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Urban Anxieties in Twentieth Century British and American Poetics

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Urban Anxieties in Twentieth Century British and American Poetics The Problem of the City: Urban Anxieties in Twentieth Century British and American Poetics David R Miller PhD 2013 1 The Problem of the City: Urban Anxieties in Twentieth Century British and American Poetics David Richard Miller A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Manchester Metropolitan University 2013 2 For Youngjoo Choi (최영주) ‘The she-theorist knew something more crimson than place’ (Robertson Occasional Work 238) 3 ‘Let there be Genevan Convention on city and law and what might be proper de- ployment of violence within the state’ (Griffiths Nomad Sense 73) 4 Contents 1. Preface (p. 6) 2. Abstract (p. 8) 3. <Introduction> The Problem of the City (p. 11) 4. <Chapter One> Poetry, Polis and Necropolis (p. 37) Poetry, Polis and Necropolis (p. 39) Cities of Prose: Romantic and Modernist Cities (p. 44) 5. <Chapter Two> Root City: Charles Olson’s polis (p. 77) ‘Democratic Vista(s)’?: Howe, Whitman and Williams (p. 85) Polis-tician: Charles Olson’s Polis (p. 134) 6. <Chapter Three> City of Traces: Roy Fisher, Iain Sinclair and Allen Fisher (p. 163) City of Traces: Roy Fisher (p. 168) Olsonian Allegiances: Iain Sinclair (p. 176) Decoherence: Allen Fisher (p. 197) 7. <Chapter Four> Delusional City: Lisa Robertson’s Vancouver (p. 227) 8. <Conclusion> City of Panic (p. 266) 9. <Appendix> Cities of WARR: Francis Crot (p. 274) 10. Works Cited (p. 293) 5 Preface This germ of this thesis began with an inexplicably well-placed copy of Burton Hatlen’s George Oppen: Man and Poet (1981) obtained from the Kenneth Green library at the MMU up to ten years ago. That text, as well as the obligatory copy of his New Collected Poems (2002), represents the beginning of a critical engagement with Oppen’s work that prompted the conceptual groundwork for the idea of a ‘problem of the city’ in my own research. It was my MA dissertation at the Manchester Metropolitan University however – A ‘Humanitarian Urbanism’: George Oppen and the City in Common (2006) – that allowed my burgeoning interest in Oppen’s work to coalesce around his most famous poem ‘Of Being Numerous’ (1968) specifically as it related to debates centred around ethics and modernist city planning. With a subsequent visit to the poet’s centennial at Buffalo University in the early days of the PhD, the individual threads of this project transformed into something much larger in scope. But this work was also created within a climate of increasing fear and insularity, which clearly shaped the trajectory of the project to an equal extent. The thesis started just before the global economic collapse, and was eventually completed on a totally different continent. Penned in the midst of increasingly aggressive attacks on the weakest members of society, and a political culture drifting hopelessly to the right, I hope what is contained within this thesis speaks with an urgency that reflects the conditions that spawned it. Written across continents in Manchester, England and Daejeon, South Korea, by the appendix there is an observational quality to the writing as it monitors a familiar social world unraveling from afar. At that level the research carried out reflects, and has therefore benefitted from, an understanding of cultural 6 estrangement otherwise unavailable to it. The ‘perilous’ nature of conditions in England, undoubtedly contributed to both the form and tone of the work but also that sense of ‘anxiety’ and ‘panic’ isolated in the poems themselves. Throughout all of these long, and at the same time incredibly brief, years it has been the same people who have encouraged me to finally hand this in. I would like to thank Nik Duffy and Kate McGowan – first and foremost – for their valued support, even at times of serious self-doubt and financial hardship. For the same reasons I would like to thank my mother and father, who have provided the economic means to make sure I continued. Furthermore, I would like to thank Clare Mullady and Youngjoo Choi, both of whom have lived with the stresses and strains of this project by proxy. Thanks are also reserved for Patrick Gannon and David Wilkinson who were able to make sure that this thesis finally left the confines of Asia. The following work is also dedicated to Patrick Foley (1920 – 2013) who will be sorely missed. 