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SMITH-DISSERTATION.Pdf (3.148Mb) Copyright by Laura Trantham Smith 2010 The Dissertation (or Treatise) Committee for Laura Trantham Smith Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation (or treatise): After Rupture: Innovative Identities and the Formalist Poetry of Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley Committee: Lisa L. Moore, Co-Supervisor Meta DuEwa Jones, Co-Supervisor Ann Cvetkovich Coleman Hutchison Roberto Tejada After Rupture: Innovative Identities and the Formalist Poetry of Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley by Laura Trantham Smith, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2010 Dedication For my teachers and my families, in their many and varied forms. Acknowledgements This project is indebted to Dr. Lisa L. Moore, who affirmed and invested in me long before it was conceived. I am grateful for her generous and spirited guidance and support—personal, artistic, spiritual, and academic. The guidance of Dr. Meta DuEwa Jones has been crucial to my growth as a scholar. Dr. Jones took this project seriously when it was largely inchoate and helped me gradually to understand its implications. I am grateful for her high standards, her enthusiastic engagement, her patience, and her unwavering commitment to my training. Dr. Moore’s dissertation group offered community and engaged readership, week after week. In particular, I want to thank Caroline Wigginton, Layne Craig, Michelle Lee, Catherine Bacon, Amena Moinfar, Nandini Dhar, Naminata Diabate, and Molly Hardy for their rigorous readings of these chapters, their hard questions, and their support. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Moore for creating this community—it has been instrumental to the development of this project. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have the ongoing involvement of Cole Hutchison, Ann Cvetkovich, and Roberto Tejada, who responded to drafts and offered their perspective throughout the writing process. This project has benefitted greatly from my having such an active and engaged committee. I had the opportunity to participate in workshops with two of the writers featured in this dissertation, Sharon Bridgforth and Akilah Oliver, and these exchanges have been instrumental to my scholarly and creative growth. “Writing Down the Bones,” a v workshop led by Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Jones and hosted by the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas, gave me insight into Bridgforth’s artistic process and the importance of creative community networks to her work. Akilah Oliver’s Anti-Memoir Workshop, offered through the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, gave me the opportunity to explore my thinking about memory in creative forms. A Presidential Excellence Fellowship gave me the time and space to complete much of the writing of this dissertation. I am grateful to the English Department at the University of Texas for its commitment to supporting late-stage graduate students and for its tenacious, inventive, and determined approach to graduate student funding, especially in sordid budgetary times. Travel grants from the University of Texas Office of Graduate Studies allowed me to attend Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program in the summers of 2008 and 2009. A Cohen New Works Festival Seed Grant allowed me the opportunity to explore Notley’s The Descent of Alette through performance prior to writing the final chapter. Lastly, I want to thank Allison, Kristin, Catherine, and James for their sustaining presence on the vexed scene of writing and thinking. vi After Rupture: Innovative Identities and the Formalist Poetry of Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley Publication No._____________ Laura Trantham Smith, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisors: Lisa L. Moore and Meta DuEwa Jones Abstract: This dissertation reveals a twentieth-century tradition of poetic formalism that positions race, gender, and sexuality as formal concerns, and further, as key factors in the development of contemporary formal poetics. My readings of three contemporary poets, Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley, combine formalist analysis with cultural approaches, including critical race theory and queer theory, to show how contemporary poets use form to confront racist, sexist, and homophobic representational traditions and to reshape identity discourse. This project intervenes in a critical tradition that divorces poetic form from political context and neglects formal aspects of poetries that engage with social identities, especially African American poetry. As Notley, Oliver, and Bridgforth portray racial, gender, and sexual diversity—including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered bodies—they invent and remake forms, genres, and textual strategies, from the feminist epic to the performance novel. These new forms exceed the strategies of rupture, fracture, and fragmentation that marked many modern and postmodern experiments and, in fact, reveal the limitations of rupture as a means of political critique. Instead, they widen the field of formalism, incorporating performance genres (epic, storytelling, blues) and new textual strategies to call attention to the histories of bodies and their representations, assert interdependent identities, promote pluralism, and insist on the interrelationship of literature, orality, and bodily experience. vii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION: "WE WHO STRUGGLE WITH FORM AND WITH AMERICA": RUPTURE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY 1 Chapter One: From Rupture to Remembering: Flesh Memory and the Embodied Experimentalism of Akilah Oliver ...............................................................49 Chapter Two: Of Being Multiple: Orality, Embodiment, and Textuality in Sharon Bridgforth’s love conjure/blues ....................................................................74 Chapter Three: Traumatic Histories and the Epic Genre: The Politics of Poetic and Bodily Forms in Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette ............117 CONCLUSION: THE POETRY OF MULTIPLE IDENTITIES 160 Bibliography ........................................................................................................169 Vita .....................................................................................................................178 viii INTRODUCTION “We who struggle with form and with America”1: Rupture and Identity in Contemporary American Poetics In the days following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a number of poetry critics who were to give a panel on “Modernist Influence on Contemporary Poetry” at the upcoming Modernist Studies Association conference met online to discuss the appropriateness of going forward with the conference plans in light of the disaster. Their discussion quickly turned into a conversation about poetry in the ongoing context of twentieth-century and contemporary violence. Poet and critic Lorenzo Thomas asked, “How to write after historical disaster, in the face of organized violence of the level of 9-11 (or of the Red Summer, World War I, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, on & on) in a way that does not reiterate the epistemological shape of violence?” (Bibby n. pag.).2 Thomas’ concern that poetic modes can repeat or reenact the “epistemological shape of violence” was echoed by the critic Michael Bibby. He asked: 1 Ralph Ellison, “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion.” Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964: 102-106. 2 I have mixed feelings about opening my dissertation with a reference to the tragic events of September, 11, 2001, particularly because these events have been used to reinvigorate an ideology of American exceptionalism and to justify countless acts of subsequent violence. Yet, the longer history of violence in which Lorenzo Thomas situates this event provides a crucial corrective, linking these acts of terrorism to a longer history of such acts of terror, which have often taken the form of violence against groups othered by racial and ethnic identities. 1 Must contemporary poetic experimentation necessarily express its “newness”…via syntactic breaks and the paratactical methods favored by modernists? Why must “rupture” be the privileged modality of contemporary radical poetics? Why must the post-structural skepticism of suturing prevail? … Why must it be presumed that for a poem to be innovative and express its historicity it must present rupture, breaks, and fragmentation? … Why must the particular forms and modes of poetic experimentation which arose out of the historical experiences of the early 20th century still manifest such a powerful relation to the poetics of a postwar generation whose experiences of historical violence have been qualitatively and quantitatively different…? (Bibby, n. pag.) Thomas’ and Bibby’s questions raise concerns about the persistence of modernism’s forms of poetic response, which Bibby suggests, seemed necessary to represent the dislocations of early twentieth-century traumas.3 Yet they question rupture’s pervasiveness, its ongoing utility, and even its ethics as a dominant aesthetic and epistemological mode at the turn of the twenty-first century. Indeed, in the anthology American Women Poets of the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, Juliana Spahr suggests that not only
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