Epitaph for the American Idea

Eric Weiskott reviews Elizabeth Willis’s “Liontaming in America.”

By Eric WeiskottOctober 29, 2024

• Poetry

• Literary Criticism

IN 2006, DURING a phase in American political history dominated by the reaction to the September 11 attacks, which took the form of a real war waged by the US government against an abstraction, literary critic Wai Chee Dimock proposed the term “deep time” to name the remarkable durability and flexibility of literary practice. She defined deep time as follows:

a set of longitudinal frames, at once projective and recessional, with input going both ways, and binding continents and millennia into many loops of relations, a densely interactive fabric. Restored to this, American literature emerges with a much longer history than one might think.

Dimock’s term does not appear in Elizabeth Willis’s wildly intelligent epic Liontaming in America, which engages other archives than that of Americanist literary criticism. But the book, published last month by New Directions, is as ambitious, multifarious, and accomplished as American literary history is in Dimock’s evaluation. Willis’s book comes to conclusions similar to Dimock’s about the vastnesses of the American project and the unfolding of a continental and indeed intercontinental drama in which we are all out of our depth.

Organized into 21 sections with epigraphs and images framing prose and poetry, Liontaming in America is many things: a critical history of Mormonism; a celebration of the communities that women create between the lines of large historical forces; a sustained meditation on conquest, emigration, and the violence of settlement; a family saga; an anatomy of political theology; a coruscating spiritual biography; a defense of poetry; an argument on behalf of the future; an evisceration of Hollywood’s escape fantasies; a delicately drawn cartography of everyday life; an epitaph for the American idea. The book is as sprawling as the country it addresses, “that ancient shore.” “I’m not speaking for you, I’m speaking to you, America,” she writes in the opening poem. It is the work of a lifetime, assembled from “decades of inquiry” in the archives of political and religious life, as Willis notes in the acknowledgments.

The book’s threnodies circle, in what Dimock called “loops of relations,” around a series of mobile figures: lion, mirror, angel, alien, prophet, actor. The lion, for example, is at once a circus animal, the emblem of MGM Studios, and Brigham Young’s residence (Lion House). Or one could apprehend Liontaming in America as an investigation into a small set of recurrent abstract verbs: define, encounter, name, perform, represent. Or again, a group of spatiotemporal nouns orchestrates the book: body, church, ground, occasion, theater. Willis seeks “the story behind the story.” How something as complex as a nation could dissolve into words—and does—is one of the principal questions the book pursues. “Poetry,” for Willis, “is redirected silence.”

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Fans of Willis have been anticipating this publication for nearly a decade—myself among them, having studied with her at Wesleyan University in the 2000s. Her last book, Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015), was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Liontaming in America was among 10 titles long-listed for the National Book Award in poetry, alongside Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma (New Directions), which it resembles in form, though not in theme. (Carson’s book has subsequently been short-listed.) Having come out of the Northeastern US avant-garde poetry world in the 1990s, Willis has moved from strength to strength. For those who know them, each of her past books contributes something to this one: Liontaming in America encompasses the historicity of Second Law (Avenue B, 1993), the love language of The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995), the film-review snark of Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003), the florid lyricism of Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan, 2006), the art-historical eye of the chapbook All the Paintings of Giorgione (Belladonna*, 2006), and especially the political edge of Address (Wesleyan, 2011). However, the self-evident continuity of concerns in her career is belied by the sharp formal turn that Liontaming takes. The book represents a significant departure from all that Willis has written before. First of all, at 320 pages, it is a veritable epic, nearly three times as long as any of her other stand-alone books of poetry.

More importantly, the voice of Willis’s writing is opened up a good deal. Like Claudia Rankine, when she turned from Plot (Grove, 2001) to Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2004), or like Ben Lerner, when he turned from the poem to the novel, Willis has now determined to crack the seal on her riotously fertile yet hermetic (prose) poetry, as found in the previous books curated in Alive. A sample, from Meteoric Flowers, whose interlocutor is the naturalist and poet Erasmus Darwin:

Silvery measures are being cut down, tricked by sun to slaughter. My elm won’t even let me break a sweat, something to believe by or just forget the dream, a fiery underlife, my score. My part becomes a piece of glass, a hand outside, against the one inside it. Make that ship you’re thinking of a ship already, so I’ll find it, in the water, in the sun.

