The Christmas City

This project is a work of “research-creation” tentatively entitled The Christmas City. The work, which will utilize documentary poetics, lyric essay, citational collage, photography, and more “traditional” lyric poetry, will be an examination of the socioeconomic history of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, particularly as it pertains to the steel industry. Using Penn State’s United Steelworkers archives, as well as the “Beyond Steel” archives at Lehigh University, I aim to write a regional history that is simultaneously radically democratic at its root and progressive in its aesthetics, weaving a tightly networked picture of a city whose transformations, successes, and failures are in many ways metonyms for a global economic system transformed by capitalism’s continued expansion. This project is an ambitious one: it does not confine itself to one genre of writing, nor does it adhere to the disciplinary conventions of one field of the humanities or social sciences. Instead, it aims to do what the best creative works do: to try and hold a picture of the world steady, and to create out of the inevitable failure to do so a moving and intellectually rigorous picture of the fluctuations and slippages that make such holding impossible. Sandwiched between America’s rust and coal belts, at the very northern edge of Appalachia, the story of Bethlehem Steel is a particularly rich case study in the rise and stagnation of American imperialism. 

Among my guiding inquiries for this project are the following: how do you grieve a place whose zenith involved the exploitation and su ering of so many? And then how at the same time do you valorize the struggles of those who strove to make that zenith more humane? What does it mean to be from, or to live in, a place undergoing the troublesome move from “postindustrial” to “urban revival”? How can we map the transformations of capitalism over the course of the twentieth century onto the people and landscapes that both drive and bear the brunt of those transformations? 

To provide answers to these questions that are both intellectually rigorous but also emotionally and linguistically resonant, I plan to cover a range of topics that will lend themselves to poetic treatment. The book will explore Bethlehem’s pre-Steel history, beginning with the early Moravian settlers who practiced a fascinating form of communal living while still justifying the holding of enslaved Africans; it will connect this history to the author’s own early education, which took place in some of the schools that these Moravians had set up hundreds of years prior. A large part of the focus of the project will be devoted to labour in all of its guises: the massive organizing e orts that characterized the period around the second world war and the outsized influence of a relatively small American town on the industrial e orts that fueled that war; as well as the subsequent decline of organized labor and its replacement by the various service industries that dominate the region today. 

Working on this project under the auspices of AHL3900, an interested student will be trained to perform research in online databases (such as the Archives and Special Collections databases at Lehigh University and Moravian University), and to compile bibliographies, using uO’s library catalogue and WorldCAT. Specifically for the purposes of this assistantship, I will be looking for research work related to poetry of place: both primary and secondary materials (books of poems or hybrid works and works of criticism, respectively). Training will involve regular meetings during which I will lay out the kind of information I’m looking for, and will introduce the student to the databases that they’ll be working with that week or month. They will also learn effective keywording strategies, and several longer meetings will be devoted to finding through-lines and points of comparison between di erent sets of texts. I would also look forward to involving this student in the creation and organization of potential course plans related to the project, which would not only help me to envision future pedagogical linkages with my research but would also provide an undergraduate student in particular a rare glimpse into the transformation of research questions into the syllabi that they see every semester in their classes. Overall, the research assistance needs of this project promise to train students in a wide variety of skills related to basic discovery, data collection and organization, and professional communication.  

In-person meetings: 12 hours (one hour per week or two hours biweekly depending on the task), supplemented if necessary with an additional 3 hours worth of virtual check-ins 

Bibliographical searches: 20 hours 

Reading: 25 hours 

Collating texts, organizing bibliography, writing abstracts/descriptions: 30 hours 

TOTAL: 90 hours