Recording Voice and the Racial Politics of American Experimental Poetry

Home , 2017 Wichita swatting, Confessional poetry, Media control symbols, Military cadence, Ron Silliman, Steve Benson (poet)

The Dissertation Committee for Jeffrey Kyle Boruszak Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Sound Off!: Recording Voice and the Racial Politics of American Experimental Poetry

Committee:

Lisa Moore, Co-Supervisor

Chad Bennett, Co-Supervisor

Brian Bremen

Tanya Clement

Meta DuEwa Jones

Sound Off!: Recording Voice and the Racial Politics of American Experimental Poetry

Jeffrey Kyle Boruszak

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2018 Acknowledgements

The prefix “ac-” in the word “acknowledgement” derives from the Latin preposition “ad,” meaning “to” or “towards.” It implies a vector, a spatial directionality that mirrors the physical properties of sound and the electric mechanisms in recording devices that make signal processing possible. Sound, listening, and knowledge are never solo performances, and this project was no exception. As I reflect on the countless people, who either in their direct or indirect contributions made this dissertation possible, I am prepared to fail in the impossible task

I now commence: naming them all. I am incredible fortunate to be the recipient of such overwhelmingly gracious support from so many people, without whom I could never have made it this far. My gratitude towards my parents, Amy and Allan, will never be enough. I don’t think they ever really understood why I got into this poetry “business” to begin with, but they never tried to sway me from the course. Instead they continue to offer nothing but unconditional love, support, and encouragement as I wander my uncharted path. The same goes for my siblings:

Haley, Sidney, and Sarah, thank you for everything you have done—and will continue to do. You are the buttresses I know I can always turn to when facing life’s storms. During my time at the University of Texas, I found camaraderie with my fellow graduate students. Your friendships mean the world to me, and this document contains countless ideas that emerged from many formal and informal conversations over the years. Erin Cotter, Loren Cressler, Reid Echols, Jesi Egan, Zach Hines, Robert Jones, Keith Leisner, Regina Mills, Aubri Plourde, Valerie Sirenko, Jeremy Smyczek, Anne Stewart, Elliott Turley, and of course, my dearest friend and roommate Alejandro Omidsalar: in my wildest dreams I never would have imagined that my graduate school cohort would consist of so many kind, wonderful, and intelligent humans. You’ve made the past six years an amazing and unforgettable existence, and there will always be a “hole in the wall” of my heart filled with memories of our time together.

iv Many other friends from Austin and beyond put up with my intellectual ramblings and occasional trolling as I worked on this project, and I would be woefully remiss were I not to name them now: Betsy Berry, Emily Echols, Meg Freitag, Meghan Gorman-Darif, Thomas Green, Hannah Harrison, Aleina Kreider, Katie Logan, Sequoia Maner, David Marcou, Rosy Mack, Rebecca Macmillan, Courtney Massie, Meg McKeon, Steve McLaughlin, Aidan McQuay, Will Mosley, Ben Roth, Jonathan Schoenfelder, Mark Sheridan, Megan Snell, Charles Stewart, and JC Wilt. Thank you all. Of course, the actual writing in this document would not exist at all without the extensive feedback I received from the members of my dissertation writing group. For drea brown, Carolyn Davis, Lindsey Gay, Jeremy Goheen, and Nick Spinelli, a mere “thank you” is hardly enough. Your incisive comments on numerous drafts pushed me to make this dissertation better than I thought it could be. I also owe a great debt to the members of my dissertation committee, who greatly impacted my intellectual development over the past six years and whose impact on this document is not limited to its present state. Your thoughts and questions continue to push me beyond the limits of what I know. Thank you, Brian Bremen, for serving on my field exam and prospectus committees as well as my dissertation committee. Not only are you the only person in this department who loves the work of Ezra Pound as much as I do—you were the first to suggest the work of Alexander Weheliye to me, and this project took on incredible new directions as a result. Tanya Clement, with whom I began working just before moving to Austin, and who by including me in her HiPSTas project and instructing me in the digital humanities introduced me to new methods of academic inquiry that continue to influence my research: I am forever indebted. Meta DuEwa Jones, your brilliance and insightful questions cut through the nonsense and get to the heart of the issue with an alacrity that never ceases to amaze me. Your comments on drafts made this dissertation better than it ever would have been otherwise. Chad Bennett, you have been a light throughout my graduate studies. My knowledge of and opinions

v about contemporary poetry have undergone radical transformations over the years because of your infinite generosity. Your extraordinary kindness and mentorship have meant so much to me, and your work as a scholar and a teacher will always be a model for me. And finally, to Lisa Moore, I will never be able to repay the debt I feel I owe to you. I could not have asked for a better advisor or friend. Your honesty and support led me through the darkness and the pitfalls of my graduate studies, and I would not be here today if not for you. Additional thanks are due to Douglas Kearney, who in addition to providing me with a copy of the recordings analyzed in Chapter Three, sat in a room and listened to me give a paper on his poetry but still had only kind and thoughtful things to say. Thank you to the Stanford Libraries, which houses the Allen Ginsberg Special Collection. In addition to the documents cited in the first chapter, which I encountered in their reading room, the Library was also kind enough to send me a digital copy of one of one of Ginsberg’s auto poesy tapes—an act that advanced both my knowledge and the direction of my arguments. Thank you as well to Patricia Schaub, the Department’s Graduate Coordinator, a truly unsung hero whose efforts made my work as a graduate student possible all these years.

