UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones 5-1-2013 In What Array That They They Were In and Participating Godlike Food Thomas Jackson Wills University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations Part of the Fiction Commons, and the Poetry Commons Repository Citation Wills, Thomas Jackson, "In What Array That They They Were In and Participating Godlike Food" (2013). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 1908. http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/4478327 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. 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IN WHAT ARRAY THAT THEY WERE IN and PARTICIPATING GODLIKE FOOD By Thomas Jackson Wills, Jr. Bachelor of Arts in English University of Iowa 2006 Master of Fine Arts in Poetry Writing University of Iowa 2008 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English College of Liberal Arts The Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas May 2013 i THE GRADUATE COLLEGE We recommend the dissertation prepared under our supervision by Thomas Jackson Wills, Jr. entitled In What Array That They Were In and Participating Godlike Food be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English Donald Revell, Ph.D., Committee Chair Claudia Keelan, M.F.A., Committee Member Vincent Perez, Ph.D., Committee Member Michael Tylo, M.F.A., Graduate College Representative Thomas Piechota, Ph.D., Interim Vice President for Research & Dean of the Graduate College May 2013 ii Abstract I am submitting two manuscripts for my creative dissertation, In What Array That They Were In and Participating Godlike Food. The former is a sequence of odes followed by a brief epic, followed by a cycle of verse dramas, with an ode epilogue. The latter is a book-length excerpt from an epic poem/crime novel/Menippean satire/television show/ Dada collage/historical document/vatic investigation that comes in 20 page sections that are supposed to approximate the 42 minutes of an average crime show. iii Preface to In What Array That They Were In and Participating Godlike Food For my creative dissertation , I am submitting two manuscripts, called In What Array That They Were In and Participating Godlike Food. *** In What Array That They Were In starts with a linked series of lyrics exploring the mechanisms and assumptions of the Pindaric and Horatian methods of ode, and about the Arab Spring and structure of history; then goes to a brief epic that explores the nature of the intersection of allegory, emblem, and document, with a post-phenomenological vision of the structure of the soul; and climaxes with a series of linked verse dramas about atrocities in South Carolina history. These all represent a move from the interior stasis of the lyric; to narrative mode that contains some interior, but moves toward “men of action,/ here to give your animals tangible traction,” as Bruce Springsteen says toward the end of the poem; finally to an investigation of visionary action and history in the plays, about the mystery of how to act in the world, and the burden of “carrying that slow rune slowly into town.” The collection ends with an ode-epilogue questioning whether the program of the whole structure was worth pursuing in the first place. Below are descriptions of the ideas behind the four individual sections. Some Odes: Horace describes the odes of Pindar as a giant swollen river, a ruit profundo or profound falling, while he himself is the careful bee gathering thyme, with the moro modoque apis, mores and modes of the Bee, if you will. These seemed to me the two poles of strophic art, the turning art of the ode. In the poems I wrote, I dealt with Horatian and Pindaric methods of ode as a loose dichotomy of sorts, the first smoother, iv more logical, hypotactic, ideal for personal addresses, and, particularly, political and historical considerations; and the second more jagged, wild, paratactic dedicated to vision, ecstasy, and celebration. I tried to see if the formal tendencies encouraged the philosophical tendencies, and looked into what happened when the modes collide or interpenetrate, explored the way the ode is the lyric form most suited to incorporating and synthesizing multiple perspectives and positions and even types and modes of materials. Inter Umbras Arborum, A Pastoral Phantasm-agoria: Inter Umbras Arborum is a long poem in quatrains about a Nightingale with a baby face and Three Jabirus with fetus faces who take the narrator to a series of locations in which are located emblems and examples of the seven divisions of the soul. It’s Egyptology and phenomenology and landscapes and etymologies psychotropically mixed, basically. It is nine sections in all (introduction, seven sections of the soul, conclusion). The title is from Pervigilum Veneris, and means “among the shadows of trees.” It is an allegory, but I have in mind something like Dante’s four-part theory of allegory, which is always literally, allegorically, morally and anagogically the case: it is polysemous, not metaphorical. I’m not interested in the particulars of Dante’s system there, but more generally in the fact that he is claiming that all four are literally the case at all times: it amounts to a claim that reality itself is polysemous and tetrafoliate, at least. You could translate his four part system into, respectively, these more widely applicable categories: there is the history of events, the literal history, the domain of the newspaper or the documentary; then the history of the soul , the spirit history, the history of consciousness, that thing Olson was after in “The Kingfishers”, the move from Pope to v Keats for instance; then there is the personal and subjective impression, that thing that happens inside of us that was the particular domain of Hamlet or of the Romantics; then finally there is that which will happen when the history of events, the history of souls, the subjective rumblings of the interior are bound up in some event of future transformation: how do all of these things coalesce into our future actions? While the particulars of the world view of Dante don’t really apply to my poem, I do think that, to use the example I use in the notes, when Bill Callahan is mentioned, he is historically and literally himself; but also represents a certain point of development in the history of consciousness and the spirit as a result of cultural forces and flows; but also represents my subjective and personal response to his work as a flimsy and private aspect of my autobiography; but also is part of the mechanism of spirit that will launch me into my future and my actions, and my engagement with the world in its literal and spiritual movement forward. So it is an allegory, but not so simply as Pilgrim’s Progress, perhaps. The narrative language of this poem is a little unusual and probably would benefit from a little explanation as well. The narrative style is heavily influenced by silent film: each stanza is in essence a scene, a strip of film, or an inter-card, and stanza breaks do the work of a jump-cut or of montage, depending on the situation. The language of the individual stanza is lyric, following images, emotions, or ideas not strictly necessary to the narrative in a schematic sense. However, the stanzas have been cinematically arranged to produce a juxtaposition-based narrative language. The idea, essentially, was to write something with the condensation and density of a lyric, but with the mercurial, huge scope and wide flow of activity and adventure, of vi spectacle, of all the shaggy, old narrative poems I love. The early days of cinema, particularly German Expressionist stuff like Schatten or Secrets of the Soul, provided a usable model of lyrical narrative language. Ideally, Cleanth Brooks could go to town on any particular passage of the poem, while Tim Burton could make a movie of it in approximately the way he translated Alice in Wonderland into the genre constraints of a contemporary Hollywood movie. Introduce fighting, and a love story the consummation of which would constitute the finale of the story, but the scenery and visuals, and the general quest-romance structure would remain the same. Also, there is the matter of etymology. I often use modern abstractions, of primarily Greek or Latin origin, with both their modern abstract meaning and their earlier imagistic and metaphorical meaning, simultaneously. Why? Here again, Milton is the touchstone. At the time I was writing this, I was obsessed with Milton’s hallucinogenic concept of etymology: Here’s a famous example, from the opening proem, that I have directly stolen: What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support, That to the height of this great argument, I may assert eternal providence. So here when he uses argument we are meant to think to ourselves, “Ah yes, argument, coming form the Latin arguo, meaning to bring to better light, which comes from argos, vii Greek for bright white.