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WORK TITLE: The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America
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http://www.english.ucla.edu/all-faculty/182-cohen-michael-c * http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15352.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Dartmouth College, B.A., 2000; New York University, Ph.D., 2007.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, visiting assistant professor, 2007-09; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, assistant professor, 2009-11; University of California, Los Angeles, assistant professor, 2011–.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the Emily Dickinson Journal, American Literary History, and ELH. Contributor of chapters to books, including The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
SIDELIGHTS
Michael C. Cohen is a writer and educator. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from New York University. From 2007 to 2009, Cohen served as a visiting assistant professor at Macalester College. The following two years, he worked at Louisiana State University as an assistant professor. In 2011, Cohen joined the University of California, Los Angeles as an assistant professor. He has written articles that have appeared in scholarly publications, including the Emily Dickinson Journal, American Literary History, and ELH. He is also the author of an entry in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
In 2015, Cohen released his first book, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. According to R.J. Cirasa, writer in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, in this volume, “Cohen … considers literary texts in terms of the social dynamics.” He pays special attention to minstrelsy and ballads of the era. Cohen asserts that much of the meaning of ballads was derived from their context. Therefore, one must understand how the ballads were circulated to fully understand them. Cohen follows certain books and publications, as they travel throughout the United States before, during, and after the Civil War. He also profiles individual balladeers, including Jonathan Plummer and Thomas Shaw. Shaw was known as the “Down-East Homer,” while Plummer was called the “Yankee Troubadour.” Each wrote and published his own works of poetry. Cohen argues that these poems/ballads could be compared to rumors, news, and gossip in terms of their social significance. Ballads were not perceived as having high artistic value. In the second chapter of the book, Cohen focuses on abolitionist poetry. He highlights a book called The North Star: The Poetry of Freedom by Her Friends. The book’s editors were John Greenleaf Whittier, Elizabeth Lloyd, and Elizabeth Nicholson. The volume was meant to connect those affiliated with the abolitionist cause. Cohen goes on to analyze songs written and disseminated by former slaves, including “Song of the Negro Boatmen.” Cohen calls them contraband songs. The fourth chapter of the book finds Cohen discussing English and Scottish Popular Ballads, a book written by Francis James Child. He later comments on Whittier’s popularity as a minstrel and on minstrelsy in general. He identifies the ways in which minstrels traveled about the country.
Cirasa, the writer in Choice, described The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America as “an ingenious, well-developed study utilizing impressively illuminating archival sources.” Cirasa also categorized the book as “highly recommended.” Reviewing the book on the Journal of American History Web site, Wendy Raphael Roberts called the volume “meticulously researched and refreshingly accessible.” Angela Sorby, writing online at Modern Philology, described The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America as a “marvelously nuanced book.” Sorby added: “This book’s signal strength lies in its willingness to trace the circulatory routes of specific poems, from early nineteenth-century blood-and thunder broadsides to midcentury abolitionist scrapbook verses to postbellum spirituals performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. In keeping with his understanding of the ballad’s protean character, each of Cohen’s chapters works as an independent investigation, enriched by a particular historical archive. However, by the final chapter, new insights emerge from the accrued mass of details.” “Smart, exploratory, and deeply grounded in poetic practice, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America makes a meaningful contribution to our understanding of how poems permeated nineteenth-century U.S. culture,” asserted David Haven Blake on the Nineteenth-Century Literature Web site. Lydia G. Fash, critic on the Sharp News Web site, suggested: “This excellent volume will be of interest to anyone who wants to think more about the circulation, reception, and creation either of poetry or of literature in the nineteenth century. The book is a smart, readable, worthwhile, and helpful addition to on-going studies of the history of reading.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2016, R.J. Cirasa, review of The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America, p. 1164.
ONLINE
Journal of American History Online, https://academic.oup.com/ (September 1, 2016), Wendy Raphael Roberts, review of The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America.
Modern Philology Online, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ (May 19, 2016), Angela Sorby, review of The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America.
Nineteenth-Century Literature Online, http://ncl.ucpress.edu/ (March 4, 2016), David Haven Blake, review of The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America.
Sharp News, http://www.sharpweb.org/ (December 10, 2016), Lydia G. Fash, review of The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America.
University of California, Los Angeles, Department of English Web site, http://www.english.ucla.edu/ (March 29, 2017), author faculty profile.
LC control no.: no2014141595
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Cohen, Michael C.
Field of activity: American poetry--19th century English poetry--19th century
American literature Poetics--History Books--History
Affiliation: University of California, Los Angeles
Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, La.)