Finally, and most importantly, thank you to Dilara Cirit. You are the love of my life, my soul mate, my better half, and most importantly, my partner. I would never have accomplished a feat so large without your never-ending support and companionship. You listened to ideas when they were at their most barebones, engaged my harebrained rhetorical leaps with utter grace, and by reading draft after draft of my writing made my prose sing. You are the person who celebrated my accomplishments and intellectual heights while providing empathy and assurance at my self-critical lows. You are my constant inspiration. And more than completing this dissertation or receiving my doctoral degree, meeting you and falling in love is the most important thing I’ve done as a graduate student over the past six years. As we move forward into a new phase of our life together, I am confident of the great things ahead with you by side.

vi Sound Off!: Recording Voice and the Racial Politics of American Experimental Poetry

Jeffrey Kyle Boruszak, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2018

Supervisors: Lisa Moore and Chad Bennett

The racial politics of the avant-garde is one of the dominant and most urgent issues in twenty- first century American poetry. Non-white poets often find themselves excluded from contemporary avant-garde circles, historical narratives of avant-garde practices frequently occlude their contributions, and avant-garde poets rarely include anti-racist rhetoric and principles in their poems. In recent years, the anti-lyric critiques posed by the avant-garde Language poets in the 1980s and 1990s drew increased attention for their role in racially segregating experimental and formally innovative writers. Poetic voice, the rejection of which is a cardinal principle of anti-lyric, became a central figure in these discussions. Yet given that voice can refer to the phenomenal act of speaking as well as serve as a common figure for an individual poet’s style and tone, the nature of the links between voice and race in poetry remain unclear. This dissertation therefore incorporates current trends in the scholarly field of sound studies by attending to postwar American poets who use technology for sound recording and reproduction in their work in order to isolate voice as an object of intense scrutiny. By analyzing the Vietnam-era “auto poesy” of Allen Ginsberg, the dystopian specter colonialism in poems by

Cathy Park Hong, and the typographical experiments of Douglas Kearney, this project engages both analog and digital recording technologies and their applications as compositional processes, structural metaphors, and aesthetic influences. Rather than focus on how voice is produced in the

vii acts of speaking and writing, I engage the cultural norms that code sounds and inform human listening practices in order to argue that voice is dynamic, fluid, and contextual. Given their significant overlap in political commitments, acknowledging the whiteness of the avant-garde suggests the possibility of creating a broader and more inclusive coalition of experimental poets whose combined efforts can bring about desirable shifts in political, pedagogical, and publishing norms.

viii Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... x

Introduction ...... 1 “Make It New”: Inventing an American Avant-Garde ...... 6 “We must hew our own path”: Race and the Avant-Garde ...... 19 “I am I because my little dog knows me”: Voice, Identity, and Sound Technology ...... 30 Chapter Summaries ...... 41

One Track Mind: Auto Poesy and Alternative Consciousness in Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: poems of these states ...... 47 “Composed on the Tongue”: Ginsberg’s Early Poetics ...... 51 “parallel black wires on the grey highway”: Auto Poesy, Defined ...... 61 “hearing the Horror Syndicate”: Vietnam and the Military-Industrial Complex ...... 70

Creolizing Empire: Linguistic Variation as Decolonial Practice in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution ...... 86 “…Opal o opus”: Desert Creole, Witness, and the Tape Recorder ...... 91 “So learn them all”: Desert Creole and Decolonizing Language ...... 98 “Chattabox”: Voice, Race, and Decoloniality ...... 105

Ekoustic Poetry: Writing the Masked Sounds of Blackness in Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton ...... 115 “We Wear the Mask”: Dialect and Listening to How Blackness Sounds ...... 119 “hey, you: what’s that sound”: Typography as Audiovisual Remix ...... 130 “(goin’ back)”: Masking, MP3s, and Erasures in the Sound of Blackness...... 136

Coda: Hitting Pause on the Avant-Garde ...... 145

Bibliography ...... 164

ix LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Untitled Image by Jennifer Tamayo. https://bit.ly/2JHnDIQ...... 24 Figure 2: His Master's Voice, Original Painting by Francis Barraud, 1899...... 37 Figure 3. “The Black Automaton in What It Is #2: Hypertension in Effizzect,” by Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton (New York: Fence Books, 2009), 26...... 132 Figure 4. “The Black Automaton in What It Is #3: Work It Out,” by Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton (New York: Fence Books, 2009), 82...... 137 Figure 5. “Pornegrophy,” by Douglas Kearney, Buck Studies (New York: Fence Books, 2016), 32...... 141

x Introduction

Sound off! One-Two. Sound off! Three-Four. Cadence Count! One-Two-Three-Four. One- Two…Three-Four! — “Duckworth Chant”

The call-and-response military cadence known as “The Duckworth Chant,” later referred to as “The Jody Call” and “Sound Off,” was invented by Private Willie Duckworth during a May

1944 march near Ft. Slocum, the provisional training center at which Duckworth was stationed.

The 20-year old soldier began the chant spontaneously during a particularly tedious march through swamps and rough backcountry roads that had drained company morale. Superior officers took note of the chant’s revitalizing effects: “Foot-weary soldiers started to pick up their step and cadence with a growing chorus of hearty male voices. Instead of a down-trodden, fatigued company, here marched 200 soldiers with heads up, a spring to their step, and happy smiles on their faces.”1 Upon his return to Ft. Slocum, Commanding Officer Colonel Bernard

Lentz tasked Duckworth with developing the cadence further. In 1945, the United States Armed

Forces introduced the chant to the public by releasing a record containing three variations of the tune under its “V-Disc” label. Over 70 years later, “The Duckworth Chant” has been employed in military bases across the country, and with depictions of the cadence in popular media from

Full Metal Jacket to The Simpsons, it may be one of the most widely known aspects of military training among the American public.

What many people do not realize is that Private Duckworth was black, and grew up on his grandparents’ sharecropper farm in rural Georgia during the heights of the Great Depression and Jim Crow. Although he initially claimed to have invented the chant on the spot, during an

1. T. Sgt. Henry C. Felice, “Introduction,” The Duckworth Chant, 1945, V-Disc, YouTube video, 5:43. Posted by Michael Cavanaugh, July 21, 2013. https://youtu.be/Q6bhv4i8qso. 1 interview on his 78th birthday Duckworth stated that the chant originated in his calls to the family hogs back on the farm.2 Of course, Duckworth had the American black musical tradition behind him as well—collective singing to ease the burden of labor during field work, the antiphonic structure of hymns, and the anaphoric organization of blues lyrics, where words are repeated across stanzas with minor variations, could all be claimed as influences on Duckworth’s creation.

