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Florida State University Libraries 2016 Of the Out of Style Jeff Hipsher Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES OF THE OUT OF STYLE By JEFF HIPSHER A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts 2016 Jeff Hipsher defended this thesis on April 15, 2016. The members of the supervisory committee were: David Kirby Professor Directing Thesis Barbara Hamby Committee Member Andrew Epstein Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii for Sarah iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Poems in this manuscript previously appeared in or are forthcoming from The Boston Review and The Common. An early version of this manuscript was one of three finalists for the Poetry Society of America‘s 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship. I am deeply grateful for the patience and love of my wife, Sarah Cassidy Hipsher. My parents, Paula and Everett Ison, for putting up with me. Don and Margaret Cassidy for the same. All my Hipsher, Cassidy, Ison, Garcia, and Chavez families. Much love to Timothy Donnelly, Chuch O‘Neal, Adam Day, A.H. Jerriod Avant, Mikayla Avila Vila, Yolanda Franklin, Cocoa Williams, Gary Jackson, Chris Michaels, Dan Sack, Hannah Gamble, Douglas Kearney, Nick Sturm, Jeremy Clark, Nick Sturtzel, Rob Johnson, Wendy Xu, Alexis Orgera, Michael Miles, Tristan Child, Mark Hensel, Muriel Leung, and Josh & Jessie English for their invaluable insight, guidance, support, and friendship. Many thanks to my professors David Kirby, Andrew Epstein, Barbara Hamby, and Virgil Suarez for their help through this whole process. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract vi THY CLEAN WHITE HAND IS OPEN WIDE, 1 I SO KINDLY AM SERVED 2 A POEM FOR SPECULATIVE HIPSHERS 3 RESEARCH FOREST 4 SURFING WITH THE ALIEN 5 ALL IN THE REALM OF DEATH 6 ESCAPE FROM THE UNDERGROUND FORTRESS 7 OF THE OUT OF STYLE 8 ZENN-LA IN THE COLD WASTE 9 THE FULL FLOOD OF A CONTRATERRENE 10 NEW VOYAGES OF THE MICRONAUTS 11 IN THE VALLEY OF THE PALEST THING 12 PEARL HAIRED GIRL 13 SMART WATER 14 HEAVENS TO MURGATROID 16 AMERICAN PALEOCONTACT 20 MOUTH TALK CON-JOB 21 AFTER YAKUB WRESTLES THE ANGEL 22 YOU REACHED THE FLYING GLOBE 23 HOW FAR AM I FROM CANAAN 27 PLEASE DON’T PLAY THAT SONG 28 KATHOOM IN THE STERLING RIDGE 29 ASLEEP IN THE RETREAT AT TWIN LAKES 30 SLOW BOAT TO CHINA 31 THE WILL HAS BROUGHT NO FORTUNE 33 THERE USED TO BE A GREYING TOWER ALONE ON THE SEA 34 MONTEZUMA TO HIS MAGICIANS 2 35 TO ENDURE AN INTRODUCTION 36 IT WON’T BE VERY LONG 38 Notes 39 Biographical Sketch 44 v ABSTRACT Of the Out of Style takes its title from Jimi Hendrix‘s afrofuturist proto-prog rock masterpiece ―1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be).‖ As a collection the poems, as Hendrix puts it in song, ―take a last look / at the killing noise / of the out of style.‖ That killing noise in both Hendrix‘s lyrics and hopefully these poems can be understood as white domestic, political, and poetic space. And as such, the poems attempt to address their own role in the demarking of that space. And so again like Hendrix the motifs of science fiction are employed to refuse, alter, or abandon those spaces all together. Informed greatly by Susan Sontag‘s writing on science fiction film, at times even quoting her directly, the poems adopt and co-opt the many tropes of the genre outlined in her essay ―The Imagination of Disaster.‖ However, throughout the collection science fiction is positioned as both a form of resistance literature and a proponent of white capitalist patriarchy. Subversive works by Mina Loy, Douglas Kearney, and Andrew Joron are cited just as canonical stories by HG Wells, HP Lovecraft, and Jules Verne are critiqued. This juxtaposition is key to the project of the manuscript as a whole, as it reflects the complex relationship between the white male speaker‘s love of an inherited canon, in both literary and popular culture, and the desire to resist it. This agitation is borne out in process, as most of the poems appropriate language from these various and often oppositional sources. Poets including the aforementioned as well as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Adrienne Su, Catherine Wagner, Wanda Coleman, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Fred Moten appear alongside dialogue from Jack Kirby‘s first volumes of The Silver Surfer and The Eternals. Excerpts from the screenplays for Planet of the Apes („68), AKIRA, The Shinning, and Interstellar are also included as well as lyrics from The Eagles, Kanye West, Sam Cooke, Busta Rhymes, and the astroblack jazz of Sun Ra. This act of sampling is at once in conversation with the methods of production in both the literary avant-garde and the traditions of hip-hop, while also attempting to interrogate the role of appropriation, or theft, as well as the erasure of the other in the creation of white art. The title poem opens with a line from Ashbery‘s ―The One Thing That Can Save America.