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Vernacular Poetics in Postwar America by Jonathan Other Than a Citizen: Vernacular Poetics in Postwar America by Jonathan Peter Moore Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Co-supervisor ___________________________ Frederick Moten, Co-supervisor ___________________________ Joseph Donahue ___________________________ Nathaniel Mackey Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 ABSTRACT Other Than a Citizen: Vernacular Poetics in Postwar America by Jonathan Peter Moore Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Co-supervisor ___________________________ Frederick Moten, Co-supervisor ___________________________ Joseph Donahue ___________________________ Nathaniel Mackey An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 Copyright by Jonathan Peter Moore 2015 Abstract Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a white consumer public reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid- century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America. In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter iv the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of textual capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America represented unprecedented imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship. v Dedication For my mother and father, the first vernacular speakers I ever met. vi Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... x 1. Home-born Exiles: The Doublespeak of Vernacular Poetics .............................................. 1 1.1 In the American Veneer ................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Ranch-Style Renovations ............................................................................................... 17 1.3 Subversive Intonation: The Vernacular of Fluidity ................................................... 11 1.4 Swayed in America: The Vernacular of Fixity ........................................................... 25 1.5 The Vernacular Basement of the Speech-Based House Un-American ................... 38 2. It Ain’t Easy, Bro: Charles Olson and the Vernacular of Obstruction ............................. 50 2.1 One Speech Makes Many: The Critical Reception of Olson’s Speech-Based Poetics ................................................................................................................................................. 54 2.2 Least Song: the Measure of Vernacular Obstruction ................................................. 64 2.3 By ear, he sd: The Vernacular Countermand to Commercial Language ............... 75 2.3.1 The Vernacular of Mu-sick ....................................................................................... 80 2.3.2 The Vernacular of Difficulty .................................................................................... 85 2.4 The Usefulness of Place: The Regional Particularity of Olson’s Vernacular ......... 88 2.5 The Secrets Objects Share: Vernacular Materialism in Olson’s Poetics .................. 98 3. Beyond the Reality of the Incomparable: Robert Duncan and the Vernacular of Preliteracy .................................................................................................................................. 111 3.1 All Speech is Poetry ...................................................................................................... 112 3.2 Domestic Dispute ......................................................................................................... 117 vii 3.2.1 The Vernacular of Illiteracy ................................................................................... 119 3.2.2 The Vernacular of Preliteracy ................................................................................ 125 3.3 Phonetic Correspondence ........................................................................................... 136 3.4 To Do Something Big For America ............................................................................ 145 3.5 Free Speech .................................................................................................................... 151 3.6 The Insubordinate Child ............................................................................................. 159 4. Mute Inglorious Minions: LeRoi Jones and the Vernacular of Silence ......................... 160 4.1 From “How You Sound” to Holding Our Tongue .................................................. 164 4.2 Dead Lecturer, Silent Poet ........................................................................................... 174 4.3 The Silence of Unspeakable Tragedy ......................................................................... 183 4.4 The Silence of Suppressive Canons ........................................................................... 188 4.5 The Silence of Racial Send Up .................................................................................... 195 4.6 Echoes of Silence ........................................................................................................... 205 5. How Shall the Law Allow for Littleness: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Vernacular of Uncertainty ................................................................................................................................ 207 5.1 In the Guise of Certainty: Mastery and Deformation ............................................. 211 5.2 Call Them Common Things: Vernacular in the Restricted Sense ......................... 221 5.3 Strangest Place in Chicago .......................................................................................... 225 5.4 Domestic Disturbance .................................................................................................. 233 5.5 Let the Fair Fables Fall ................................................................................................. 239 5.6 Gwendolyn Brooks and the Vernacular Counter-Anthem .................................... 249 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 239 viii Biography ..................................................................................................................................
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