What is so striking about his chant, then, is that despite its well-documented origins and obvious connections to black folk music, it is considered a military song first and foremost.

Drawing its title from Duckworth’s cadence, this dissertation occupies a similar intersection between the history of recorded sound, the racial politics of the United States, and the contemporary avant-garde in American poetry, the latter of which contemporary poet Ben

Lerner recently characterized as “a military metaphor that forgets it is a metaphor.”3 Although I focus on avant-garde poetry specifically in the following pages, the questions animating this investigation are part and parcel of sound’s wider impact on race and its attendant discourses since the invention of technologies for sound recording and reproduction at the end of the nineteenth century. These questions include familiar inquiries into representation and inclusion

(Who gets to speak in America?); phenomenological investigations into sound’s physical properties (What do we hear when we listen to others?); inquests into cultural and epistemological norms (How does race, typically conceptualized in visual terms, manifest acoustically?); and tactical queries (In what ways does the state use sound technologies to surveil and control its minority populations, and how can sound be used by subjugated populations as a tool for resistance?). As such, the stakes of this dissertation are not limited to scholarly

2. Yvonne Johnson, “U.S. Army Jody Call has black roots,” U.S. Army, February 14, 2011, https://www.army.mil/article/51827/us_army_jody_call_has_black_roots. 3. Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 41. 2 interventions in literary studies. By engaging sound as a significant domain through which humans physically, mentally, and emotionally interact with the world, it is my intention for these arguments to resonate across disciplines.4

For decades, the critical discourse around American avant-garde poetry has been dominated by its relation to lyric, largely as a result of the anti-lyric critiques asserted by the

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (hereafter “Language”) poets since the late 1970s.5 The cardinal principle of anti-lyric is the rejection of voice, a figure for self-expressivity that Language poets associate with the poetic styles that dominate mainstream publication venues (such as The New

Yorker and American Poetry Review) and graduate creative writing programs. In the 1980s,

Language poets described these products of “Official Verse Culture”6 as lyric poems with “an ideology of no ideology,”7 in which a speaker narrates an experience in free verse, eschewing any direct agenda in favor of broad moralizing and sentimental platitudes. Such approaches, they argue, not only fail to fully encompass poetry’s potential for intellectual and political engagement, but also contribute to poetry’s niche status among the American public. For decades, many critics responded to their critiques of lyric by claiming that the rejection of voice

4. My use of “resonate” draws on Jean-Luc Nancy’s invocation of the term: “perhaps it is necessary that sense not be content to make sense (or to be logos), but that it want also to resound. My whole proposal will revolve around such a fundamental resonance, even around a resonance as a foundation, as a first or last profundity of ‘sense’ itself (or of truth).” Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham UP, 2007), 6. 5. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine founded by Language poets Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein in 1978 that serves as the source for the group’s stylized name, will be rendered without abbreviation in order to distinguish between the poets as group and their associated publication. 6. “Let me be specific as to what I mean by ‘official verse culture’—I am referring to the poetry publishing and reviewing practices of The New York Times, The Nation, American Poetry Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), Antaeus, Parnassus, Atheneum Press, all the major trade publishers, the poetry series of almost all of the major university presses…Add to this the ideologically motivated selection of the vast majority of poets teaching in university writing and literature programs and of poets taught in such programs as well as the interlocking accreditation of these selections through prizes and awards judged by the same individuals. Finally, there are the self-appointed keepers of the gate who actively put forward biased, narrowly focused, and frequently shrill and contentious accounts of American poetry, while claiming, like all disinformation propaganda, to be giving historical or nonpartisan views.” Charles Bernstein, “The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA,” Content’s Dream (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986), 247-8. 7. Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten, “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 264. 3 is inexorably tied to the ongoing occlusion and exclusion of people of color from the avant- garde.8 As race has grown to dominate the national discourse in the aftermath of Ferguson, MO and the development of the Black Lives Matter Movement, the need to address the avant-garde’s racial politics has become increasingly urgent—and increasingly polemic.

In this dissertation, I intervene in these highly contentious debates by arguing that the exclusion of poets of color from the contemporary avant-garde in American poetry is not the unintended byproduct of rejecting voice, but the unacknowledged atavism without which anti- lyric would not exist in the first place. Underlying anti-lyric arguments is a cathexis between voice and race that over time hardened beyond mere metonymic displacement. Yet the slippages between terms present an extraordinary hurdle to examining the evolution of these rhetorical tropes. Does “voice” refer solely to the act of speaking, or is it a broader figure for an individual poet’s tone and style? Does “self-expressivity” reflect the ability to narrate experiences from the poet’s subject-position, or from the poem’s speaking persona? And given recent developments in lyric studies, is “lyric” a literary genre, a mode of writing, or a hermeneutic?

In order to trawl the depths of the myriad anti-lyric arguments made by Language poets, critics, and poet-critics, this dissertation isolates voice as an object of intense scrutiny by examining poetry collections in which technologies for sound recording and reproduction

