NAFTA Superhighway Poetics

Driving the width of USAmerica from Minnesota to Texas and back as I did the past two weeks (and may again later this summer), I began to imagine somewhere in Kansas or Missouri what a tri-national, social, cultural, and politicized middle North American poetry and poetics would look like, sound like, and read like. It’s a thought I return to with some regularity--child of rust-belt Buffalo, educated on the outskirts of Toledo, sequestered the past two decades at the western edge of the Great Lakes, or, as Lorine Niedecker called the region, “North Central” (though that’s perhaps a more apt moniker for Thunder Bay or Nunavut than south-east Wisconsin). Having read and studied the New York Schools and San Francisco Renaissances of the previous century, as well as the countless other coastal poetry and poetics communities of eras far and close, I can’t help but try to imagine a geography of North America poetry production centers recalibrated along a North-South Central axis.
Try to imagine a continuum that begins with Magnus Einarsson’s Icelandic Canadian Popular Verse composed on farms north of Winnipeg and ends with Subcomandante Marcos’s versification at the Zapatista Encuentro “for humanity and against neoliberalism” in Chiapas in 1996; try to imagine “the port of Kansas City” (as some of the NAFTA superhighway literature describes) and its potential poet laureate Diane Glancy--her book Claiming Breath is central, I think, to any reading of what, here in the US nation-state, we might imaginatively dub an emergent US-35 literary tradition.

And while speaking of US-35, its urban centers and the grasslands and fields and pastures that connect them, what would be the profound works of poetry and imaginative writing--like those published after 9/11 (from Kamau Brathwaite’s “Hawk...” to Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, to cite just two)--penned in the wake of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 (one year after the passage of NAFTA) in Oklahoma City and the collapse of the US-35W bridge here in Minneapolis last summer? The incredibly moving Oklahoma City Memorial, designed by Hans and Torrey Butzer (University of Texas-Austin graduates) with associate Sven Berg, might be read as but one post in the foundation of the social poetics I’m proposing here.
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The Government of Canada, the Government of the United Mexican States and the Government of the United States of America, resolved to:
STRENGTHEN the special bonds of friendship and cooperation among their nations;
CONTRIBUTE to the harmonious development and expansion of world trade and provide a catalyst to broader international cooperation;
CREATE an expanded and secure market for the goods and services produced in their territories;
REDUCE distortions to trade;
ESTABLISH clear and mutually advantageous rules governing their trade;
ENSURE a predictable commercial framework for business planning and investment;
BUILD on their respective rights and obligations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and other multilateral and bilateral instruments of cooperation;
ENHANCE the competitiveness of their firms in global markets;
FOSTER creativity and innovation, and promote trade in goods and services that are the subject of intellectual property rights;
CREATE new employment opportunities and improve working conditions and living standards in their respective territories;
UNDERTAKE each of the preceding in a manner consistent with environmental protection and conservation;
PRESERVE their flexibility to safeguard the public welfare;
PROMOTE sustainable development;
STRENGTHEN the development and enforcement of environmental laws and regulations; and
PROTECT, enhance and enforce basic workers' rights;
HAVE AGREED as follows:
So reads the NAFTA Preamble. What “follows”? Who among us has read (even parts of) the document? [Note: Now you have.] Who are its writers and readers? Who writes against it (in its wake), its policies, its poetics (for, as I’ve argued elsewhere, it certainly has a poetics, no?)? What is or will be the NAFTA Superhighway’s On the Road?
In the Wal-Marts and Subways and state-maintained rest areas; in the gas stations of Guadalajara and Wichita and Churchill (in northern Manitoba, on Hudson Bay); in the diesel semi’s and the hybrid Toyotas, in the windmills, in the floodwaters of Des Moines and Cedar Rapids and Iowa City; in the minds of drivers and service providers and citizens (and not-yet- and never-to-be- citizens) of the communities that line the NAFTA superhighway, something central for 21st century poetry is germinating. You can feel it when your hands are on the wheel, when your toes are in the soil, you can feel it at Love’s Truck Stop when you’re emptying your body of the thermos of Chinese green tea you bought in St. Paul (at the unionized Kowalski’s market) and brewed in a (non-union, right-to-work state) Fort Worth motel and finished drinking somewhere along US-35 in Missouri or Kansas. From communities that coagulate around the Diego Rivera murals of Mexico City to the Winnipeg folk festival (and North and South from there), a poetics is waiting to be born. And it’s up to us to write the anti-narrative to the perverse and privatizing 22 chapter prose text we all live and breathe beneath. And soon.