On the Margins

Abstract

While early and hostile readings of suburbia have depicted it as an insubstantial “no place,” suspended between the two (positive) poles of city and country, and devoid of identity, the poetry of the suburbs has specifically embraced this marginal, liminal, in-between space, and has found it to be plangent with meaning. As John Updike explained in a 1966 interview, “I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules” (Howard 11). His interest, one which is shared by many of the poets in this book, lies in “middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery” (qtd. in Ostler 2). It is the “ambiguity” and “mystery” that dominate in the poems discussed below—poems that are often set in the spatially and temporally liminal zone of the suburbs at twilight.¹ The suburbs as night falls represent, for (white) male subjects in particular, a transitional space (Shields 83), one that seems at one and the same time, suffocating and replete with possibilities.² The poems that follow use the indeterminacy of this place and time as a way of contemplating the perceived uncertainties of contemporary suburban existence and, more specifically, of exercising the potentially compromised position of the suburban poet who plays the parts simultaneously of spokesperson for and critic of the status quo. This is sometimes a self-pitying position, as seen most bathetically in the group of suburban lawn-care poems discussed already.