8. Publications in the 21st century that rehearse these claims and were particularly influential in my thinking over the course of writing this dissertation include: Race and the Avant-Garde by Timothy Yu (2009), Renegade Poetics by Evie Shockley (2011), Thinking Its Presence by Dorothy Wang (2014), and “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” by Cathy Park Hong (2014). In using the term “occlusion,” I am also interested in Prageeta Sharma’s expanded definition of the term: “When I say occlusion I mean that, while race sometimes constitutes a subject of analysis, its effects in a white classroom—or a classroom where white students are a majority—are not considered. Occlusion consists in the perception that the racial body or the racial poetic is a transient space for the white poet body on his or her way to learning poetry: a stop here and a stop there, one strategy here, one poet there.” In this dissertation, I am attempting to be conscious and vigilant about my own social position as a white (Jewish) man, and therefore want to work against the tokenist impulses Sharma describes by treating the poets and critics of color I cite not as extraordinary outliers, but as substantial interlocuters in old and ongoing conversations. See Prageeta Sharma, “Model Minority, Dreaming, and Cheap Signaling,” Boston Review, March 10, 2015, accessed March 14, 2018, http://bostonreview.net/poetry/prageeta-sharma-forum-response-race-avant-garde. 4 influence poetic production and animate poetic forms. Because these technologies physically cleave the sonic event of the voice’s irruption from its emanating source, sound recording mirrors poetry’s relationship to voice in that both recordings and poems physically displace voice from the body’s originating spatiotemporal context. As I will demonstrate, studying the intersections between voice and race in poems that include sound recordings offers a glimpse into the cultural norms that govern the racial dimensions of voice’s production. But even more importantly, this approach opens up questions about reception and how we listen to voice and race in contemporary America more generally. This dissertation’s methodology therefore reflects current trends in the relatively new field of sound studies, “the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival.”9 My approach follows a strain within sound studies that, borrowing from the tradition of cultural studies, examines the ways in which cultural forces shape—and are shaped by—evolving techniques for producing and listening to sound in America. A core premise of this critical methodology contends that various sound technologies do not stand out as radical breaks inaugurating wholly new relationships between humans and the sounds with which they interact. Rather, these inventions respond to ongoing epistemological and discursive shifts, and in their wake reshape the public’s cultural knowledge and habits.10

While I argue that the contemporary avant-garde in American poetry institutionalizes its

9. Jonathan Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” The Sound Studies Reader, ed. by Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012): 2. 10. For example, in The Audible Past (Duke UP, 2003), Jonathan Sterne expands upon Michel Foucault’s archaeology of the medical profession in The Birth of the Clinic (1963) by describing the invention of the stethoscope as a response to the increasing importance of empiricist approaches to medicine in the early 19th century. The original stethoscope was actually quite similar in design to the already-existing ear trumpet, a hearing aid. However, the stethoscope led its inventor, René Laennec, to systematically develop principles for medial auscultation, an auditory technique in which medical professionals listen to the body’s organs in order to accurately diagnose a patient. Because medial auscultation requires proper training to identify aberrational sounds, clinical experience became increasingly important to the medical profession; as a result, medicine became an upper-middle class profession associated with advanced education. 5 whiteness through its oppositional stances towards mainstream norms and identity politics, I am not charging poets and critics who consider themselves avant-garde with intentionally reifying white supremacy through severe racial transgressions. But whether intentional or not, anti-lyric arguments have had the practical effect of widespread racial segregation within the poetry community. Avant-garde poets already count extraordinarily few non-white poets among their coteries. And even if they articulate support for anti-racist positions in their prose and personal lives, they rarely address racial concerns in their poetry. When they do attempt to engage with anti-racist discourse, the results can be controversial, tone-deaf, and divisive—as was the case for avant-garde Conceptual poets Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, whose tendentious projects will be discussed in my coda. It is my intention over the course of this project to outline the inherent contradictions animating the avant-garde’s poetic redlining of people of color, with the hope of determining a path towards a broader and more inclusive coalition of experimental poets.

“MAKE IT NEW”: INVENTING AN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE Literally translated as “advance guard,” the term avant-garde originally referred to a group of soldiers serving in the forward position of a military formation. As such, they are the individuals most likely to kill—and be killed—on the battlefield. While the many groups across artistic genres and media that have identified themselves as avant-garde over the years vary wildly in theories and goals, the military metaphor that animates the term provides a compelling explanation for its enduring appeal to artists over the past century. Imagining themselves fighting on the front lines of an ongoing aesthetic battle where the emancipation of humanity itself is at stake, artists adopt the label in order to situate their work as an all-out assault on the values, norms, and traditions of society. No longer hiding in the shadows as unacknowledged legislators,

6 avant-garde artists present themselves as revolutionaries, actively fighting to instantiate change in the world around them.

The military metaphor is not all-encompassing in structuring the avant-garde, however.

Governed in the style of an unstructured democracy rather than a strict military hierarchy, there is no formal membership to the avant-garde. Whether the label is self-applied or not, being an avant-garde artist requires nothing more than being confirmed as such through popular consensus

(although this standard does have the social side-effect of encouraging group formation and affiliation). Nor are there set rules of conduct, as groups and artists with noticeably divergent methods of artistic production and political ideologies have been described as avant-garde for over a century. In the case of the historical avant-garde, a term which refers to a series of artistic movements in Europe before World War II and includes Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, and ‘Pataphysics (among others), the ability to organize such disparate efforts under a single identifier strains the possibility of using the term for scholarly purposes with any modicum of particularity.

Attempts to theorize the avant-garde over the twentieth century largely follow the approach laid out in Peter Bürger’s landmark treatise Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) by situating the term in relation to changes in intellectual and material conditions brought on by modernity.11 Bürger most notably claims that the historical avant-garde can be described through the progression of art from its original sacral and representational functions to a self-reflexive criticism of art’s autonomy in bourgeois society. Rather than produce art that is “beautiful,” avant-garde artists seek to collapse the distinction between art and the social praxis by which

11. Prominent examples include Rosalind Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986), Paul Mann’s The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (1991), and Frederick Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). 7 people live their lives. That is, artists of the historical avant-garde tend to view art as something to be lived by every person in every moment, not admired from afar.

It is not my intention, however, to theorize the avant-garde as a whole with sweeping pronouncements about its relation to the competing logics of Big-M-Modernism and Big-P-

Postmodernism. Instead, I am interested in a much smaller subsection of avant-garde artists: contemporary American poets who invoke the avant-garde label to describe themselves, their work, and their milieu. While the differences in their individual styles and methods are often pronounced, these poets trace their connections to avant-garde ancestors along similar genealogies. In addition, direct institutional support and growing communication networks facilitated by the internet brought these individuals into direct personal and professional contact.12 Describing the avant-garde in contemporary American poetry, then, will allow for a more direct and specific approach to the racial politics of twenty-first century poetic discourse.

The avant-garde as popularly understood in contemporary American poetry is the invention of the Language poets and their critical proponents. Through a combination of overt and indirect positioning against poetic traditions and values, major Language poets and critics such as Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and Marjorie Perloff spent decades presenting themselves and their associates as the rightful heirs to American poetry’s experimental impulses.

