Papers by Michael Skansgaard
Poetics Today, 2019
This article delivers a two-pronged intervention into blues prosody. First, it argues that schola... more This article delivers a two-pronged intervention into blues prosody. First, it argues that scholars have repeatedly misidentified the metrical organization of blues poems by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. The dominant approach to these poems has sought to explain their rhythms with models of alternating stress, including both classical foot prosody and the beat prosody of Derek Attridge. The article shows that the systematic organization of blues structures originates in West African call-and-response patterning (not alternating stress), and is better explained by models of syntax and musical phrasing. Second, it argues that these misclassifications — far from being esoteric matters of taxonomy — lie at the heart of African American aesthetics and identity politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas literary blues verse has long been oversimplified with conventional metrics like “free verse,” “accentual verse,” and “iambic pentameter,” the article suggests that its rhythms arise i...
often called formalism and historicism; in the narrower field of verse criticism, they are known ... more often called formalism and historicism; in the narrower field of verse criticism, they are known as cognitive poetics and historical poetics. 1 Cognitive poetics is "cognitive" because it investigates, as Yopie Prins puts it, what happens to "your brain on poetry" (19). Its methods are derived from philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, prosody, gestalt theory, and more generally, any theory that can clarify the relationship between literary art and aesthetic cognition (Tsur, Toward 6; Freeman, "Cognitive" 314). Rather than rejecting outdated theories, cognitive poetics prefers to reorient and redeploy them (Stockwell 6). Historical poetics is "historical" because it investigates, in the words of Virginia Jackson, "the history of the interpretation of lyric poetry" (6). Relative to cognitive poetics, historical poetics focuses more on the practices of readers (rather than writers), the synchronic (rather than diachronic) analysis of poetic form and literary history, and the circulation of texts though discursive channels of politics, economics, and popular culture (rather than through a sphere of canonical influence). The methods favoured by historical poetics include literary (but seldom linguistic) prosody, history, sociology, and elements of race, class, and gender theory. Cognitive poetics focuses on how "poets make poetry"; historical poetics focuses on how "poetry makes poets" (Said 12). From their very different vantage points, Matthew Arnold and Michel Foucault both indicate that the blueprints of literary art can be studied systematically. Yet while Arnold thinks this structure is formally "traced in its bare outlines upon the spectator's mind" (558), Foucault believes that it "cannot be adequately understood in relation to the grammatical features, formal structures, and objects of discourse" (137). Helen Vendler, who shares Arnold's interest in form and cognition, prefers to read poetry "from the inside, not from the outside" (qtd. in Gibbs 234). Prins, who is closer to Foucault, prefers to read "simultaneously from inside out and from outside in" (14). The terminology shared by these metaphors overstates the possibility of consilience; in fact, Vendler and Prins are not studying the same architecture from different angles, but altogether different phenomena. For example, musico-linguistic hierarchies organised 1 Though useful orienting concepts, these terms, as Marjorie Levinson explains in "What Is New Formalism?," are unstable. "[N]ew historicism" has, regrettably, become "a catch-all term for cultural studies; contextual critique; ideology critique; Foucauldian analysis; political, intersection, and special-interest criticism; suspicion hermeneutics; and theory" (559). Levinson nuances her title concept by distinguishing between "activist formalism" and "normative formalism" (559), neither of which anticipates the prosodically driven approach of this study. Skansgaard 8 in 4-beat units of rhythm and syntax and socio-cultural hierarchies organised by race, class, education, and income involve both different kinds and different degrees of pattern recognition. 2 These paradigms are usually non-competing: both commonly use the word aesthetic as an approximate synonym for stylistic. Yet they also diverge: cognitivists sometimes use aesthetic to mean good, true, and beautiful while historicists are likelier to use aesthetic and strategic interchangeably. A similar tension accompanies much of the nomenclature used by these fields: terms that Prins describes as "essentially contested concepts" about which "there is agreement that something real is at stake but which involve, and indeed require, as a foundational part of their complex structure, ongoing disputation about how they are to be realized" (14). Cognitivism claims to be historical because "technique" is "the way in which the work of art most intimately registers historical experience" (Jarvis, "For a Poetics" 931), while historicism also claims to be cognitive because aesthetic perception "implies the implementation of a cognitive acquirement, a cultural code" (Bourdieu xxvi). As an example of this ongoing disputation, Jarvis and Prins have both published influential studies titled "What Is Historical Poetics?" that critique (and claim to encompass) the methods of the other. Although some contributors to poetics are principally invested in cognitive methods (Jarvis, Culler, Hurley, Vendler) and others are principally invested in historical methods (Prins, Jackson, Martin, Cohen), there is, in practice, nothing like a battle line running between two opposite camps. Most contemporary verse critics are, to varying degrees, interdisciplinary. Nevertheless, spirited debate often ensues when scholars near one end of the bell curve feel that scholars near the other end are missing the point. 