Macalester College
New York University
Profession or occupation:
College teachers
Found in: Social lives of poems in nineteenth-century America,
[2015]: ECIP title page (Michael C. Cohen)
UCLA, Department of English, WWW site, October 23, 2014:
faculty (Cohen, Michael C., assistant professor; PhD New
York University, 2007) CV (2011-present, Assistant Prof.
of English, University of California, Los Angeles;
2009-2011, Assistant Prof. of English, Louisiana State
University, Baton Rouge; 2007-2009, Visiting Assistant
Prof. of English, Macalester College); fields of
interest (Nineteenth-century poetry, American
literature, Historical poetics, History of the book)
Associated language:
eng
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Education
PhD: New York University, 2007
BA: Dartmouth College, 2000
Interests
I teach and study the literature of the transatlantic nineteenth century. More specifically, my work focuses on poetry between roughly the 1790s and the 1890s, primarily in the United States, but also across the broader English-speaking world. I am most interested in the ways that people used poems: the means by which they received and circulated them (via books, broadsides, letters, oral recitation, and so on), the reading practices that made up their encounters with them (memorization, group reading, singing), and the theories of genre and media that informed the way they understood poems.
My first book, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (U Penn, 2015), draws together many of these interests in the material history of literary culture. I am at work on a new project, tentatively titled "Poetry and the History of Reading." This book is a speculative investigation into the relationships between historical practices of reading, literary traditions and the history of literariness, and contemporary critical theory and methods, focusing on the United States before 1900. I am working with a large archive of readers and their readings, in an effort to re-imagine American literature from the perspective of readers rather than authors. Readers’ canons, I am arguing, allow for a more fluid approach to early national literature, while they also demand a much closer attention to the roles of poems in the earlier Atlantic world.
I offer courses on many aspects of nineteenth-century literature, poetry, and theory, including courses on early American literature, Atlantic Romanticism, American poetry, transcendentalism, "old media," and authors such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, as well as graduate seminars on poetry, lyric theory, and the history of reading.
Publications
"Alienating Language: A Poet’s Masque." The Emily Dickinson Journal 23.1 (2014).
“Reading the Nineteenth Century.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014).
"Peddling Authorship in the Age of Jackson." ELH 79.2 (2012): 369-88.
"U.S. Poetry: Beginnings to 1900." The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. Ed. Stephen Cushman and Roland Greene. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012: 1480-85.
QUOTED: "Cohen ... considers literary texts in terms of the social dynamics."
"an ingenious, well-developed study utilizing impressively illuminating archival sources."
"highly recommended."
Cohen, Michael C.: The social lives of poems in nineteenth-century America
R.J. Cirasa
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1164.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Cohen, Michael C. The social lives of poems in nineteenth-century America. Pennsylvania, 2015. 281 p index afp ISBN 9780812247084 cloth, $55.00; ISBN 9780812291315 ebook, $55.00
(cc) 53-3389
PS316
2014-40834 CIP
Setting aside judgments of aesthetic merit, Cohen (UCLA) considers literary texts in terms of the social dynamics they catalyze as well as embody. He traces the circulatory power of the 19th-century American popular ballad in the formation of an American ethos, for this purpose construing the ballad genre to include a variety works that are--with the exception of Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain"--pedestrian and more common in their popular character than in their formal features. His subjects range from the inklings of a simply more sociable community fostered by the balladmongering of Yankee peddler-poetasters at the turn of the 19th century to the emergent new composite African American poetic culture--and, arguably, African Americanness itself--produced by racially contested minstrelsy and jubilee choruses. Along the way the author devotes extensive attention to the mobilizing zeal of John Greenleaf Whittier's abolitionist verse and looks at "contraband" slave songs leading up to and running throughout the Civil War and the straining during reconstruction for a recovered national mythos mediated by ballad anthologizing. Cohen examines these texts as material sites for the negotiation of cultural ownership and belonging, social identity and agency, literary and racial authenticity, and other sociological turns. An ingenious, well-developed study utilizing impressively illuminating archival sources. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.--R. J. Cirasa, Kean University (retired)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cirasa, R.J. "Cohen, Michael C.: The social lives of poems in nineteenth-century America." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1164+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661520&it=r&asid=e35b300d62f8f66097beb242ce630c76. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661520
QUOTED: "meticulously researched and refreshingly accessible."
Wendy Raphael Roberts
It is not an overstatement to say that the vast majority of nineteenth-century American verse is simply unreadable to modern scholars. Literary scholars have long marginalized most of it, while historians have rarely used it to understand social tensions, such as those over citizenship and race. As it turns out, argues Michael C. Cohen, many nineteenth-century readers did not read their poems either. But, they emphatically used them.