기쁜마음으로 책을 마치며.. Abstract 7 The following research involves an engagement with what will become known as ‘the problem of the city’ as it pertains to twentieth century British and American poetics. What this amounts to is an analysis of how the extremely palpable ‘occlusion’ of the city in contemporary poetry is necessarily premised on various socio-political factors rooted in inadequate conceptions of a ‘common identity’ that have undergirded urban social being since the foundation of Aristotle’s polis. Isolating the root cause of this situation in romantic and modernist aesthetic practice seen as promoting a desire for ‘closure’ in the poem, the research goes on to examine a variety of approaches that tackle this situation in terms of its opposite. The end of the research pitches writing on the city as a ‘perilous’ undertaking skirting a fine line between the demands for authorial control of the materials, and the necessity to engender a more ‘open’ poetics independent of the writing itself. The introduction acquaints the reader with the concept of urban anxieties, as well as the key terms ‘urbicide’, ‘necropolis’ and ‘melee’ in relation to Jean Luc Nancy’s text Being Singular Plural (1996) and Bill Griffiths’ A Book of Spilt Cities (1999). Following on from this chapter one looks, briefly, at the roots of the problem of the city in both romantic and modernist writers, ending with an exposition of George Oppen’s work as a different approach stemming from his engagement with objectivism in the thirties. Chapters three, four and five will branch out to incorporate various postwar understandings of the city that promote aesthetic strategies most able to counter this dilemma in the light of work like Oppen’s. The third chapter sees the boldest attempt in Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, specifically as they continue in that 8 tradition of objectivism. Olson’s ‘root city’ is juxtaposed with Walt Whitman’s New York, Susan Howe’s text Singularities (1990) and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson sequence, in order to see how effectively the desire for closure was surmounted from within the bounds of a conservative poetic tradition founded on ‘cratylism’. It is in chapters four and five, however, that the conclusions of the thesis really begin to take shape. By examining the influence of Olson and Williams on the English writers Roy Fisher, Iain Sinclair and Allen Fisher, a way forward is determined for the city and poetry albeit perched between a the desire for hope and a profound despair. Allen Fisher’s Place (2005) and his later Gravity as a Consequence of Shape (2004) project are positioned as fundamental to this approach particularly in how they work towards an interruption of linguistic closure enshrined in the very materials themselves. In chapter five romantic aesthetic ideals are firmly questioned in line with the innovations made by Lisa Robertson in both The Weather (2001) and her longer project on the city Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture (2003). Her impulse to see social space in terms of noise or ‘cacophony’ – that is, not the place of a single interpretation of urbanity as much as a residue of different voices – sets the standard by which an open poetics becomes possible. The conclusion and appendix aim to situate this ‘delusional’ poetics within the context of a city that is both ‘panicked’ and subject to ever- greater interference by state historical versions of urban space. Francis Crot’s text Hax (2011) remains fundamental in this climate specifically in how it seeks to disrupt notions of linguistic closure through a determined focus on harnessing the tensions manifest in the city itself. 9 10 The Problem of the City 11 It follows that the state belongs to that class of objects which exists by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal [zoon politikon]…anyone who by his nature and not simply by ill-luck has no state is either too bad or too good, either subhuman or superhuman – he is like the war mad man condemned in Homer’s words as ‘having no family, no law, no home…he is a non-co operator like an isolated piece in a game of draughts (Aristotle 28 – 29). “the exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is not scattered, the hood of miasmata that weighs over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey”. (Calvino 102) “For a certain type of modern poet, I will argue, “poetry” names an ontological project: A civilizational wish to reground the concept and value of the person” (Izenberg 1) 12 The Problem of the City ‘Who will bring love to a whole city’? (Griffiths A Book of Spilt Cities 66) In his text Contemporary British Poetry and the City (2000), Peter Barry writes of the ‘occlusion’ of the metropolis in British poetics over the last two hundred years.
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