Calling Out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics Nadine A. Maestas A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2012 Reading Committee: Brian Reed, Chair Paul Remley Jeanne Heuving Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2012 Nadine A. Maestas University of Washington Abstract Calling Out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics Nadine A. Maestas Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Brian Reed English Department This dissertation explores the relationship between the postmodern and the premodern in American poetry. Beginning with Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern, I move to incorporate Charles Olson’s introduction of the term postmodern in American letters. While Lyotards’ definition offers that the postmodern is against the meta narrative of modernity, Olson’s introduction of the term postmodern in 1952 emphasizes a temporal blurring that is central to the notion of the postmodern. After illustrating how the work of Olson, Burroughs, and Rothenberg are derived from anthropological and ethnographic exploration of premodern cultures and their poetic forms, I then move to the anthropologist Michael Taussig, whose contribution to the field was to turn anthropological analysis to critique Western culture. Taussig believes that our very means of representation are under siege, and that in order disrupt this siege of representation, writing must engage and disrupt the languages and images that reify the power of the modern nation-state. For Taussig, poetry can and does produce this type of disruption. My goal is to effectively apply anthropology as an alternative method of reading poetry. Though partly informed by anthropology, ethnopoetics, textual studies and literary studies, my method of anthropoetics heavily draws on the methodology of Michael Taussig. In Taussig’s methodology, the concept of returning is centralized, and in a sense will be centralized in this dissertation as well. I will show that the concept of returning to an origin in order to move forward is a significant defining practice of postmodern American poetics. Anthropoetics, in this project, is interested in exposing the material scene of the origin of texts by means of tracing the circulatory systems of poetry. In other words, the search for origins, as far as anthropoetics is concerned, is about the search for the first mimetic moment, the textual source from which the poem comes into being in order to see more clearly the ways in which poetic forms circulate across time periods as well as cultural and national borders. My analysis focuses on a select group of late 20th century poets who derive their influence from premodern pasts. I argue that a turn towards the premodern is a distinguishing factor in postmodern American poetry and that the intention was to move forward by way of immersion in the premodern. I further offer that this forward movement results in an increased sensitivity to the sound and materiality of the historical text. The poets I take up as part of this discussion include Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve McCaffery and Lisa Jarnot. I propose that in an attempt to exit the modern, these poets have immersed themselves in the premodern in order to recover and bring forward that which has fallen outside of Western modernity. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Anthropoetics and the Anthropological Imagination in Postmodern American Poetry ................................................................. 2 Chapter 2: The Premodern: Chant in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Anne Waldman’s “Fast Speaking Woman” ......................................................................... 19 Chapter 3: A Transhistoric Poetics in Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer...................... 69 Chapter 4: Sound as a Medium for Loss in Nathaniel Mackey “Song of the Andoumboulou” and Steve McCaffery’s “Lastworda” ............................ 117 Chapter 5: The Postmodern Lyric: A Comparative Analysis of Lisa Jarnot’s “Sea Lyrics” and the Anglo-Saxon poem “Dream of the Rood”....................... 162 INTRODUCTION “I define postmodern,” writes Lyotard in his seminal work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, “as incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv). Frederic Jameson, in his book Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, describes postmodernism as having a crisis in historicity. He writes that it “is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place” (ix). Jameson’s analysis points out, that time becomes cultural spaces in late capitalism. Instead of metanarratives, instead of a meta-history what we have in the postmodern is experiences of fracturing and multiplicity, surface play, incompleteness, unfixed meaning, the hybridization of culture all of which culminates as a desire to exit modernity. To put this in another way, what we call the postmodern is better called circumventing modernity. At stake in all of this are the Eurocentric meta-narratives that helped to define modernity. In his book, Magic of the State, the anthropologist Michael Taussig argues that the State, with a capital “S” is the culmination of modernity. In this sense, the postmodern condition is also characterized by the need to circumvent the state. In American poetry one avenue to circumventing modernity was the anthropological imagination that characterized postmodern poetry. Three significant literary figures play a prominent role in the promotion of an anthropological imagination: Charles Olson, 2 William Burroughs, and Jerome Rothenberg. For these three writers, the combination of the anthropological and the premodern resulted in an anthropological imagination and in American poetry the anthropological imagination plays an important role in shaping the aesthetic forms of the postmodern. In other words, the premodern and the non-Western would come to characterize postmodernism in American poetry. Lyotard provides us with a succinct definition and Jameson with a cultural analysis of the postmodern, but it was the poet Charles Olson that first introduced or applied the term postmodern to American literature. “I am an archaeologist of morning,” writes Olson in his 1952 essay titled “The Present is Prologue.” And the writing and acts which I find bear on the present job are (I) from Homer back, not forward; and (II) from Melville on, particularly himself, Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud and Lawrence. These were the modern men who projected what we are and what we are in, who broke the spell. They put men forward into the post- modern, the post-humanist, the post-historic, the going live present, the “Beautiful Thing” (Olson 207). In his short essay, Olson is arguably the first to introduce the term post-modern. His use of the term emphasizes a temporal blurring that is part of the postmodern turn. The blurring of time is evident in the essay “The Present is Prologue.” In his title the present is also the preface, the first event, the introduction, the preface. In a sense “The Present is Prologue” resists linear time and instead test its conceptual boundaries by playing with the denotative concepts of language. The very first sentence of his essay also reflects this temporal play in language. He initiates the essay by writing: “My shift is that I take it the present is the prologue, not the past” (205). 3 Olson’s definition of the postmodern stems from his anthropological imagination and was articulated around the time of his return from the Yucatan Peninsula. Documented in his Mayan Letters (1953), Olson explores and compares a Mayan system of the human universe with a westernized, meaning Eurocentric, view of the human universe. In doing so, he further develops his interest in the destruction of “historical time” and turning “time into…space” (Olson 26-27). Olson’s introduction of the term “post-modern” makes visible is the connection that postmodernism had to time and what Jameson describes as the crisis in historicity. Olson’s notation of the post-historic points to this crisis in historicity, but for Olson the project is looking backwards at the premodern, and the non Eurocentric, in order to break open or rupture the metanarrative of historicity. Two other important texts derived from an anthropological imagination and written around the same time as Olson’s Mayan Letters include William Burroughs Queer (1985) and The Yage Letters (1963). Queer, written between 1952 and 1953, reflects Burroughs’ time living in exile in Mexico. The book mentions yage throughout and culminates in the beginning of the search for the yage used by curanderas. Burroughs’ interest in yage was not just about getting high as many have supposed, but instead he envisions it as something that will help cure him of his heroin addiction. In this sense, Burroughs imagines yage as something that can cure him. After Queer, Burroughs wrote The Yage Letters, a series of letters written to Allen Ginsberg between 1952-1953. These letters chronicle Burroughs’ yage expedition. 4 Receiving these letters preceded Ginsberg’s own trip to Central America shortly before writing Howl and fed Ginsberg’s own imagination. In his introduction to The Yage Letters Redux, the Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris notes that Burroughs’ own background included graduate studies in anthropology at Harvard and Columbia, as well as “anthropology,