While scholars tend to differentiate between modernist, postmodernist, and avant-garde practices in the twentieth century, Language poets blurred the boundaries between these experimental impulses in order to construct a neo-avant-garde lineage in which modernist and postmodernist

12. For example, Language poets Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe partnered with Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley to found the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo in 1991. In addition to educating a number of younger poets associated with the avant-garde, including Juliana Spahr, Jena Osman, and Peter Gizzi, they founded one of earliest and largest online forums of its time, the POETICS listserv, in 1993. 8 writers were always-already avant-garde.13 Their efforts therefore effectively reassembled the history of twentieth century poetry by collapsing distinctions between American modernist impulses and European avant-garde efforts into an exquisite corpse of poetic invention.

Ezra Pound, rent between American and European currents, retroactively became the central figure in their history of America’s poetic avant-garde. What is otherwise referred to as the “Poundian tradition” in many ways stands in for the genealogy of the avant-garde in contemporary American poetry. In this historical narrative, Pound directly influenced the

Objectivist poets Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen in the 1930’s and 40s, as well as Black

Mountain and Beat poets in the 50’s (especially Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg, respectively).14 The 1960 anthology The New American Poetry:1945-1960 suggests this narrative, and Language poets frequently invoke it as both a model and a poetic ancestry.15

Moreover, the fact that the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E opens with the prose and poetry of Larry Eigner, a Black Mountain poet a full generation older than the majority of the other contributors, indicates that at least as early as the late 1970s, the Language poets were already overtly situating themselves as the latest development in a Poundian lineage. As a tactical consideration, this self-asserted bloodline intends to bolster the legitimacy of the

13. Kerry Doyle observes this tactic at play in Marjorie Perloff’s evolving use of the term “avant-garde” over the course of her career: “Perloff does not rigorously apply ‘avant-garde’ as a key term in the early criticism, but in her later studies it becomes, retrospectively, an umbrella term to describe the various modernist, later twentieth-century, and early twenty-first century texts that ‘work to rupture the lyric paradigm.’ Among the other modernists, Perloff’s avant-garde includes the Russian and Italian Futurists, the Surrealists, and those in the ‘new mode’ exemplified for Perloff, and others, by the poetry of Ezra Pound.” See Kerry Doyle, “More Apparent than Real,” Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North American Avant-Gardism, 1963-2008, ed. by J. Mark Smith (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013): 53-4. Bernstein similarly describes postmodern practices as an extension of modernist concerns in Charles Bernstein, “In the Middle of Modernism,” A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992): 90-105. 14. For a more detailed account of this lineage and its connections to Language poetry, see Christopher Beach, ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992). 15. Anthologizing experimental poets such as Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Allen Ginsberg largely canonized them among the American public. For more on The New American Poetry and its influence among Language poets, see Marjorie Perloff, “Whose New American Poetry?: Anthologizing in the Nineties,” Diacritics 26 no. 3, (1996): 104-23. 9

Language poets’ claim as heirs-apparent to a poetic avant-garde that they were actually in the process of actively inventing.

In terms of poetic practice, the Language poets display a three-fold inheritance from

Pound’s writing. First, the American avant-garde places enormous value on poetic invention, an overt incorporation of Pound’s dictum to “make it new” that bucks received traditions in favor of formal experimentation and originality.16 Second, Pound’s support for fascism in his poetry, while roundly rejected by contemporary avant-gardistes in content, is an important influence on their view of poetry as an inherently political form. Avant-garde (and especially Language) poets follow Pound’s lead by composing texts that demand intense and sustained intellectual engagement in order to redirect readerly attention towards political ends. Finally, Pound’s textual collages—predominately found in The Cantos but also represented by the radical juxtaposition of his Imagist poems, including “In a Station of the Metro”—had wide-ranging influence even among non-avant-garde poets. But for the purpose of establishing a link in methods between

Pound and the Language poets, the legacy of these collages can be observed most clearly in the latter’s attempts to disrupt syntactical conventions through intense rhapsodic sutures in which sudden juxtapositions and paratactical swerves blend together seemingly unrelated premises in order to display previously hidden and unacknowledged logics operating within words and linguistic structures.

While these core principles—invention, politics, and disjunction—generally describe the stylistic and methodological norms of Language-influenced avant-garde poetry, they are nonetheless tangential to what has become paramount in defining the poetic avant-garde as a

16. Of course, “make it new” is ironically neither an original statement nor an actual call for originality. The operative word in the phrase is actually “it,” a pronoun referring to Victorian culture and tradition. Pound’s dictum expresses his belief that this material must be engaged and repurposed towards new ends. 10 distinct social group in contemporary America: anti-lyric. It is important to note that Language poets did not articulate the premises of anti-lyric in any single theoretical statement—in fact, they almost never invoke the label themselves. Instead, scholars use “anti-lyric” as an umbrella term that subsumes similar criticisms collectively leveled against lyric’s cultural dominance as the major poetic genre in mid-century America. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Language poets targeted mainstream poems, poets, and publications aligned with New Criticism’s institutional influence and Confessional poetry’s commercial popularity in order to lob arguments at lyric poetry in general.

New Criticism generally characterized lyric poems as the expression of a central speaking subject, which can be read and interpreted sans historical and biographical context. This mid- century premise was heavily influenced by John Stuart Mill, who famously wrote in his 1833 essay “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” that “Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling: but, if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard.”17 By characterizing poetry as “overheard,” Mill figures lyric poetry as an individual’s expression of their private thoughts and observations, while also gesturing towards that solitary orientation as a public performance that acknowledges its interception by the reader. While scholars typically focus on the latter half of this quotation in order to probe the divide between private thought and public speech that animates the lyric tradition, the observation that poetry is akin to eloquence is also noteworthy and will be discussed shortly. For the moment, however, it is worth noting that Mill’s figure implies a hierarchized model of transmission—poetry originates with the poet and is expressed to the reader. New Criticism drew from Mill and later expressions of his claims, such as T.S. Eliot’s

17. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,” The Crayon 7, no. 4 (1860): 95. 11

“The Three Voices of Poetry,” which followed Mill’s description of lyric poetry as akin to a soliloquy.

