The Self in the Song: Identity and Authority in Contemporary American Poetry by David William Lucas A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Linda K. Gregerson, Chair Professor Yopie Prins Associate Professor Gillian Cahill White Professor John A. Whittier-Ferguson for my teachers ii Acknowledgments My debts are legion. I owe so much to so many that I can articulate only a partial index of my gratitude here: To Jonathan Farmer and At Length, in which an adapted and excerpted version of “The Nothing That I Am: Mark Strand” first appeared, as “On Mark Strand, The Monument.” To Steven Capuozzo, Amy Dawson, and the Literature Department staff of the Cleveland Public Library for their assistance with my research. To the Department of English Language and Literature and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan for the financial and logistical support that allowed me to begin and finish this project. To the Stanley G. and Dorothy K. Harris Fund for a summer grant that allowed me to continue my work without interruption. To the Poetry & Poetics Workshop at the University of Michigan, and in particular to Julia Hansen, for their assistance in a workshop of the introduction to this study. To my teachers at the University of Michigan, and especially to Larry Goldstein and Marjorie Levinson, whose interest in this project, support of it, and suggestions for it have proven invaluable. To June Howard, A. Van Jordan, Benjamin Paloff, and Doug Trevor. To Gregg Crane, for opening the door, and for telling the truth when it was closed. To Sara Blair, Michael Awkward, and Danny Hack for their continuing support as Directors of Graduate Studies. To Jan Burgess, Bonnie Campbell, Lisa Curtis, Linda Deitert, and Senia Vasquez, who hold everything together. To those at John Carroll University and the University of Virginia who showed the way, especially George Bilgere, Stephen Cushman, Rita Dove, Anna Hocevar, John McBratney, Maureen McHugh, Phil Metres, Maryclaire Moroney, Tom Nevin, Francis Ryan, and Lisa Russ Spaar. To Ellen Geisler and Debra Rezzolla, who showed the way to the way. iii To my students at Gilmour Academy, John Carroll University, the Sweet Briar Creative Writing Conference, and the University of Michigan, from whom I continue to learn. To Mark Strand and Charles Wright, whose work spurred the work of this study, whose generosity with their time and friendship fostered its development, and whose example remains the lodestone by which I find my way. To those whose friendship and support sustain me: Jenny Basa and Jason Nemec, Nora and Bob Beach, Jeff Brannon, Laurie and John Casteen, Joanna Connors, Mary Ellen and Michael Croley, Cynthia Valdez and Bradley Dougherty, Melissa, Blake, and Paige Frei, Karen Long, Amy Scott, Steve Spiess, Arin and Joe Tait, and Shannon Thomas. To the Cesa, Hildebrand, Keating, Lucas, and Smego families. To my cohort at the University of Michigan, who collectively have fashioned the model for intellectual community, support, and camaraderie that I will carry with me into the years beyond these good years in Ann Arbor. To my dissertation committee, Yopie Prins, Gillian White, and John Whittier-Ferguson. My experience of their intelligence, patience, and kindness began in the seminar room and, to my great good fortune, has continued since. The best accomplishment of my graduate career at Michigan is certainly having known and worked with such mentors. To Linda Gregerson. Nothing in the work of the last six years would have been possible without her, from her first welcome in 2008 to her final notes on this document. To have called her my adviser has been one of the honors of my life. To continue to call her my friend will remain one of its great joys. Whatever this dissertation’s merits, the credit is hers; its failures are despite her good advice. To my mother, Barbara Lucas, my first and best teacher. First, finally, and always, to Amy. In memory of my grandmother, Rosalie Hildebrand Cesa (1920—2013), who always told me “your schoolwork comes first.” In memory of my father, David L. Lucas (1936—2008), the scholar. And in memory of Adrienne Rich (1929—2012). iv Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract vi Introduction 1 Chapter One The Nothing That I Am: Mark Strand 42 Chapter Two This This: Charles Wright 98 Chapter Three In Which Our Names Do Not Appear: Adrienne Rich 158 Chapter Four Divided to the Vein: Derek Walcott 214 Coda 265 Works Cited 269 v Abstract Provocative recent scholarship has sought to revise, historicize, and challenge a commonplace of reading lyric: the illusion of personal encounter in the language of a poem. The work of lyric theorists has enriched and complicated potential answers to a persistent question: what do we encounter when we read a poem? In The Self in the Song, I argue that the work of Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, Derek Walcott, and Charles Wright formulates similar questions and offers complex