The Poetics of the Archive: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Poems Containing History

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The Poetics of the Archive: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Poems Containing History The Poetics of the Archive: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Poems Containing History by Sara Elizabeth Phillips A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2012 Date of final oral examination: 11/16/12 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee Lynn Keller, Professor, English Cyrena Pondrom, Professor, English Timothy Yu, Associate Professor, English Vinay Dharwadker, Professor, Literatures and Cultures of Asia Susan Friedman, Professor, English © Copyright by Sara Phillips 2012 All rights reserved i for my parents, who always believed in me, and for Jeremiah ii Acknowledgments I don’t know that anything comes close to the marathon run of the dissertation. I do know that I had help—and much of it—along the way. For my advisor, Lynn Keller, many thanks for your wise suggestions and gentle prodding, and for the conversations on life and poetry we’ve shared these last few years. Thanks also to my committee members who have taken the time to help me especially in these last steps toward the finish: Cyrena Pondrom, Vinay Dharwadker, Susan Friedman, and Timothy Yu. I’ve had many writing partners along the way: Rachel Cordasco, Brenda Hsu, Sarah Anderson, Clara Burke, John Bradley, Carrie Conners, and Rob Henn. Your accountability has been invaluable at times when I was lagging. The “regulars” of the poetry group have also reminded me of how rich and true conversation around poetry can be: thanks to Jennifer Conrad, Michelle Niemann, and Lisa Hollenbach. I don’t know that I would have become as deeply interested in history and the archive if it weren’t for the seven years I have worked at the Wisconsin Historical Society. To my wonderful and gracious colleagues at WHS Press, thank you for your encouragement and patience, especially in this last year. Special thanks go to Kathy Borkowski, Kate Thompson, and Elizabeth Boone. My friends at Madison Mennonite Church and Geneva Campus Church—my first and second “homes” in Madison—have also given me great support and wisdom, as have the members of my small group over my years in Madison. Particular thanks go to my mentors: Marcia Bosscher, who has been with me since my first months in Madison and through many iii talks about faith, marriage, and the larger life journey, and Carola Breckbill, whose friendship— and welcome introduction to the Mennonite way of life—has been invaluable at the end. Tuesday lunches with Rachel Cordasco and Andrea Bontrager Yoder and weekly dinners with the “sewists” have been saving graces during these long months of writing. Thanks also to Erica and Jacob Boehr, Annie and Andrew Dutcher, Allison Olson, Allison Madison, Lisa Woodson, and Caroline Brock for your friendship, which stretches into all areas of living and reminds me (constantly, needfully) of life “beyond” the degree. A great debt of gratitude goes to my mom, Nelda Phillips, for her unfailing encouragement and countless hours of conversation that helped me through the toughest hours, and to my dad, Woody Phillips, who would have been so very proud to see me get this far. Thanks also to my brother, Jeremy Phillips, for always challenging me to articulate just what I mean, and to my lovely nieces and nephews for giving me glimpses of the full life of family. I’m also grateful to my aunts, Margie Jensen and Sue Kuta, and to my cousins Artemis and Alathea Jensen, for helping me to enjoy my respites from study by making me shop and eat good food and be reminded of the life outside academia. To my in-laws and to the wonderful extended family I’ve picked up through marriage, your encouragement to “keep going” and excitement when I reached milestones encouraged me greatly, especially in the long months at the end. Karen Weber and Irma Weber, the gift of the China trip couldn’t have come at a better time. Finally, to my partner and husband Jeremiah Robinson, thank you for all of the support and love, and especially for this last year of the “Jeremiah Fellowship.” You’ve been wonderful and tough at the same time—just what I needed. iv Contents Introduction 1 Poetics in the Archive Chapter 1 26 Ezra Pound and the Privileged Archive Chapter 2 76 Charles Olson and the Limited Archive Chapter 3 121 Susan Howe and the Persistent Archive Chapter 4 167 Jena Osman, Rob Fitterman and the Networked Archive Coda 217 The Poethics of the Archive Appendix: Papers of Hannah Edwards Wetmore 226 Bibliography 227 1 Introduction Poetics in the Archive In a recent issue of PMLA, Deborah Nelson explores commonalities among several pieces plucked from the journal’s archives and “clustered” under the rubric “twentieth century American poetry,” noting that each “attempt[s] something other than or in addition to the study of twentieth-century poetry, deriving their motivations from outside the genre” and “mak[ing] the case