Confessional poets, meanwhile, responded to the mid-century dominance of New

Criticism by reasserting the importance of the poet’s affect and intention in autobiographical verse. Emphasizing self-expression by narrating personal experiences, these poets largely adopted the model of lyric poetry as “overheard” from Mill while excising New Criticism’s demand for impersonal detachment. Allen Ginsberg, whose status in regard to Confessional poetry and the avant-garde will be discussed in Chapter One, is often characterized as an exemplar of Confessional verse. In his early poems, Ginsberg narrates his experiences, as well as those of family and friends, eschewing personal censorship in favor of sincere and authentic self- expression.18 His emphases on individualism and free expression, combined with his soaring literary celebrity following the Howl obscenity trial in 1957, influenced countless young people writing poetry in America at the time and famously contributed to the countercultural ethos of the 1960s.

Given these somewhat contradictory sources, it may not be surprising that “lyric” can be just as nebulous a term as “avant-garde” in poetic discourse, especially since this characterization does not account for more recent developments in lyric theory. The twenty-first century saw poets and scholars make a number of competing arguments concerning lyric, largely in response to the anti-lyric arguments of Language poets.19 However, presenting an “accurate” definition of

18. In “Kaddish,” for example, Ginsberg describes returning his mother, Naomi, to a mental institution after agreeing to have her lobotomized: “The ride then—held Naomi’s hand, and held her head to my breast, I’m taller— kissed her and said I did it for the best—Elanor sick—and Max with heart condition—Needs— / To me—'Why did you do this?’ —‘Yes Mrs., your son will have to leave you in an hour’—The Ambulance”. Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish,” Kaddish and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961, 28. 19. Major attempts to re-theorize lyric include: the argument that lyric is in fact a readerly hermeneutic and not a genre; an investigation into the affective dimensions of lyric production; and the claim that lyric is a transnational and transhistoric genre capable of self-reflection; see Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric 12 lyric is beside the point. Language poets advocated anti-lyric positions to argue against what they saw as the popular and dominant approaches to poetry in mid-century America, and most frequently characterized lyric poems as participating in the following norms: 1) an emphasis on personal expression through the narration of thoughts, feelings, and experiences; 2) concluding lines that “close” the poem by drawing moral conclusions from these narrated experiences; 3) a structural reliance on a “lyric I” standing in for either the poet herself or a persona who gives

“voice” to the poem; and 4) the use of poetic language presented as “natural speech” that conveys qualities such as the poem’s “honesty, its directness, its authenticity, its artlessness, its sincerity, its spontaneity, its personal expressiveness.”20

Heavily influenced by the apparition of the poststructuralist zeitgeist during the time in which it began to be articulated, anti-lyric is a critique of lyric’s core premises based upon the withdrawal of the subject’s philosophical centrality and the recognition of language’s inherent artificiality as a constructed system. One of the Language poets’ most important and oft-cited figures in support of their anti-lyric position is Ludwig Wittgenstein,21 with his theory of

“language games” playing an important role in how they conceive of the relationship between poetry and language in general. Wittgenstein articulates his theory in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) through the analogy of children playing a game.

Entrants play the game of language without knowing what rules the other players have adopted at the outset. As the game continues, they become aware of the rules under which other players are operating and subsequently modify their behavior in response. Therefore, communication

Reading (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005); Gillian White, Lyric Shame (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014); and Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2017), respectively. 20. Charles Bernstein, “Stray Straws and Straw Men,” Content’s Dream (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986), 41. 21. While Wittgenstein is not considered a “poststructuralist” philosopher in the proper sense of the term, his outsider reputation and not-easily-categorizable theories situate him between analytic and continental traditions in philosophy. 13 between individuals is possible because language produces meaning through the ongoing consensus of its participants.

There are three dimensions to the language games’ overall import on the anti-lyric critique. First, the theory of language games challenges Mill’s premise that poetry is “overheard” by shifting linguistic agency away from the poet. If language is a constant negotiation between players, then how readers of poetry interpret what they “overhear” ought to be in dialogue with what the poet uttered in the first place, even when the two appear to be in opposition. In the co- authored treatise “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” Language poets

Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten adopt the figure of a “once-divided-but-now-fused Reader and Writer”22 from fellow Language poet Bruce Andrews to describe a hermeneutic foundation for poetry in which the reader expands the poem’s interpretive horizons through the act of reading the poem.

Second, Mill’s comparison between poetry and eloquence assumes the existence of

“natural” properties of language that facilitate expression between persons. However, Language poets and their supporters are quick to note that poetry is by definition an artificial construct. As

Marjorie Perloff writes in Radical Artifice:

Whereas Modernist poetics was overwhelmingly committed, at least in theory, to the “natural look,” whether at the level of speech…the level of image…or the level of verse form…we are now witnessing a return to artifice…Artifice, in this sense, is less a matter of ingenuity and manner, of elaboration and elegant subterfuge, than of the recognition that a poem or painting or performance text is a made thing—contrived, constructed, chosen—and that its reading is also a construction on the part of its audience.23

Poetry, even in its Greek root poiesis, refers to a “made” or “crafted” thing. Therefore, poetry

22. Silliman, et al., “Aesthetic Tendency.” 270. 23. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991): 27- 8. For more on poetry and artifice, also see Charles Bernstein, “The Artifice of Absorption,” A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992): 9-89. 14 may in fact be similar to “eloquence” in the sense of the latter’s etymology—poetry “speaks out” by making a language event public. But the other properties eloquence often connotes— expressiveness, fluency, ornamentation—are not “natural” properties of language but rules that have become popular favorites in the ongoing language game of poetry. That is, the properties of eloquence are artifices that a poet must choose to make overt when crafting poems.

