The American House Poem, 1945-2021

Abstract

This book tracks the emergence of an “American house poem,” from the time of the post-war housing boom through the post-2008 housing crisis. The house is perhaps the most recognizable emblem of the American ideals of self-making: prosperity, stability, domesticity, and upward mobility. Yet over the years from 1945–2021, the American house becomes more famous for the betrayal of those hopes than for their fulfillment: first, through the federally enacted segregation of cities and public housing; then through the expansion of private credit that lays the ground for the subprime mortgage crisis of the early twenty-first century. This book finds that, as access to housing expands to include a greater share of the US population, the house emerges as a central metaphor for the poetic imagination. During the post-World War II age of ascendant American power across the globe, the American house poem represents the changing abilities of US poets to imagine new forms of life while also building on the past. The American House Poem focuses on poetry written by women, Black, and LGBT+ writers who register the unevenly distributed pressures of successive housing crises by rewriting older poetic forms. Writing about the materials, tools, and plans for making a house, poets express the tensions between making their lives into art and freeing their lives from inherited constraints and conditions.