UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Radical Matter: Materiality in Postwar and Contemporary American Mixed Mode Poetry Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/70b0t46k Author Wang, Sophia Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Radical Matter: Materiality in Postwar and Contemporary American Mixed Mode Poetry By Sophia Wang A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Lyn Hejinian, Chair Professor Dan Blanton Professor Michael Mascuch Fall 2012 Abstract Radical Matter: Materiality in Postwar and Contemporary American Mixed Mode Poetry by Sophia Wang Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Lyn Hejinian, Chair “Radical Matter” argues that expansive and experimental mixed mode poetic works since the American mid-century embody a language-based materiality that motivates the valuations of their symbolic economies. I focus on three works— William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals, and Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now—that each engage prose alongside verse, material from other texts and authors, or multiple discursive modes: all ways, I argue, of substantiating the desires and rhetorical strategies that orient these speakers in language and in relation to their imagined addressees. These substantiations bring forward features and consequences of language’s articulations as discourse—whether lyric, narrative, epistolary, diaristic, or other—that carry out metaphoric interventions in the crises of value that drive these poetic works towards their substantial lengths, their material and modal inclusivity, and the speakers that they voice. I read Paterson’s larger strategy of textual bricolage and its local junctures between prose and verse as expressions of the portability of lyric discourse’s sensory and semantic functions. The circulations and evolutions of lyric figures and phrasal units throughout the work act in opposition to the expressive and libidinal paralyses of the stagnant American economic and social body that the poem’s matter documents. Against the reifications of established forms—aesthetic forms as well as the institutions and conventions that organize social life—Williams manifests language’s broadest functional value through the material resources of lyric. The discursive junctions of Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals activate the rhetorical relations of lyric, epistolary, and diaristic address as sites where speakers and addressees materialize as embodiments of the pronominal figures “I” and “you.” I test these materializations against psychoanalytic and structural linguistic models of subject formation in order to read Mayer’s drive towards atemporality and the indeterminacy of her interlocutors in terms of the personal history her journals document. Through the materializations and dematerializations of grammatical persons, Mayer rehearses the lack and losses that motivate her hunger and which the operations of language make manifest. 1 In my last chapter, I read Spahr’s collection of prose, verse, and prose poetry, Well Then There Now, in terms of its orientation towards difference as the material consequence of her opaque plural pronominal lyric protagonists “we” and “they” and her transparent first person prose speaker, as well as the intertextual reading that her multi-mode collection demands. I argue that Spahr’s materialization of difference and the readerly exclusions it enacts constitutes an anti-pluralist resistance to rhetorical demands of readerly identification and inclusivity with poetic speakers. The “matter” of Spahr’s works—personal, political, environmental, and economic systems of interrelation and complicity—becomes “radical” by virtue of a rhetoric that manifests difference as the fundamental condition of language and the requisite term in active, self-organized reading. 2 Table of Contents Introduction iii Chapter One, Materializing Movement: William Carlos Williams’s Paterson 1 Chapter Two, Materializing Subjects: Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journal 56 Chapter Three, Materializing Difference: Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now 110 Bibliography 164 i Dedication and Acknowledgments I dedicate this work in memory of my mother, Dr. Mei-Hui Teng. The strides she made in pursuit of scientific discovery were only exceeded by the leaps she made in life. She has been my guide. This would not have been possible without the wisdom, generosity, contributions, and steadfast support of my advisor, Lyn Hejinian. I am deeply inspired by her commitment to poetry, pedagogy, and social justice. I am very privileged to have worked with my readers and mentors Dan Blanton, Michael Mascuch, Chris Nealon, and Rei Terada. Their insights and direction shaped and sharpened this project and my thinking in immeasurable ways. I thank Bernadette Mayer for corresponding with me about her poetry. For the gift of a home and a space to work, I am grateful to the memory of Josephine Miles, poet and first tenured female professor in the English Department at U.C. Berkeley. I thank the English Department’s Roberta C. Holloway Committee for the opportunity to share in this legacy. I am very fortunate to have such inspiring and brilliant colleagues, creative collaborators, and friends; they enrich my ideas and my world, and encouraged me all along the way: Karen Leibowitz, Karla Nielsen, Kea Anderson, Erin Edwards, Namwali Serpell, Franklin Melendez, Lana Voronina, Brontez Purnell, Hentyle Yapp, Jonathan King, Anthony Grudin, and Carrie Thiessen. And for the invaluable gifts of their constant love and unwavering faith in me, I thank Joshua Kit Clayton, Fran Thiessen, Meei-Meei Soong, my father, Dr. Lu-Hai Wang, and my sister, Sandra Wang. ii Introduction This project began with the observation that long poetic works emerging from modern and contemporary experimental literary practices often share the feature of being mixed in mode. These works incorporate prose along with verse and feature different types of discourse: lyric and narrative, but also quotation or imitation of writing and speech from non-literary practices such as journalism, advertising, and historical documentation. Canonical works of American and European literary modernism that utilize mixed modes include Ezra Pound’s Cantos, James Joyce’s Ulysses, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, which I address in my first chapter. These texts model the innovations that anticipate some key characteristics of postmodern literature in the second half of the century: textual fragmentation, quotation and pastiche, and the expression of multiple discourses and genres in a single work. The poetic works I address in my second and third chapters, Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals, and Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now, contribute to this latter period of literary experimentation. Deconstructionist and poststructural analyses of these techniques endeavor to show how disruptions of literary convention and normative referentiality expose the operations of language as instantiations of the ideologies and hierarchies that organize society, the self, and all modes of representation. In my dissertation, I pursue this line of thinking by examining three mixed mode poetic works in terms of the metatextual relation between their subject matter and their discursive modes. I argue that each of these works—Williams’s Paterson, Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals, and Spahr’s Well Then There Now—materializes an essential feature or consequence of language—portability, subjectivity, and difference—which serves as a metaphoric term that is crucial to parsing each work’s thematic material. Mixing modes is a way of expanding poetry’s material. I use the term “material” in the sense of the subject matter that poetry engages, but also in the sense that language is the medium of literature, analogous in some ways to the materials that are the medium of visual artworks. In language-based works, different discursive modes access different resources that are determined by histories of literary forms and rhetorical devices for engaging audiences. As an example, I would point to the conjunction between two modes of listing that characterize the sonnet sequence of Well Then There Now in which Spahr juxtaposes statistical data from a blood sample with more conventional lyric syntax and diction: potassium at 4.6 milliequivalents per liter chloride at 98 milliequivalents per liter carbon dioxide at 26 milliequivalents per liter blood urea nitrogen at 17 milligrams per decaliter A catalogue of the individual and a catalogue of us with all. A catalogue full of thought. A house where we with all our complexities lie. iii A catalogue of blood. 1 In the shift between the names and quantities of organic compounds to the paratactic nominal phrases of the last stanza, the text activates different types of shared knowledge, vocabularies, and reading practices within the uniform stylistic frame of a list. The attention required to parse the statistical information differs from the reading that the last stanza activates; in this way, the juxtaposition occurs both at the level of discourse and the kind of reading it invites. A second example, from Paterson, illustrates a modal juxtaposition