Fellow Focus: Michael Patrick Allen
National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics Michael Patrick Allen received his PhD from Harvard University, where he taught courses on the literature and culture of cities in the university’s Writing Program.
In this conversation with Communications & Outreach Coordinator Karl-Mary Akre, Michael discusses the connection between urban poets and democracy.
KARL-MARY AKRE: How did you come to do the research you're currently doing?
MICHAEL PATRICK ALLEN: During my PhD, I was reading some poems by the poet James Merrill, and I noticed he was writing a lot about places in New York that had been torn down or destroyed. He has this poem “An Urban Convalescence” where he says, “As usual in New York, everything is torn down / Before you've had time to care for it.” And I thought, this is a good poem. That's a good line. Yet, this isn't really what most critics talk about with Merrill, because they think about him as being someone who's very interested in poetic form for its own sake. Someone who's not very interested in what's going on outside his study window. The more I thought about that question, the more I realized that some of the poets who are usually put into the box of being more interested in poetry as such, and less interested in social conflict or social change, did have a lot to say about those things. And the way they said them relied a lot on decisions having to do with poetic form. That's where my project started.
That line does feel very apt if you’ve lived in New York or any other major city.
It is. Merrill also captures the fact that when you're healthy, you can't remember what it actually feels like to be healthy. That’s only possible the first day that you're back after being sick. It feels great to be able to breathe and walk around because you can still remember the absence of those capacities. He was very attuned to those things. In the poem, Merrill gets up after being in bed for a week, and then he walks around and he sees this building on his block being demolished, and he says, essentially, 'I can't remember what building was there and I would walk down this street every day.' And he starts to think, 'What about my own memories of the building? What do I actually have left?' And he remembers a little cornice, a little piece of the roof of the building.
I thought that was an interesting way to think about not just how historical preservation works, but also what people retain— intellectually and emotionally— of buildings that are being torn down. It's very similar to the other poets that I write about. [In their work], there are always images of wrecking balls and jackhammers. On the other hand, there are also little architectural details that are saved.
How would you say that concept and understanding in your research intersects with our annual theme of Democracy: Past, Present, Future?
I was very excited when I saw the call, and I definitely wanted to apply because I've been arguing that poets are interested in these questions of preservation or starting from scratch. That's also something that artists like to do. They like to start from zero. But that question about who's actually making those decisions is really important. When I did more contextual and historical research for my project, I discovered that James Merrill was very influenced by this fight over what was going on in lower Manhattan, which is where he grew up. There was a plan to build a huge highway through the middle of Washington Square Park that was defeated by activists, mostly mothers who took their children to the park. So that's an example of a “we” that defeated it and I talk a little bit about that in my project.
In another chapter, I discuss Gwendolyn Brooks' poem “In the Mecca,” which she published in 1968. The poem is about an apartment building on the south side of Chicago which was torn down in 1953. And my questions are: What can poetry do when a site of community has already been destroyed and what can it tell us about what allowed it to be destroyed? And what remains after it's gone? To me, those are all questions that have to do with democracy, especially democratic culture.
How has the fellowship impacted your work, process, or approach to the questions that you're investigating?
To start, the most valuable thing is having the space and support to think and read and write and tear it up and start again. I really am intensely grateful to the Fox Center for that. Also, it's been really thrilling to hear people from very different disciplines talking about their work and I'm very inspired by how much they bring from their own discipline. It's amazing to hear historians talk about a historical project in progress. Or someone who works in political theory thinking about which text to use. I'm very struck by how everyone tries to engage with the problems and preoccupations of the other fellows. They try to not only give you something from their home discipline but also understand the questions and projects that you are trying to pursue. Even the term “democracy” — we use it in really different ways. We've talked about sovereignty and agency and abortion, which all do touch on democracy. I thought I knew the universe of possibilities that have to do with "democracy,” but I feel that I have a better sense of those possibilities now.
What is your own relationship to discipline? Has this relationship changed as a result of your Fox Center fellowship?
The question that I'm pursuing doesn't only exist in English. What is the debate over urban space? Should we get rid of slums and replace them with something that's newer and better? Or should we value neighborhoods and what they're already doing? On the other hand, what should we do with poetic form? Should we try to hold onto inherited poetic forms or should we do something new? That question touches upon history and social theory and sociology and many other disciplines.
I was trained as a literary scholar who is very interested in the specific choices that poets make. Why is this poem in the first person? Why is this poem arranged with these particular stanzas with this particular rhyme scheme? And when I teach, I try to get my students to see poems as a series of decisions made by an artist.
So, I think about my project as being a really classic project for someone who's interested in what literary studies has always done. It’s also a project that's examining the relationship between literary studies and other forms of knowing. That's baked into the structure of my project itself. Because when there's some kind of crisis, poets often hear 'Now's the time for you to be direct, immediate, spontaneous.' They are told, 'there's a big problem going on. Stop thinking about the past and poetic history and speak immediately to the moment.' But part of my argument is that when poets think about the organization of the built environment, they use the tools that are inherent in their medium, which is literary form. So, my disciplinary background in studying literary form is helpful for understanding that process.
Speaking of the city, how have you liked living in Atlanta and being at Emory? Have you gotten a chance to explore?
One of the nice things about being at Emory is that they have an incredible library, the Rose Library. They have 75,000 volumes in the Danowski Poetry Library and it would just be impossible to do the kind of work that I do without being able to consult those. And they have incredible special collections in the Rose Library, generally. One of the things that formalist criticism is interested in is how does the poet make specific choices? And if you go to Rose’s Special Collections, you can see a typescript by Elizabeth Bishop and you can see her crossing a word out and changing it. That is very exciting for me.
The other thing that's been really nice and also exciting is the Emory undergraduate students. They are very enthusiastic and full of excitement for poetry. They take it both very seriously and joyfully. So, it's been really fun to teach them.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.