Surrealist Poetics in Contemporary American Poetry
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THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Surrealist Poetics in Contemporary American Poetry A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of English School of Arts & Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By Brooks B. Lampe Washington, D.C. 2014 Surrealist Poetics in Contemporary American Poetry Brooks B. Lampe, Ph.D. Director: Ernest Suarez, Ph.D. The surrealist movement, begun in the 1920s and developed and articulated most visibly and forcefully by André Breton, has unequivocally changed American poetry, yet the nature and history of its impact until recently has not been thoroughly and consistently recounted. The panoramic range of its influence has been implicitly understood but difficult to identify partly because of the ambivalence with which it has been received by American writers and audiences. Surrealism’s call to a “systematic derangement of all the senses” has rarely existed comfortably alongside other modern poetic approaches. Nevertheless, some poets have successfully negotiated this tension and extended surrealism to the context of postmodern American culture. A critical history of surrealism’s influence on American poetry is quickly gaining momentum through the work of scholars, including Andrew Joron, Michael Skau, Charles Borkuis, David Arnold and Garrett Caples. This dissertation joins these scholars by investigating how selected American poets and poetic schools received, transformed, and transmitted surrealism in the second half of the twentieth century, especially during the mid-‘50s through the early ‘80s, when the movement’s influence in the States was rapid and most definitive. First, I summarize the impact of the surrealist movement on American poets through World War II, including Charles Henri Ford, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Philip Lamantia, and briefly examine Julian Levy’s anthology, Surrealism (1936). Next, I investigate how surrealism was transmitted to the Beats and elucidate surrealist elements in the work of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman. Then I analyze the deep image poets (especially Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, Robert Bly, and James Wright) and how their attempt to combine surrealism with imagism and Jungian depth psychology framed the discourse about surrealism during the ‘60s and ‘70s. The implications of this assimilation are explored further in a study of George Hitchcock and Kayak magazine. Finally, I consider the complicated relationship between the language poets and surrealism, and how the complementarity of the two movements is worked out in the writing of Clark Coolidge. This dissertation by Brooks B. Lampe fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in English Language and Literature approved by Ernest Suarez, Ph.D., as Director, and by Rosemary Winslow, Ph.D., and Glen Johnson, Ph.D., as Readers. ___________________________________ Ernest Suarez, Ph.D., Director ___________________________________ Rosemary Winslow, Ph.D., Reader ___________________________________ Glen Johnson, Ph.D., Reader ! ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………… iii List of Illustrations………………………………………………………………….…. iv Chapter 1: Poetic Surrealism in the United States: Introduction and History…………. 1 Chapter 2: Bombs and Abomunists: The Beat-Surrealist of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman……………………………………………………………………. 34 Chapter 3: Surrealism and the Deep Image: A Study in Structure……………………… 90 Chapter 4: “The Gold Snake / Coiled in the Sun”: George Hitchcock and Kayak Magazine…………………………………………………………………. 132 Chapter 5: The Syntagmatic Turn: Surrealism in Clark Coolidge’s Solution Passage….. 176 Conclusion: A Historical and Aesthetic Approach to Surrealism……………………… 212 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………. 218 ! iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Kayak 11, pages 2-3………………………………………………………… 156 ! iv CHAPTER 1 POETIC SURREALISM IN THE UNITED STATES: INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY The surrealist movement began in the 1920s and was developed and articulated most visibly and forcefully by André Breton. It expanded throughout Europe and the Americas over the course of the twentieth century, inspiring and transforming practically all artistic mediums. In the United States its impact has been ubiquitous, redefining for many how art itself is conceived and practiced. The movement has unequivocally changed American poetry, yet the nature and history of its impact has not been thoroughly and cogently recounted. This dissertation investigates how selected poets and poetic schools received, transformed, and transmitted the ideas of surrealism. I focus special attention on the mid-‘50s