The Provision Ground in New York: Claude McKay and the Form of Memory

Abstract

Reading Claude McKay’s “The Tropics in New York” as a twentieth-century aesthetic equivalent of a slave provision ground, Posmentier argues that the poem asserts cultural autonomy even in the face of the dislocation it describes. In doing so, she suggests that formal lyric poetry can share the burdens and possibilities of these agricultural spaces, insofar as it takes shape in relationship to an oppressive colonial tradition while defining a black expressive form that resists its own utility within the postplantation aesthetic economy. Posmentier reads McKay’s American sonnet in the context of “Quashie to Buccra,” his earlier meditation on agricultural labor and the cultivation of poetic taste, to highlight the narrative of work omitted from the later poem. In fragmenting that narrative, “Tropics” generates an alternative temporality and spatiality of freedom.

Pastoral Modernism: An American Poetics

“…As William Empson explains in his foundational, yet highly idiosyncratic study of pastoral, "literature is a social process, and also an attempt to reconcile the conflicts of an individual in whom those of society will be mirrored." 26 To read pastoral as a mirror of modernity, reflecting back William Carlos Williams's question, further invites us to consider the efficacy of Empson's curious definition of pastoral as "putting the complex into the simple," which given the difficulties of reading modernist poetry would seem either inaccurate or 25 See Schuster; Posmentier (2012Posmentier ( , 2016. 26 Empson,19. impossible.…”