Third, the uncritical reproduction of language’s supposedly “natural” or traditional qualities in lyric poems forces one to rely upon the historical logics used when those rules were established as part of ongoing language games. Fluent participation in language games arises from the ability to establish iterable responses to rules in given contexts. As Wittgenstein writes,

“To follow a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs

(usages, institutions).”24 Therefore, customary approaches to language rely upon rules edified in moments of Western history when citizenship was denied to women and basic principles of humanity were widely abrogated for non-white people. Lyric poems, then, insofar as they follow linguistic customs without interrogating their underlying assumptions and operative premises, risk reifying institutional and systemic mechanisms of oppression such as patriarchy and anti-

Semitism.25

These three components of anti-lyric critique—the hermeneutic confluence of the fused-

Writer-Reader, the inherent artifice of poetry itself, and the critical examination of language’s systemic role in perpetuating violent and oppressive practices—orbit the wider Wittgensteinian position that communicating intention through language can never be absolutely assured. Hence the tendency among Language poets to compose works that attempt to disrupt intention through

24. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., trans. By G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 87. Emphasis in original. 25. For example, Sylvia Plath’s poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” use the imagery of Jews murdered during the Holocaust in an appropriative manner that lacks self-awareness about its participation in anti-Semitic logics. 15 formal and aesthetic discordance.26 In the 1970s, Ron Silliman described this position using the equation “Aesthetic consistency = voice,”27 metonymically linking lyric poetry’s avoidance of linguistic rupture to the widely used figure for an individual poet’s style through direct equation.

By the 1990s, anti-lyric arguments were so widely associated with a rejection of “voice” that it became the primarily battleground between Language poets and supporters of lyric poetry. In fact, Marjorie Perloff begins her 1999 essay “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron

Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo” with a clear description of the schism between avant- garde and lyric poetry: “One of the cardinal principles—perhaps the cardinal principle—of

American Language poetics (as of the related current in England usually labeled ‘linguistically innovative poetries’) has been the dismissal of ‘voice’ as the foundational principle of lyric poetry.”28 Issued by Perloff like a declaration of papal law, the rejection of “voice” in poetry could today be considered the defining feature of anti-lyric, and by association, the avant-garde in contemporary American poetry.

However, the use of voice as a catch-all term for lyric self-expression ought to give readers pause, especially given that the term’s use is not standardized between writers. In some cases, voice aligns with Paul De Man’s description in “Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory:

Riffaterre and Jauss,” a 1985 essay that opens:

The principle of intelligibility, in lyric poetry, depends on the phenomenalization of the poetic voice. Our claim to understand a lyric text coincides with the actualization of a speaking voice, be it (monologically) that of the poet or (dialogically) that of the exchange that takes place between author and reader in the process of comprehension.29

26. These works’ length and arrangement on the page make directly citing examples difficult. For an example, see “Asylum” by Charles Bernstein, originally published in Asylums (1975), but more readily accessible in Charles Bernstein, All the Whiskey in Heaven (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010). 27. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1987): 57. 28. Marjorie Perloff, “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 3 (1999): 405. 29. Paul De Man, “Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory: Riffaterre and Jauss,” Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. By Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 55. 16

De Man considers voice to be a function of the poem’s ability to be interpreted, and Perloff cites this passage explicitly in order to discuss the “lyric I” in her 1990 monograph Poetic License.30

However, by referring to its phenomenalization, De Man suggests that voice is not a metaphor but an observable attempt to bring the experience of the text into the sonic realm. The co-authors of “Aesthetic Tendency,” meanwhile, collectively decry the “lyric I” as “an aesthetic project in which the specifics of experience dissolve into the pseudo-intimacy of an over-arching authorial

‘voice,’”31 downplaying phenomenal effects in favor of associating voice with the presence of a poetic subject. Complicating “voice” further is the Language poets’ embrace of sound as a function of poetry. This contradiction is most apparent in Charles Bernstein’s work—in addition to editing the influential essay collection Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word

(1998), he was a co-founder of “The Segue Series,” which began as “The Ear Inn Series” in 1978 and is one of the longest continually running poetry reading series in the United States.

Recordings of the series’ forty years of readings are available on PennSound, the premier online archive of poetry audio recordings Bernstein co-founded at the University of Pennsylvania in

2005. These projects suggest that Bernstein embraces both voice-as-phenomenon and the pseudo-intimacy of the authorial voice, at least in the context of poetry readings.

Turning to technology for sound recording and reproduction brings into relief the precarity of these theoretical contradictions and an aporia in Language poetics when it comes to the role of voice in poetry. In one of his earliest works, “1-100,” Bernstein seems to insist on the importance of the voice as a poetic phenomenon. Produced in 1969 during his sophomore year of college, the poem is a three-minute long recording in which Bernstein recites every number from

30. Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990), 12. 31. Silliman et al., 264. 17 one to one hundred, modulating his volume and tempo over the course of the numerical series.

He gradually builds in volume to a shout, then a scream. By the time he reads numbers in the

90s, his screams are prolonged and tortured. With a barbaric yawp of “ninety-nine,” he returns to a conversational volume and tone while uttering the final number: “one hundred.”32 The sonic irregularities Bernstein produces with his voice are part and parcel of this poem’s form and content. The differences in volume and tempo draw the reader’s attention to the sheer materiality of the poem’s acoustics, while also performing an emphatic protest against the rule-bound mathematical logic governing the progression of a series. By lowering his volume during his final utterance, Bernstein suggests an acknowledgement of the exercise’s futility in the face of termination and mathematical certainty. The prominence of language’s material dimensions and his acknowledgement of the futile attempts to break rule-bound systems both presage much of

Bernstein’s later writings on the relationship between language and poetry. And, despite the prominent role voice plays in the poem as a phenomenal occurrence, it bears no resemblance to how voice functions in lyric poetry—at least in terms of voice’s contradictory characterization under anti-lyric.