and resonant responses. I demonstrate the remarkable skepticism with which they portray the self, as an idea with political, philosophical, geographic, and theological implications. In poems that enact and foreground their own poetics, they articulate complex theoretical concerns about the artificiality of the speaking “I” and the belatedness of the self with regard to language. Moreover, I read their poetry as heralding and exemplifying the emergence of our complex contemporary poetics from an historical moment in the 1970s and 1980s when the work of poststructuralist theorists and practicing poets came into productive conversation, often centered around the question of the apparition of the self in literary language and its philosophical and political implications. The lasting influence of that contact demonstrates that the opposition of “experimentation” to “tradition,” as articulated by the Language Poets and other historical poetic avant-gardes, is another false binary among many that have oversimplified the multifaceted history of American poetry. Although the four poets I consider have received varying degrees of scholarly attention, they are almost unanimously considered exemplars of what Charles Bernstein has dismissively called “official verse culture,” both in the praise of its cultural arbiters and in the oppositional avant-garde critique of that culture. I read their work in and against these contexts, also using my reconsideration of their poetry as an opportunity to call for a fresh approach to the complexity of the illusion of personal encounter in the lyric poem, for new avenues to perceive the variety of writing and thinking across the spectrum of poetic practice in the United States, especially as we seek to understand what we mean by authority and identity in poetry. vi Introduction I celebrate myself and sing myself WALT WHITMAN I’m Nobody! Who are you? EMILY DICKINSON My two epigraphs inaugurate in American literature two apparently opposing lineages of thought about the nature of the self as we encounter it in poetry. At one pole, Walt Whitman would project an expansive, permeable self among and through his fellow men and women, across the continent and across time; all that would belong to him, he says, “as good belongs to you” (1.3). At the other pole, Emily Dickinson seems to whisper to a potential confidant: “Are you—Nobody—too?”—confessing the terror of being “Somebody” (“[I’m Nobody!]” 2, 4). The self is oceanic; the self is a prison. So far as Anglophone poetry in North America since Whitman and Dickinson has served as a stage for thinking about the self, that thinking has oscillated between celebration and denial, often demonstrating contradictory elements of one in the other. Is it possible, our poets have asked, to be a celebrated, sung self and “Nobody” at the same time? In The Self in the Song: Identity and Authority in Contemporary American Poetry, I consider the idea of the self as a site where some of the most compelling debates in contemporary American poetry are staged. I argue that, while in the last forty years the avant-garde “Language poets” have claimed as a distinctive feature of their practice a radical critique of the lyric “I,” similar interrogations have taken place (if by other means) in what Charles Bernstein has dismissively called “official verse culture.” I examine works by Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, Derek Walcott, and Charles Wright as case studies in the 1 “mainstream” poetic deployment of the self, as four eminent poets of “official verse culture” whose work proves all the more significant because of its unrecognized contributions to interrogations of the concept of selfhood. I argue that their poems are remarkable particularly in the skepticism and provisionality with which they portray the self, features that enact complex theoretical concerns about the artificiality of the speaking “I” and the belatedness of the self with regard to language. This dissertation offers a twofold critical intervention. Although the four poets I consider in my chapters have received varying degrees of scholarly attention, they are almost unanimously considered exemplars of “official verse culture,” both in the praise of its cultural arbiters and in the oppositional avant-garde critique of that culture. By clarifying and emphasizing the ways in which their work, like that of the Language poets, complicates and enriches our idea of the self, my readings enlarge our understanding of their individual contributions to a broader spectrum of contemporary American poetry. Moreover, I demonstrate that the opposition of “avant-garde” to “official verse culture” is a false binary that persists despite the passé and arbitrary rhetoric that surrounds it. The persistence of this binary—like others in the history of American poetry (“formal” and “free” verse, “the raw and the cooked”)—diminishes our understanding of contemporary American poetry and poetic history.