Criticism and Poetry Related to
Poetry-Criticism and Cultural Studies
Stephen Miller, Department of
English, St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Abstract: In criticism, I am
working on Liquid Totems: Computer, Holocaust, Suburb. This
critical manuscript identifies a relation between the New Deal and
pre-computer national mindset. As Alan Turing conceives the
mathematical model of the “Turing Machine” to disproof the notion
of a unified logical basis for mathematics and Turing Machines
facilitate functional computers that are able to interrelate
seemingly unrelated logarithms and apply that interaction onto
seemingly total and open fields or databases, so Franklin Roosevelt
proposes ad hoc programs that posit the American economy and nation
as cohesive and completely interactive entity. For various many in
the upper class view this “new deal” as a metaphoric holocaust
foisted against their leadership and, in a sense, the poet-World
War II rise of suburbs “launders” a pre-New Deal sense of reality
by reestablishing the dominance of private space. In poetry, Fort
Dad continues much of the critical and poetic work of Being with a
Bullet. My first draft of the title poem “triangulates”
contemporaneous phenomena of Freud’s work, American poetry of the
thirties by Stevens and Williams, and New Deal politics. “Fort Dad”
refers to Lego construction that my young son builds. I use it as
part of complicated conceit for Freudian defense mechanisms and the
ambivalence with which Americans view conflicting national
constructs of the New Deal and opposition to it. I strengthen the
connections it makes, and perhaps make it a book length poem. In
editing, I am seeing through to publication a collection of
criticism about experimental Jewish American poetry, Secular Jewish
Culture/Radical Poetic Practice, under contract with the University
of Alabama, in addition to editing Critiphoria, an online literary
journal at www.critiphoria.org devoted
to interactions between poetry and criticism and featuring
prominent writers that St. John’s students help edit and write and
thus assisting my teaching.