‖ Often cited as the poet commenting on the seemingly impenetrable and private nature vi of his more abstracted poems, the line ―I know that I braid too much on my own / Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me‖ is used here instead to comment on the white perspective often privileged in contemporary poetry, indicting both Ashbery and the speaker of these poems. However I also view this act as one of salvage, as the poem goes on to steal from another great personal inspiration, the Californian punk band Bad Religion, who also failed to address issues of race or gender in their thirty year career as white male activist musicians. And so the poem both equates them with Hendrix‘s ―killing noise / of the out of style,‖ while appropriating their language to address it. In this way, through many of these poems, I attempt to reclaim genuinely admired yet undeniably problematic white art and put it in the service of dismantling the privileges from which it benefits. This range of sampled material helps to give the poems‘ form a texture reflective of the various tensions in the source texts by creating in their accumulation an array of polyvocal speakers struggling to reconcile their personal cultural interests, aesthetics, and politics with the paradoxically invisible yet ubiquitous and central position of their identity. vii THY CLEAN WHITE HAND IS OPEN WIDE, Lord, & thou are just, Lord, just very tired. I spent twen ty years there one night. Y‘all‘s woods were full of policemen, ya‘ll. But y‘all, y‘all just talk trees All Day In the riven troughs, the splay- ed leaves pile up. Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall. Had to move my family out the country, the sunken fields of hemp out from under the shade of the trees, the crazy hemlock ‘s point, before, the sentinel of the grave, All Day, turnt out the way it were, turning out to greet y‘all. 1 I SO KINDLY AM SERVED Self-Portrait at Thirty and Thirty-One Try to be penitential like, the enervating dusk settles into cylinders. Who gives a shit. If we blow this we bogus. Standing at the sliding glass door describing your wife to herself. The enervating dusk like “I‟m living my life, live yours.” But you‘re just one little white whining beast appropriative in the ante diluvian dusk, who came way too late, but, baby, I‘m on it, like, “Dear Heart how like you this type shit that‘ll call the dusk as it truly behaves in all that danger so as to not just give you this bread out my hand?‖ 2 A POEM FOR SPECULATIVE HIPSHERS I had got, finally, thru my plant‘s uninhibitedness. I lost my coat. I had no idea I had no pants. Way out here there‘s no color lessness, Grand Inbetween- er. The power cosmic remains unavailable. Look ing back thru the forest, into my motives, I think, ―Good grief, like, really, what‘s his difficulty?‖ 3 RESEARCH FOREST The farms, calm, preternaturally, are witness to a great put-on. ―Out here, on the patio, things matter,‖ I tell her father, the two of us watching the jungle as seen through a dense envelope of radio-waves, atop a distant tableland— the estuaries full of rich yellow water. The phone is for me, it‘s my brother, and he says, ―Its like this and like that, and uh.‖ We‘re never done. Or rather, ―Momma, I‘m so sorry, I‘m so obnoxious.‖ Then he and I see it, our one clean thought. The moon awash in the black tide of the parking lot. Over the mountain and across the sea, it‘s like that and like this, and uh. 4 SURFING WITH THE ALIEN I say now Timothy, about myself in the future, there‘s none of it. And in that awful hour, The Lord roamed as hands, accidentally delivering the bad news deep into my scalp. And whoever was tapping the phone heard us and became weak must reach controls before the monstered water folds against us, purpled with conditioner, a tired and stung hibiscus like not being in the express lane (cash only).