3 This back-and-forth discussion has played such a sizeable role in shaping blues aesthetic criticism that an explanatory digression is in order. On what has been called the conservative side of the Anglo-American Culture War, stylistically 5 This shift toward "socio-aesthetic" blues criticism can be observed in several recent studies; see Brackett 78; Grandt 156; Lowney, Jazz 54. Skansgaard 11 suppose that sociologically-tinted glasses automatically correct for ethnocentric bias. Indeed, they can even compound this bias by magnifying the false presumption that left writers or authors from socially marginalized groups were less concerned with formal experimentation in general-and with modernist experiments in particular-than their traditionally canonized peers. (1191) Vera M. Kutzinski expresses similar concerns: "folk and protest labels subordinate the formal aesthetics of Hughes's poems either to ethnographic or to ideological criteria" (4). She complains that the "courtesy" of "exceedingly close readings" "has not always been extended to Hughes" and "agree[s] with Jeff Westover that Langston Hughes remains 'easily the most critically neglected of all major modern American poets'" (3). Indeed, in the 33 years since the publication of Arnold Rampersad's biography, the rallying cry that Hughes's artistry needs more attention has become something of a cliché. "It is almost as if Hughes's working with the oral tradition precluded for many scholars any close textual study of his written work," which, on inspection, is "intellectually stimulating" and "aesthetically pleasing" (Tracy, LHB 2). "It is the intellectuality in Hughes's work that a cursory reading is likely to underestimate" (Vendler, "Unweary"). 6 "Under-reading is the curse of Hughes criticism" (Bloom, LH-BC 3). "Hughes remains a major intellectual ancestor" and a poet of "considerable creative genius" (Chinitz 3). These critics agree that Hughes's blues-inspired style is formally complex. Or perhaps they don't. Hughes limits himself to "the expression of the average, everyday, honest and unpretentious person who expresses himself in a simple, heartfelt, and interesting manner" (Tracy, LHB 9); he writes in "the simplest possible words" that "the most uneducated person could hear and understand" (Vendler, "Rita" 381); his poems "rarely demand … 'close reading'" (Bloom, LH-CRSG, editor's note); they are "not replete with delicately calculated formal devices" (Chinitz 76); Hughes prefers "plain language" that seems "wholly transparent and self-explanatory" (Kutzinski 2). Like Schrödinger's poet, Hughes is both complex and simple, major and minor, canonical and anti-canonical. Mark Whalan is right to suggest that the neglect of Hughes's "major status" "has Skansgaard 16 Coltrane's music appeals to a syncopated, responsorial, improvisational competence, it also appeals to a "myth" of "essential" "African origins" (Whyton 112). Call-and-response patterning, too, has been used strategically to suggest "African diasporic connections at the time of Ghanaian independence" (Monson 334). Afrocentric criticism is relatively closer to cognitive poetics because it perceives vernacular idioms as "transformations of modes of musical thought … shared with West African cultures and the African diaspora" (Wilson and Weston 69) and therefore part of "a specific African American tropological consciousness" (Sekoni 65). Anglophonic criticism is relatively closer to historical poetics because it perceives vernacular idioms as "trope[s] for the Africanization of Euro-American music" (Feith 66) and therefore part of a "project of African repatriation" (Cohen, Social 225). Afrocentric criticism is interested in the possibility of thinking through African-diasporic technique; Anglophonic criticism is interested in the phenomenon of thinking about African-diasporic technique. Although there is nothing inherently incompatible about these approaches, their priorities are so different that they are sometimes presented as competing theories. One influential critique of Afrocentrism appears in Kenneth W. Warren's What Was African American Literature?: the collective enterprise we now know as African American or black literature is of rather recent vintage. In fact, the wine may be newer than generally acknowledged, which is to say that it was neither pressed on the African continent nor bottled during the slave era. Rather, African American literature was a postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow. (1) Warren takes aim at the connoisseur who savours black writing for its subtle hints of Africanness.
Modern Language Quarterly, 2020
Previous historical studies of The Weary Blues have focused on the racial symbolism of Langston H... more Previous historical studies of The Weary Blues have focused on the racial symbolism of Langston Hughes’s technique, which (as the consensus goes) authenticates the voice of the persona through its deliberate simplicity. This orthodox view is wrongheaded from the outset. The essay uses a new system of rhetorically driven scansion to identify elaborate rhetorical symmetries and polyrhythms that shape the cognition of Hughes’s persona and the recognition of his readers in ways that prose language cannot. Hughes employs rhetoric and iconography as alternative modes of historical narration. This recuperation of his persona intervenes in an ongoing dispute in the field of historical poetics about the value of formalism and cognitivism. The essay aims to show that the concept of thinking in verse is valuable where it has been least applied: in reclaiming the value of traditionally marginalized literatures such as those of the African American vernacular tradition.
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Papers by Michael Skansgaard