200479354_Mar2019.pdf 1 Madness through Poetry: Voice, Autobiography, Sources and Survival in the poetry of Frank Bidart & The Sensational Nellie Bly and Other Stories Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Pauline Mary Rowe March 2019 200479354_Mar2019.pdf 2 Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the University of Liverpool for the award of a John Lennon Memorial scholarship. My supervisors, Professor Deryn Rees-Jones and Professor David Pilgrim have been generous and patient and I thank them both for their encouragement. I also acknowledge the loving and practical support of my husband, John and my children Linus, Christy, Julia, Matthew, Oscar and Simone. I would not have been able to complete this thesis without them. I thank the editors of the following publications for publishing poems from the collection The Sensational Nellie Bly and Other Stories: ‘Tell-tale’ was published by The Fat Damsel – Poems to Survive In, Issue 11, Part 2, 2017, ‘The Ward at Night’ was published by Coast to Coast to Coast, Issue 2, 2017. ‘Pilgrim’ was published in Tilt 1:3 (Liverpool: Open Eye Gallery, 2018). All the poems in 'Frames: Poems to be read aloud to photographs' (except for ‘Pilgrim’) in Part 2 were written in response to work by photographer, AJ Wilkinson. This work was supported, in part, by a public engagement grant from the University of Liverpool and Thomas Dukes and Jacob Bolton at Open Eye Gallery. These poems were also included in the exhibition 'Sleeping in the Middle' at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool on 18th May 2018 when AJ’s photographs were displayed on screens alongside sound recordings of the poems. Illustrations Figure 1, page 35, cover illustration: Frank Bidart, In The Western Night Collected Poems 1965-90 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990). Figure 2, page 46, cover illustration: Dr Michael M. Gilbert with Robert S. Tralins 21 Abnormal Sex Cases (New York: Paperback Library, 1966). Figure 3, page 88: photograph of woman known as ‘Ellen West’ from original case file. Figure 4, page 110: photograph of Vaslav Nijinsky as Petruschka. Figure 5, page 116: photograph of Fatova Mingus as ‘The Chosen One’ in Joffrey Ballet’s resurrected version of ‘The Rite of Spring,’ 1987. 200479354_Mar2019.pdf 3 Abstract Frank Bidart’s poetic strategy is rooted in an existential-phenomenological engagement with lived experience. It is built on four central pillars - of ‘autobiography’, ‘voice’, ‘sources’ and ‘survival’. Autobiography provides material from his own life-story and the stories of others. Voice in soliloquy and poetic drama, in its shaping and uniqueness, is the means for carrying the psychology and language of these stories; it also denotes his style and tone. Source - through his endless and helpless research of ‘pre-existing forms’ through psychology, philosophy, cinema, literature, history and other epistemes - is the foundation of his authenticity as an artist (in that his work is rooted in the world and the human quest to understand the world or ‘being in the world,’ – what the philosopher Heidegger would call dasein). The fourth pillar is survival – the ambition to live, to refuse suicidality; survival has been both his motivation and attainment through writing poetry. Part 1 offers close readings of Bidart’s poems ‘Herbert White’, ‘Ellen West’ and ‘The War of Vaslav Nijinsky’ in the context of lyric theory, narrative, dramatic techniques, concepts of embodiment and existential phenomenology. Bidart demonstrates a meticulous use and transformation of source materials (including stories from his own life) to explore three versions of madness: criminal insanity, suicidality through anorexia and the madness of the artist denied his bodily artistic identity and practice. Part 2 is an original collection of poetry that reflects on subjectivity and madness and includes a series of poems about the life and biography of Nellie Bly. My reasons for choosing Bly as a subject are various: she invented herself through writing at a time in America when there were few women journalists and she practiced an early form of investigative journalism. Her first ‘scoop’ – Ten Days in a Madhouse (1887) – documented her stay in the asylum (following her presentation as an insane woman) on New York’s Blackwell Island. Her purpose, in part, was to test the expertise of those charged with the care of Blackwell’s inhabitants. Nellie Bly also interests me as she tells newsworthy stories, yet few documents exist relating to her biography other than her journalism – so she offers a rich source of imaginative possibilities both through voice and the pre-twentieth century moment in which she found her fame. She also offers a strong subject through which experiment with poetry and form seems appropriate in reflecting on narrative, autobiography and poetics through the other stories, including poems about the ‘Thud’ experiment, told in this collection of poems. 200479354_Mar2019.pdf 4 Contents Page No. Part 1: Madness through Poetry: Voice, Auto/biography, Sources and Survival in the poetry of Frank Bidart Introduction …………………………………………………………..…….. 9 Chapter 1: Voice and Embodiment……………………………………. 19 Chapter 2: The Sources of ‘Writing “Ellen West” ’ – Frank Bidart’s poetry of research………………………. 31 Chapter 3: ‘Herbert White’: Sources, Voice, Subjectivity and Biography ………………………………………………. 45 Chapter 4: ‘Ellen West’…………………………………………………… 86 Chapter 5: Strategies of Narrative and Voice in ‘The War of Vaslav Nijinsky’ and Half-light……………. 109 Chapter 6: Reading Bidart and Writing Poetry……………………........ 138 200479354_Mar2019.pdf 5 Contents continued Page No. Part 2: The Sensational Nellie Bly and Other Stories 1 Other Stories This is Really a Ghost Hospital……..…………………………………………..155 Tell-tale………………………………………………………………………… 156 Patrimony……………………………………………………………………… 157 The Ward at Night………………………………………………………….. 158 ‘Away with the Faeries’……………………………………………………….. 159 Treatment ………………………………………………………………………. 161 The Locked Door……………………………………………………………… 162 If I sleep, I dream of the dead…..…………………………………................. 163 I drowned not in water but in dust ……….………………………………….. 164 2 Frames: Poems to be read aloud to photographs The Dead Rehearse……………………………………………………… 166 Dear Ghost ………………………………………………………………… 167 Fainting I Follow…………………………………….…………….………. 168 It all starts with light – ……………………………………………….….. 169 Punctum………………………………………………………………….….. 170 Dark Secret………………………………………………………………… 171 Crown………………………………….…………………………………… 172 The Letting Go ……………………………………………………...……. 173 Late Meeting ……………………………………………………….…….. 174 Pilgrim ……………………………………………………………………… 175 200479354_Mar2019.pdf 6 Contents continued Page No. 3 The Sensational Nellie Bly A Madhouse Air…………………………………………………… 177 Breakthrough ……………………………………………………... 178 Trial ………………………………………………………………... 179 The Courtroom …………………………………………………… 180 Dropping the Act …………………………………………………. 182 Chaperone ………………………………………………………... 183 From David Lucie ………………………………………………… 184 Captured, 1887 …………………………………………………… 185 After Supper ………………………………………………………. 186 What David Did …………………………………………………… 187 Bath-time on Blackwell Island ………………………………….. 188 From David ……………………………………………………….. 189 Nellie waking ……………………………………………………… 190 Promenade ………………………………………………………... 191 Last Days ………………………………………………………….. 192 I Became David Lucie ……………………………………………. 193 David Speaks of Experience ……………………………………. 195 Everything Looks Pathological ………………………………….. 196 By-lines ……………………………………………………………. 197 Dear Mother ……………………………………………………… 199 Nellie Bly’s Notes for a Never Written Letter …………………… 200 4 And Making Faces …………………………………………………………… 202 This is the gourd I found for Giuseppe Arcimboldo ……………… 203 Cutting the Stone ………………………………………………… 205 Pseudo patient No 9 ……………………………………………… 206 Rosenhan’s Last Confession ……………………………………... 209 Residents ……………………………………………………………………. 210 Postlude ……………………………………………………………………… 212 Notes ……………………………………………………………………… 213 200479354_Mar2019.pdf 7 Contents continued Page No. Bibliography Primary Sources ………………………………………………… 215 Secondary Sources …………………………………………….. 216 200479354_Mar2019.pdf 8 Madness through Poetry: Voice, Auto/biography, Sources and Survival in the poetry of Frank Bidart 200479354_Mar2019.pdf 9 Introduction Frank Bidart is a significant and singular figure in contemporary American poetics. His work provides an in-depth engagement with subjectivity – as well as with the wider world – through both autobiographical and psychological approaches. His poetics negotiate survival, madness and human experience (in extremis) through dramatised portrayals of the lives of historical characters, from the Church Fathers to the Hollywood of Ava Gardner, as well as lyric explorations of his own life as son, lover, gay man, friend and artist. His strategies and methods have influenced my creative thinking especially in considering facticity and imagination. I focus on his early dramatic monologue poems as they navigate subjectivity by combining the directness of confessional modes with what Bidart himself describes as his ‘poetics of embodiment’.1 There is an increasing range of critical material that agrees about Bidart’s seriousness, accomplishments and the difficulty of his poetics. He can be considered a tragedian who makes an interesting contribution to debates around confessional poetics. He is also a revered gay poet with an admiring fan base, a critic, a widely consulted voice in Lowell and Bishop studies and an active commentator on his