The meticulously researched and refreshingly accessible The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America joins a growing number of works that reexamine poetry as a political and social object outside of arguments and methodologies that rely upon close reading. Work by the scholar Virginia Jackson that argues that the practices of contemporary criticism have reduced all...
QUOTED: "marvelously nuanced book."
"This book’s signal strength lies in its willingness to trace the circulatory routes of specific poems, from early nineteenth-century blood-and thunder broadsides to midcentury abolitionist scrapbook verses to postbellum spirituals performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. In keeping with his understanding of the ballad’s protean character, each of Cohen’s chapters works as an independent investigation, enriched by a particular historical archive. However, by the final chapter, new insights emerge from the accrued mass of details."
Angela Sorby
Michael C. Cohen’s marvelously nuanced book, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America, begins with a set of premises that will be familiar to readers of Joan Shelley Rubin, Michael Chasar, Meredith McGill, and others, but it changes the conversation by focusing specifically on ballads and minstrelsy. As Cohen stresses from the outset, balladry in nineteenth-century America was less a fixed genre than a set of context-dependent practices; to understand what poems meant, then, it is necessary to understand how and why they circulated. This book’s signal strength lies in its willingness to trace the circulatory routes of specific poems, from early nineteenth-century blood-and thunder broadsides to midcentury abolitionist scrapbook verses to postbellum spirituals performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. In keeping with his understanding of the ballad’s protean character, each of Cohen’s chapters works as an independent investigation, enriched by a particular historical archive. However, by the final chapter, new insights emerge from the accrued mass of details, underscoring the notion that ballads have lives, in the sense that their meanings change with their use values.
The study’s first substantial chapter, “Balladmongering and Social Life,” traces the careers of two turn-of-the-nineteenth-century eccentrics: Jonathan Plummer (the “Yankee Troubadour”) and Thomas Shaw (the “Down-East Homer”). Plummer and Shaw produced self-published poetry that was not valued qua poetry; instead, as Cohen outlines, such poems worked as a kind of social glue, in tandem with other genres including gossip, rumor, and news. At the same time, these ballads were, in an important sense, “vagrant”—able to operate in the margins, below the public order ratified by more institutionally legitimated forms of literature. Partly because low-prestige ballads were not fetishized as high art, they could “condense the power of circulation as a social force” (59), thereby setting the stage for the ongoing use of balladry as a flexible tool for producing and sustaining interpersonal, regional, and national relationships beyond the literary realm.
In chapter 2, Cohen explores abolitionist poetry as a conduit for such relationships. In one section, he describes the collaborative construction of a gift book, The North Star: The Poetry of Freedom by Her Friends (1840), which was nominally edited by Elizabeth Nicholson, Elizabeth Lloyd, and John Greenleaf Whittier but actually produced and reproduced by many hands. The purpose of The North Star was not so much to promote antislavery as to build solidarity among those already converted to the cause. For this reason, exchanging poems was implicitly valued as much as writing them; the point was not to lionize a specific author but to fortify a circle of friends. A poet like Whittier, even when he aimed for broader audiences, could produce successful antislavery poetry only insofar as he could use familiar tropes and meters to make readers feel at home and among friends; hence the effectiveness of the ballad form, with its supposed ties to collective oral traditions. The key ingredient was not authorial originality but rather a sense of community.
By the end of the second chapter, interconnected themes have been introduced that are elaborated in the remaining chapters, which focus on the later nineteenth century. Cohen is especially interested in the postbellum uses of minstrelsy and the minstrel figure and in examining how ballads worked across class and racial lines even as they authenticated essentialist assumptions about class and race. The remaining chapters thus articulate the ways that ballads circulated as “folk” materials, steeped in cultural fantasies of simplicity, collective composition, and group identity. Chapter 3 takes up the question of “contraband songs,” using the term to explore how songs sung by former slaves were understood as “detachable and reusable commodities, available and amenable to the needs and desires of their users” (106). One of the most famous contraband songs, “Song of the Negro Boatmen,” was actually written by Whittier, but rather than dismissing it as an inauthentic knockoff, Cohen shows how the “Negro Boatmen” came to express the feelings of the freedmen who sang it; its power lay not in its provenance but in its social circulation. More broadly, Cohen concludes, “indexicality trumps literariness … if a song or poem is a part of you, carried in your head or your heart, it no longer matters whether or not it is good,” or whether you are the author (135). The ballads peddled by Plummer, Shaw, and their ilk were disposable artifacts that people used and discarded, but Cohen argues that, beginning around the time of the Civil War, people began to understand poems, and ballads in particular, as emblems of specific racial, national, and/or linguistic origins.