through the early ‘80s as the period when surrealism’s influence on poetry in the States was rapid and most definitive. Surrealism’s expansion across the Atlantic was somewhat limited until after World War II. To that point, its tenants had been adopted in the States by only a few writers, such as Charles Henri Ford and Philip Lamantia. During the war, Breton and the Surrealist expatriates led a flurry of activity in New York. Andrew Joron notes that the efforts of these individuals would become the “‘background radiation’” for a renaissance of surrealism in the States during the ‘60s. During this decade many poets came into contact with surrealism through travel and the increased availability of translated works. This exposure, combined with “the mystical, apocalyptic, and psychedelic tendencies of 1960s counterculture...mingled with political currents, adding momentum to the surrealist surge in America” (380). By the end of the ‘70s, 1 2 George Hitchcock, editor of the surrealist magazine Kayak, could claim that there was such a thing as an “American Surrealism” that retained “all the well-known devices of the Surrealists— but utilize[d] them with American material, American consciousness, and elements of our American experience” (“Interview” 154). This introductory chapter summarizes the history of surrealism in American poetry and identifies the tensions at play in its evolution. The next chapter investigates the channels through which surrealism was transmitted to the Beat poets and examines how these influences shaped the poetry of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman. Chapter 3 considers the deep image poets and how their attempt to combine surrealism with Pound and Jungian depth psychology shaped the discourse about surrealism in the States during the ‘60s and ‘70s. The nuances of this discourse are further elucidated in a study of George Hitchcock and Kayak magazine in Chapter 4. Finally, Chapter 5 considers the complicated relationship that has formed between the language poets and surrealism, and how the complementarity of the two movements is worked out in the writing of Clark Coolidge. The academic study of “American Surrealism” has been impeded in part because of surrealism’s ambivalent reception by popular and scholarly audiences. The concept of the “surreal” has come to be viewed, simultaneously and paradoxically, as normative and transgressive, as endemic and irrelevant. In casual contexts the term describes merely the uncanny or peculiar—misnomers that are cripplingly vague and neutral. In the hypermodern context of the twenty-first century, its idiomatic meaning is essentially a banal truism. In critical and academic discourse, the subject has been disparaged, such as when Charles I. Glicksberg 3 wrote 1949 that “[i]f the unconscious is the abode of infantile repressions, then Surrealism culminates in the art of infantilism” (303), or, especially in more recent decades, has been treated as a stylistic category lumped in with playfulness, irony, and absurdity.1 These misrepresentations stem from a variety of factors, including the avant-garde nature of the movement, the diverging and sometimes contradictory branches of its influence, and, to some extent, the aesthetic mediocrity with which it has come to be associated. Despite the often vexed and inconsistent discourse concerning surrealism, many American poets have undeniably been inspired by the movement’s approach to writing. Especially since the ‘60s, poets have been interested in reestablishing a connection to the unconscious and have imitated many surrealist techniques, often with considerable success. Yet frequently these writers treated surrealism as one of many modernist traditions, ostensibly a set of tools for expanding and varying poetic creation, rather than a point of view directly challenging the cultural and literary status quo. Surrealism’s call to a “systematic derangement of all the senses” could not comfortably exist alongside the desire to explain and resolve the disjointedness of modern experience. Absent a unifying principle, especially in the context of the rapid and complicated expansion of American poetry during the mid-century, a syncretistic approach to surrealism took shape. Critics and other poets detected the diluting effects of this syncretism and criticized some of the most visible versions of it as “soft” or “sloppy.” Even though the works of the Surrealists were only partially and recently available, readers knew enough to contest certain aspects of the movement’s assimilation. For these reasons, discussions 1 See, for instance, Donna Stonecipher’s article on James Tate, “Poet Tate’s American surrealism keeps attracting new readers.” 4 of surrealism in American poetry have been engulfed in a cloud of frustratingly ambiguous connotations and mystification. Nevertheless an appreciative critical