal concerns of Sean Bonney's refashioning of the ballad for revolutionary anti-capitalist purposes alongside Shahid Agha Ali's usage of the ghazal, and Myung Mi Kim's “textual experiment,” which, as Hunter states, resists the privatization and totalizing of global English. The author extrapolates on this by showcasing Kim's translation process between Korean and English as a different relationality within the global, one that “makes a unique intervention within processes of racial ascription by undermining the authority of the listener, the translator, and the romanizer” (83). Likewise, Hunter creates a parallel with Ali, who he describes as pushing against the label of political poetry by subverting Western civilization in order to “save oneself” from it (Ali qtd. in Forms 84; original emphasis). Further, Hunter argues that Ali turns to the form of the ghazal so as to imbue it with a cosmopolitan aesthetic, a cosmopolitanism which, rather than emerging through the figure of the world traveler, rises out of a destabilizing and unsettling critique of the structures and elements of social belonging.Chapter 4 returns to prior engagements with land through an examination of anthropogenic climate change. Hunter states that if “poetry once represented the turning of the plow, now perhaps the emblems for the poetic line are the furrows created by fracking, oil drilling, and mineral extraction” (92). The ethical concerns of the text are echoed here through a continued engagement with poems that consider the continued “political and economic devastations of the transatlantic slave trade and the damage of the environment wrought by financial speculation and underdevelopment” (92). These claims about the human are a culmination of many underlying concerns in Hunter's work, with its focus on persons, places, and spaces of precarity in the global order. Although prospect poems, the form engaged with in this chapter, acknowledge the role of the poet, the human, in the global ecology, Hunter also argues that these poems do not simply situate the poet as a body “floating over a meadow” (96), but as one on a hill, “staging the dilemmas of the putative ‘global citizen'” (97). This denotes a new relationality, an “orientation toward the political ... one that involves an alliance, not an uncritical assumption of universality or ‘flat ontology'” (116).What Forms of a World implies throughout is that the poetic need not deliberately allow the global to enter; it is already, and has always, been there. Hunter demonstrates this again in the coda of the book by taking up the methods and questions raised through the earlier chapters to a poet who is not usually considered global, John Ashbery. In so doing, Forms of a World opens up a space in which the global permeates any and all poems and poetic forms. What remains front and center throughout all of Hunter's analyses is the inherent potentiality of the poetic; its ability to not only “intervene” in our current discourses, but to instead “imagine” “powerful alternatives” and enact “ethical and political change” in our present (18). This is one of the most poignant takeaways of the book and also its most urgent call. Hunter reveals a world in crisis, yet through careful and meticulous attention to the voices of those most susceptible to the ramifications of an unequal world, he shows us the lyric's potentiality to reimagine the planet. Forms of a World is a necessary and important addition to monographs engaging with global, post-colonial, and comparative poetics, such as those written by Jahan Ramazani, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Jacob Edmond, and Omaar Hena. Readers of these texts and authors will see that this book is essential for anyone studying the sociopolitical dynamics of global poetry

Aesthetics · Art · Globalization · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Globalization and Cultural Identity · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies