Language Poetry and Ecopoetry: a Shared Pragmatic Work
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Language Poetry and Ecopoetry: A Shared Pragmatic Work in A.R. Ammons, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and W.S. Merwin Jack Massie A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of East Anglia School of American Studies August 2018 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived therefrom must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 1 Abstract The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that A.R. Ammons, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and W.S. Merwin commit to a pragmatic poetic project of working language to facilitate cultural renewal. In illuminating this shared pragmatic work in poems from the turn of the 1990s, the thesis contradicts ecocritical assertions about the inimical relationship between ecopoetry and postmodern poetries such as Language. As ecocriticism established itself as a school of literary criticism in the 1990s, its proponents were damning of the influence postmodern literary theory was exerting on American poetry. Ecocritics argued that postmodernism had dangerously devalued the referential relationship between word and world at a time of escalating environmental crises. Taking Bernstein and Howe as representatives of Language poetry, and Ammons and Merwin as representatives of ecopoetry, the thesis will contest this ecocritical argument by illustrating that these four poets share a vision of poetry as a uniquely positioned medium for rejuvenating language and, subsequently, shifting cultural attitudes in a politically progressive manner. In order to make this argument, the thesis builds on a body of literary criticism which explores American poetry’s debt to American pragmatism. Critics connecting poetry to pragmatism have argued that pragmatists such as William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ralph Waldo Emerson have helped American poets establish an epistemological middle ground between foundationalism and the sceptical side of postmodernism. The poets studied in this thesis extend this tradition of pragmatic poetry by using their writing to engage in an ongoing poetic rejuvenation of language and ideology. Furthermore, the thesis shows how these poets’ pragmatic approach to language and epistemology aligns them the ‘progressive’ side of the Culture Wars which were erupting in the early 1990s. 2 Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. 2 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ 6 Introduction: .................................................................................................................................... 7 Section One: Language Poetry and Ecopoetry ........................................................................... 7 Objectives ..................................................................................................................................... 7 Language Poetry ........................................................................................................................ 10 Ecocriticism ................................................................................................................................ 16 Defining Ecopoetry ................................................................................................................... 21 ‘Writing as Politics’/‘Writing about Politics’ ....................................................................... 26 Grounds for Comparison ......................................................................................................... 30 Section Two: A Pragmatic Epistemological Outlook and a Pragmatic Poetic Work ........ 35 A Shared Poetic Work ............................................................................................................... 35 An Impulse Toward Poetic Work ........................................................................................... 42 The Epistemological Outlook of Pragmatism ...................................................................... 47 Emerson, Pragmatism, and Poetry ........................................................................................ 52 Pragmatist Poetry in the Early 1990s ................................................................................... 60 The Culture Wars ...................................................................................................................... 62 Chapter Outline ......................................................................................................................... 64 Charles Bernstein’s Poetry of ‘Epistemological | Inquiry’ ..................................................... 68 Section One ..................................................................................................................................... 68 The Theory of a ‘Meaning Complex’ ...................................................................................... 70 The ‘[Factitiousness]’ of Poetic ‘Facts’ .................................................................................. 74 ‘No Outside-Text’: Inhabiting Poetry ..................................................................................... 77 The Dangers of Translatability ............................................................................................... 83 The Deconstructive Side of ‘Artifice of Absorption’ ........................................................... 85 Section Two .................................................................................................................................... 89 Derrida’s ‘House of Cards’ ....................................................................................................... 89 Wittgenstein’s ‘Language Games’ ........................................................................................... 92 Context, Conventions, & Fixity in ‘Artifice of Absorption’ ................................................. 95 Stretching the ‘Threshold’ of the ‘Phonically | Significant’ ............................................... 97 The Aesthetic Pleasures of ‘Metaphoricity’ ........................................................................ 101 ‘Lining In’ and ‘Lining | Out’: The Philosophical Function of ‘Metaphoricity’.............. 106 Political Poetries and Emersonian ‘Swerving’ ................................................................... 110 ‘Words Are a Way of Fending in the World’: A.R. Ammons' Poetic Processing of Language ....................................................................................................................................... 116 Section One ................................................................................................................................... 116 Hoover’s Criteria for the Postmodern Poem ..................................................................... 117 ‘Writing-as-Product’ and ‘Writing-as-Process’ .................................................................. 122 The Indeterminacy of Postmodern Indeterminacy .......................................................... 126 3 The Postmodern and the Pragmatic ................................................................................... 133 Section Two .................................................................................................................................. 136 ‘Tomorrow a New Walk is a New Walk’ .............................................................................. 136 ‘Big Meaning’: Ammons’ Pragmatic Epistemological Outlook ....................................... 139 Language as a Tool for ‘Fending in the World’ .................................................................. 141 The Sanctification of Garbage............................................................................................... 144 The Poetic Processing of Language ..................................................................................... 149 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................. 158 Even when I can no Longer See | I Continue to Arrive at Words’: W.S. Merwin’s Negotiation of the Gap between Word and World ............................................................... 161 Section One................................................................................................................................... 161 ‘Put it on a Piece of Paper’: The Ineffability of Non-Human Nature .............................. 165 Native Languages and Local Environments ....................................................................... 168 ‘An Age Arrived When Everything Was Explained in Another Language’ ................... 171 The Desensitising Effect of an Environmentally Alienated Language .......................... 177 Section Two .................................................................................................................................. 182 ‘For the Writer’s Hoe, the Earth is a Page’ .......................................................................... 182 Raising Trees and Raising Words .......................................................................................