I was initially puzzled by Cohen’s sudden shift, in chapter 4, to a discussion of Francis James Child’s famous English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), but he makes a compelling case that Child’s project was intimately related to the imaginative work of American reconstruction, insofar as it invented traditions in the service of national unity. Even though Child was not working with American materials, his anthology functioned as an abstract model of how origins might be recovered and owned or, to put it more historically, reconstructed. As outlined in chapter 5, this abstraction—“the ballad”—helped spur the postbellum popularity of Whittier as a minstrel figure who could represent America the way Burns represented Scotland.
In the book’s final chapter, titled “The Minstrel’s Trail,” the culminating effects of Cohen’s archival excavations produce some subtle insights into the concepts of minstrelsy, ballads, and authenticity. The minstrel’s trail branched in many directions, shaped by the competing conscious and unconscious social aims of different writers, readers, performers, and audiences. “Minstrelsy” could connote racist parody, but it could also connote “pure” national origins, and indeed the idea of the folk song became foundational to W. E. B. DuBois as he imagined the color line. Rather than telling a straightforward story about authentic originators versus “love-and-theft” copyists, then, Cohen’s account suggests that American ballads were vital social forms that were enriched by multiple modes of composition, circulation, and reception.
QUOTED: "Smart, exploratory, and deeply grounded in poetic practice, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America makes a meaningful contribution to our understanding of how poems permeated nineteenth-century U.S. culture."
David Haven Blake
(unable to paste review)
QUOTED: "this excellent volume will be of interest to anyone who wants to think more about the circulation, reception, and creation either of poetry or of literature in the nineteenth century. The book is a smart, readable, worthwhile, and helpful addition to on-going studies of the history of reading."
Published by SB on December 10, 2016
Michael C. Cohen. The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 281p., 23 ill. ISBN 9780812247084. US $55.00.
Michael C. Cohen’s The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America is a fascinating and full account of the relationships between poems and readers between the 1790s and early 1900s. Dedicated to a “lived history of literary writing in the United States,” Cohen investigates the “variety of social relations that poems made possible,” both materially and theoretically (1). His six substantial chapters (and an introduction) move through history, from itinerate balladmongers (chapter 1); abolitionist verse (chapter 2), poems about contraband slaves (chapter 3); the mid-century desire to collect supposedly authentic oral ballads (chapter 4); how the postbellum country reimagined J. G. Whittier as a national poet by forgetting his abolitionist verse (chapter 5); and finally, the Fisk Singers and the racial politics of slave songs and black minstrelsy. (John Greenleaf Whittier and his poems crop up repeatedly and serve as a sort of through-line in the book.)
Throughout The Social Lives of Poems Cohen thinks not just about the formal features of these poems but also about how “poems facilitated actions, like reading, writing, reciting, copying, inscribing, scissoring, exchanging, or circulating, that positioned people within densely complex webs of relation” (6-7). His book, then, portrays multiple communities being formed through the exchange and use of “popular” (i.e. used by the people) verse of all different sorts. Sometimes such exchange means that poems were not even read (and certainly not close-read) and their non-reading had cultural import, as in, for example, American Anti-Slavery Society mailings sent to the South and burned upon arrival in riots that helped precipitate the “gag rule” against anti-slavery petitions in Congress. In taking this tack, Cohen’s book joins the work of, among others, Mary Loeffelholz and Joan Shelley Rubin, who have written about how U.S. poems were read and received, as well as Meredith McGill, Ellen Gruber Garvey, and Leah Price, who have worked on the circulation and use of the written word in the nineteenth century.
Cohen’s interest in non-reading ironically relates to my one small complaint about this dense, long volume. Cohen leaves most all of his many off-set quotations hanging off the end of paragraphs and thereby frustrates any readerly attempt to skim the quotations and skip to the analysis. These nineteenth-century poems may not have been read in their day, but Cohen wants to ensure his readers read each excerpt.
In pulling together this rich archive of nineteenth-century poems, Cohen’s book does a great service. I could not but be fascinated by the “Melancholy Shipwreck” ballad from 1807, its work as a news report, and its wonderful header of black coffins (shown in an image). So too, the beautiful manuscript book made by John Greenleaf Whittier’s friends – and Cohen’s astute treatment of how this group of friends used poems – was wonderful. And, notably, there are no fewer than 23 images within The Social Lives of Poems, five of this remarkable Whittier manuscript book. Ultimately, this excellent volume will be of interest to anyone who wants to think more about the circulation, reception, and creation either of poetry or of literature in the nineteenth century. The book is a smart, readable, worthwhile, and helpful addition to on-going studies of the history of reading.
Lydia G. Fash
Boston University