for poetry’s value to other areas of inquiry” (212–213). The essays, whose “outside” areas range from disability studies to performance studies to intimacy studies, have in common a “strong relation between poetic experimentation and the forms of intellectual inquiry that evolved in the . twentieth century” (213). In a similar gesture, this dissertation marries together two subjects of literary and intellectual inquiry that have grown up, as it were, side by side over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: the “poem containing history,” after Ezra Pound’s definition of verse epic, and the historical archive.1 This study maps a dual trajectory across what may at first appear to be quite different landscapes—but like a binoculars’ double lens the two fields merge as the picture comes into focus. On one hand, the study explores the development of the “poem containing history” from Ezra Pound to the present, paying close attention to each poet’s approach to history, methods of research, and incorporation of source material into the poems; on the other, it marks changes in our conception of the historical archive from a physical repository for objective historical records to a locus of power that, in its selective and ordering capacities, reveals itself as an agent in shaping human memory. 2 What comes into focus when the two lenses are brought together is the subject position of the inheritor of the “poem containing history”—not simply the poets writing after Pound but those for whom the history is written, for after all, whether well-intentioned or misguided, hit or disastrous miss, it is our own histories that are conveyed to us through their work. As I survey a century of “poems containing history” I find that in each poet’s negotiation of written history, a different possibility emerges for the subject of history. As the poets writing after Pound move away from his totalizing view of history which, in the early Cantos, tends to eclipse the everyday subject in favor of exemplars like Malatesta and Kung, they move toward poetries that, over time, acknowledge the material complexity of the subject’s interactions and transactions with history: Charles Olson in his recognition of the subject’s making of history; Susan Howe, problematizing this, in her portrayal of subjects who have been marginalized by the writing of history; Jena Osman, in her celebration of the subject’s potential to gain agency within networks of power, including history; and Robert Fitterman, in his exploration of the dispersal of the subject and loss of individual agency in the digitized history of the present. Each of these renegotiations happens within and through the historical archive, whose definition expands over time from a physical repository housing documents of a shared past available to a privileged few to an “archive of everything” that is not limited by physical location or restricted access and whose contents are not determined solely by their relationship to the past but also their emergence in the present. Although a handful of studies have considered theories of the archive in relation to literary narrative, in particular to trauma and testimony2, serious consideration of conceptual changes in our understanding of the archive as a mechanism for shaping history—and the place 3 of the human within history—has not yet been applied to poetry, much less to the type of long poem referred to, in Ezra Pound’s phrasing, as the “poem containing history.”3 In this dissertation, I explore changing conceptions of the historical archive as they emerge in exemplary “poems containing history” from Ezra Pound to Susan Howe, particularly around issues of access, power, and preservation. I also explore the poems themselves as archives of re- collected material, chosen from the historical archive (often physically by the poet) and arranged in a new order by the poet, who takes the role of “poet-archivist.” Archive studies theorist Terry Cook writes that “archivists . co-create the archive . by defining, identifying, then selecting which documents and which media become archives in the first place . And that same initial archival appraisal decides, with finality, which records are to be destroyed, excluded from the archives” (“The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country” 504). Indeed, as Joan Schwartz and Cook explain in a co-written article, the role of the archivist is one of great power, particularly in choosing which narratives will become part of our common history: Through archives, the past is controlled. Certain stories are privileged and others marginalized. And archivists are an integral part of this story-telling. In the design of record-keeping systems, in the appraisal and selection of a tiny fragment of all possible records to enter the archive, in approaches to subsequent and ever- changing description and preservation of the archive, and in its patterns of communication and use, archivists continually reshape, reinterpret, and reinvent the archive.
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