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―In a Shattered Language‖: A Feminist Poetics of Trauma A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Amy Kathleen Griffiths IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Maria Damon October 2011 © Amy Kathleen Griffiths 2011 Acknowledgements This project has had an uncommonly long gestation. At many stages in its development, people around me have provided the sustenance that has made its completion possible. To adequately express my gratitude in a single page to the many people who have seen me, and my work, through to this point is not possible (not even in a poem). Nonetheless, I believe in the power of naming, and in honoring the people who have honored me by thanking them by name: First among these is my advisor, Maria Damon, who has been a stalwart defender of my project, a generous and playful reader of my work, and a patient guide throughout my writing process. Maria‘s willingness to put her faith in me in writing—whether in letters of recommendation or in a note of encouragement in my journal—has buoyed me into a more creative kind of scholarship than I knew I could accomplish. I would also like to thank the members of my doctoral committee: Madelon Sprengnether, who was the first to say yes to this project, and whose incisive intellect has been an indispensible tonic to the overwhelming experience of studying trauma; Siobhan Craig, who taught me to believe in ―intellectual joy,‖ and whose genuine interest in my ideas fortified my commitment to finishing this dissertation; and Lynn Lukkas, whose perspective as an artist has not only enriched my study of poetry, but has reminded me that I, too, am an artist in my own way. I offer deepest appreciation to the University of Minnesota Graduate School for awarding me both the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and the Thesis Research Grant, and to the Department of English for awarding me a Graduate Research Partnership. These grants, offering the twin gifts of time and money, made possible the most important discoveries of this project by directly funding archival research. I am grateful to Lynda Claasen, director of the Mandeville Collections in the UCSD library, for granting me access to the papers of Hannah Weiner and Bernadette Mayer. I am particularly indebted to Patrick Durgin, whose generous email correspondence guided my research, and without whose efforts to produce Hannah Weiner‘s Open House I might never have gotten to know Weiner‘s work. Though the actual writing of this dissertation has often been accomplished in solitude, I have not been alone in the process of working through my ideas: for their thoughtful responses to my writing and thinking, their camaraderie, and their facility with a good joke, I thank my fellow graduate students, especially Sara Cohen, Liz Hutter, Chris Kamerbeek, Dana Schumacher, Laura Zebuhr, and particularly Rebecca Weaver, who, as a fellow ―poetry-person,‖ has offered crucial support and understanding throughout my dissertation writing process. I am fortunate to also have friends beyond the department who have cheered me on: a lifetime of thanks to Virginia Corbett, Tricia Johnson, Sandra Struthers, Donovan Walsh and Rachel Walsh, and Liz Ward. I am particularly blessed to count among my best friends members of my own family, without whom I simply would not be where or who I am. My deepest gratitude to my aunt, Margaret Haggerty, my sister, Shannon Bogan, my brother, George Byron Griffiths, and my parents, George Griffiths and Bonnie Griffiths; and finally, to my fiancé, Matthew Arnheiter, for loving me all along. i Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the residents of Raphael House of Portland, Oregon, for teaching me how to listen to silence, and to my family, with more love than words can say. ii Table of Contents Prologue Toward a (Po)Et(h)ics of Reading Trauma Poetry 1 Chapter One One Halted Name: The Interpretation of “Trauma” and the Trauma of Interpretation 14 Chapter Two “While Someone Else is Eating”: The Dialectic of the Extreme and the Everyday in Frances Driscoll‟s The Rape Poems 88 Chapter Three Traumatizing the Lyric “I”: Poetic Subjectivity in Betsy Warland‟s The Bat Had Blue Eyes 174 Chapter Four Traumatic Consciousness: The Poetry of Interpretation in Hannah Weiner‟s Archive 237 Bibliography 318 iii Prologue Toward a (Po)Et(h)ics of Reading Trauma Poetry I. The 2011 South Korean film, Poetry, begins with a dead body. Four boys are playing along a riverside, when one of them sees a white shape floating downstream toward him. The camera‘s gaze follows