The imagery of Liontaming in America remains often mystical; wordplay and violent changes in topic abound—it’s still poetry, in other words—yet it frequently looks and sounds more like a history lesson or a film review or a biography. Willis names names and dates dates:

Mrs. Young’s daughter Miss Charlotte Ives Cobb first married a Mr. William Godbe just as he became the leader of the dissident, liberal Godbeites who formed the Church of Zion.

The Godbes invited and hosted Mrs. E. C. Stanton and Mrs. S. B. Anthony in Great Salt Lake City in 1871.

Seeking “historical self-knowledge,” Liontaming in America explores how it is that “power is both real and imaginary, as the mission of real power is to lay hold upon the imagination.” Because power is real, the dates and the underlying research have to be true. But because power is at the same time imaginary, the method to begin to dismantle it is to enlist the conventions of imaginative writing. This makes the work “an imaginary garden with real people.” Persons of interest include Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Augusta Adams Cobb Young, Eliza Roxcy Snow Smith, the actress Maude Adams, Paul Robeson, the sorceress Circe, and Augustine of Hippo. A leitmotif is how families form, and the consequences of affinities claimed, disclaimed, or imposed: “Who this ground belongs to. Who belongs to this ground.” If many general literary readers have not yet heard of Elizabeth Willis—they will.

Poetry, “witness to the invisible,” is Willis’s favored mode even where the book merges into biography or archival reportage. The more difficult lyric style of Willis’s past books, with line breaks, appears sporadically in Liontaming as an “interlude” (the title of one poem) or garnish. Sometimes the words are someone else’s. There are unique experiments, such as a poem created by redacting a 19th-century essay, and an alphabetical list of names. For the most part, however, Willis allows the postulates of lyric—a situation of address between an I and a you who may occupy different spaces and who cannot communicate except through the poem, fugue-like revisitation of ideas already raised, collision of the abstract category and the particular case, simile and metaphor—to guide her mode of proceeding through her materials. She redescribes worship so it sounds like theater, theater so it sounds like film, film so it sounds like poetry, poetry so it sounds like devotion.

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The Robeson section, “Sometimes,” is one of several seeming digressions in Liontaming in America that are ultimately recuperated into a higher harmony. The opening poem, “Sometimes It Causes Me to Tremble,” takes its title from Robeson’s interpretation of the spiritual “Were You There?” The point of entry is a concert given by Robeson in Billings, Montana, and attended by Willis’s mother—about whom we have, up to this point in the book, learned nothing else. The poem’s conclusion takes extraordinary risks with second-person address:

What did the song mean to this man who organized the world with his voice?

Did the stage feel like a scaffold or a throne or some other kind of platform on the way to the end of the line?

Was it you who kissed him in the garden? You who watched from a distance as he dragged a tree up a hill?

Were you there when he reached toward the glove box?

When he tried to tell them who he was? When he lay in the street with a polished boot against his wrists?

Did you see him raise his hands?

Did you say I know this man? Did you name his name?

The song’s you coincides with the poem’s. On the previous page, “Were you there when this happened?” is made to sound like Willis addressing her mother, who we learn died during the writing of Liontaming. The story about going to hear Robeson in Billings “is what she had to say the last time I saw her alive.” By contrast, the you of the closing sequence shifts into a general lyric you, a person coterminous with the audience created by the very poem you are reading, and therefore newly accusatory in its familiarity. The catena of images hurries us from the crucifixion of Jesus to Robeson’s precarious fame to the police murders of Black men and women in this century that in part provoked analogous experimentation with lyric address in Rankine’s Citizen (Graywolf, 2014). “Sometimes It Causes Me to Tremble” is complex in its polyvalent pronouns but never cryptic in the manner of Meteoric Flowers. If “improvisation is not the domain of any avant-garde but the underlying reality of survival,” as declared in the next poem in the Robeson section, it follows that the tools of avant-garde lyric address are not different in kind from the strategies anybody (or any body) might enlist to endure an unsurvivable world.

With Liontaming in America, Willis embraces the very real risk of being understood. The book is experimental yet transparent. Her politics, family history, archival research, and theory of poetry are fully on display as never before. The result is a work that demands our presence and our continuous attention to the self-delusions of performance and representation in a country known to “spool out like a motion picture” when viewed from a train car. The book teaches focus, discipline, and compassion. “Gradually the mind sets down the weight of everything else.”