this whiteness, and as it comes closer, we see the white shape is attached to a black roundness: it can only be a human corpse. The body, face-down, is female, dressed in a white blouse and plaid skirt—a school uniform. A few scenes later viewers learn she is a suicide. Poetry is the story of Mija, a Korean woman in her late 60s, living on government aid and working part-time as a personal care attendant to a man who has been debilitated by a stroke. She bathes him, changes his clothes, cleans his apartment, and gives him his medicine, communicating with him despite his aphasia. She is also raising her middle- school aged grandson who, we soon learn, was a classmate of the deceased girl. His insolence, lethargy, and sense of entitlement are equal parts teenage ennui and male privilege. Mija feeds him, picks up after him, and pays to support him, enduring his disrespect with hardly a reprimand. He says little, yet fills her life with noise: a jabbering TV, an overloud stereo, and rasping bags of junk food left in the middle of the floor. One afternoon, enticed by a poster for a poetry writing workshop at the cultural center, Mija begs her way in to a full class, and begins, at the teacher‘s behest, to look at 1 the world around her more deliberately, in order to really see it, and to find poetic inspiration in beauty. Such inspiration does not come. Instead, Mija learns that her grandson and his friends are responsible for the young girl‘s death: they have been raping her in the science lab at school for several months. The girl kept a diary, and when her mother reads it and discovers the cause of her daughter‘s suicide, she reports it to the school administrators. Desperate to keep this news from ruining the school‘s reputation, and these boys‘ futures, the fathers of the other boys, encouraged by the administrators to do so, hold a secret meeting (which Mija is coerced into attending) to decide how much money each family will pay the girl‘s mother in ―restitution‖—a settlement to secure her silence about the rapes, and to shield their sons from any consequences for their behavior. The men agree to a figure, but never ask for Mija‘s assent, and without participating in the conversation at all, she gets up and leaves. In fact, she goes outside to look at flowers and make notes about them for a poem. Mija has been warned to keep her silence as well, to avoid talking to reporters or the police, who have caught the scent of the cover-up. But hers is a watchful, listening silence: she begins to seek out encounters with the dead girl‘s world: she slips into the funeral Mass, listening for only a few minutes from a back pew; as her grandson plays on a school sports field, she wanders inside to peer through the windows of the science lab; and one afternoon she takes the bus to the bridge where the girl fell to her death. She stands at its guardrail, looking down, and her white hat, lost to a gust of wind, falls into the water. Soon after, she takes out her notebook. The camera‘s gaze becomes her gaze, 2 and as she stares at the blank page, which fills the screen, drops splash and darken the paper: writing with water that might be teardrops or raindrops or both. Mija sits silently at the riverside as she is soaked by the sudden downpour. *** Promotional previews for Poetry promise the story of a woman who is suffering from Alzheimer‘s, and who is fighting time, losing her access to words even as she is finding them anew through poetry. They make no mention whatsoever of Agnes‘s suicide, or of the rapes, or of Mija‘s sense of guilt for her grandson‘s acts. The film‘s promoters, and reviewers, it seems, have less courage than the filmmaker. Evidently a small-budget, foreign-language film with not only the word ―poetry‖ in the title, but the one word, Poetry, AS the title, was already enough of a commercial risk—any additional mention of difficulties including ―rape‖ or ―suicide‖ would have been, apparently, marketing lunacy. But in fact, Mija‘s irreversible decline is certainly not the central conflict of the film. Instead, her disease is at a quite early stage; in one scene she fumbles to give a taxi driver directions when she forgets the word for ―bus stop,‖ and in another, she searches for her wallet, only to have a cashier point out to her that she is holding it in her hand. Although she reports to her doctor that she has been forgetting words, within the film, only these few scenes suggest the (limited) extent of her language loss. Indeed, she manages her self-care with aplomb and a great deal of independence.

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