In fact, Bernstein hedges against rejecting voice later in his career, acknowledging sound art, cut-ups, and attention to breath as potentially valuable applications of voice in poetry: “Voice is a possibility for poetry, not an essence.” 33 His slippages between voice as a metaphorical figure and an acoustic event indicate that he rejects the former and embraces the latter. Despite this theoretical distinction, he does not indicate a clear bright-line differentiating the two in textual practice. In the case of Allen Ginsberg, these blurred divisions actively contribute to

32. Charles Bernstein, “1-100,” PennSound, recorded 1969, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bernstein- Class.php. 33. Bernstein, “Stray Straws,” 44-5. 18 readings that abnegate poems’ sonic phenomenality by attributing it to the poet’s stylistic attributes. So why, then, do Language poets continually return to voice as the foundation of their anti-lyric critique? What different roles does voice assume among avant-garde and non-avant- garde poets? If there really is an implicit connection between voice and an individual’s capacity for self-expression, does that fact preclude voice from participating in poetic constructions that are, in the avant-garde’s Poundian tradition, inventive, political, or disjunctive?

“WE MUST HEW OUR OWN PATH”: RACE AND THE AVANT-GARDE Critical opposition to the avant-garde’s anti-lyric critique, particularly its condemnation of lyric poetry’s reliance on voice, has been frequent, adamant, and urgent. Many of these anti- anti-lyric arguments contend that the avant-garde excludes people of color in both definition and practice.34 This segregatory practice is partially due to the military metaphor at the heart of the avant-garde, which cannot be divorced from the language games that historically organized actual militaries. The customs of military language games reflect the military’s inherent reliance on masculine and expansionist rhetoric. In addition to widespread historical prohibitions against people of color, women, homosexuals, and transgendered people from serving in the military

(both in the United States and internationally),35 this rhetoric positions the concerns of vulnerable populations as trivial minutiae that can be ignored in service of victory on the battlefield. As a result, the track record of the avant-garde’s racial politics is less-than-stellar (to put it lightly).

34. Aldon Lynn Nielsen describes this effect as “the public bleaching out of the artistic movement whose major works…were inconceivable without the influence and models of black arts,” in reference to poet Bob Kaufman’s occlusion from accounts of the Beat Generation. Evie Shockley makes an even broader and more explicit charge: “the discourse around innovative and avant-garde poetry in the U.S. has historically constructed these categories as explicitly ‘white.’ African American poets, even when they were involved in, perhaps central to, now-canonical avant-garde movements, have been marginalized or erased from the literary histories.” See Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004), 150; and Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011), 11. 35. Even as I write this, President Trump’s proposed ban against transgender military service winds its way through the courts. 19

Artists of the historical avant-garde frequently appropriated Asian and African culture; from

Pound’s translations of Ancient Chinese poetry early in his career and his subsequent incorporation of Chinese ideograms in The Cantos, to Pablo Picasso’s embrace of African

Primitivism in his proto-cubist paintings, the exotic aesthetics of non-Western cultures were so enticing to historical avant-garde artists as fundamental breaks from received Western traditions that they cemented an Orientalist impulse within the historical avant-garde that cannot be divorced from the theories and practices of its contemporary successors.

For example, Ron Silliman ostensibly named his early prose poem, “The Chinese

Notebook,” after the notebook he purchased in San Francisco’s Chinatown in which he wrote the poem’s initial drafts. Beyond the explicit fetishization of China in the poem’s title and the object for which it was named, the work includes stanzaic paragraphs such as: “I began to develop forms which opt away from the melodic dominant line of the past several decades, using formal analogies taken from certain Balinese and African percussive and ensemble musics.”36 Even if we assume that the “I” does not represent Silliman himself (a premise undercut throughout the work by the frequency with which the speaker asserts biographical, educational, and geographic information overlapping with Silliman’s experiences), the poem’s text promotes theories for avant-garde literary production that self-reflexively acknowledge the cultural appropriation that makes the poem possible. In addition, Silliman does not name nor describe his non-Western influences, despite frequent references to and citations of white men, including Wittgenstein,

Robert Grenier, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, and Norman Mailer (among many others).

It may not be surprising, then, that even though the avant-garde includes members with

“subversive” identities (such as women, Jews, and queer people), a shroud of whiteness

36. Ron Silliman, “The Chinese Notebook,” The Age of Huts (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 57. 20 nonetheless functions as a nearly impenetrable (albeit tacit) barrier to inclusion and widespread acceptance within the avant-garde. Timothy Yu attributes the racial composition of the contemporary American avant-garde to the historical fracturing of New-Left coalitions at the end of the 1960s into various identity-based activist groups. As a result, “the question of race became central to the constitution of any American avant-garde, as writers and artists became increasingly aware of how their social locations inflected their aesthetics.”37 While many of the groups and individual poets Yu references might not readily accept being associated with any kind of avant-garde, “the question of race” is still a critical influence on how poets navigate their ongoing relationship to avant-garde poetry. This influence is especially prominent in the evolution of hermeneutic norms that Anthony Reed describes as “racialized reading”: “The connection between race and literature is not immanent to texts… Racialized reading reduces black culture to a set of properties, then ‘appropriates’ those properties for other discourses and projects, such as promoting social sympathy, or for restrictive, preemptive ways of misreading.”38 That is, racialized reading is a tacitly assumed practice in which texts by people of color are read (and as Reed further notes, “produced and analyzed”)39 with an eye towards their participation in anti-racist discourse and their narrated experiences of oppression and discrimination. The interpretations generated through racialized reading tend to be broad humanistic affirmations of the inherent worth of people of color that in poetry tend to favor content over the text’s formal qualities.40

37. Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 1-2. Emphasis in original. 38. Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), 7. 39. Ibid. 40. According to Meta DuEwa Jones, racialized reading results in the tendency for widely anthologized poems by black authors to be “read (i.e., interpreted and performed) as thinly veiled racial allegories that lament and resist racialized oppression while celebrating blacks’ humanity and resilience.” Meta DuEwa Jones, The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2011): 22. 21

Among the many problems with racialized reading is that the practice assumes that writing by white poets is not marked by race, and therefore considerations of ethnic social location do not apply to their work. Ron Silliman describes this schism by associating it with the poets’ chosen writing practice: “In poetry, there continues to be a radical break between those networks and scenes which are organized by and around the codes of oppressed peoples, and those other ‘purely aesthetic’ schools.”41 By placing the phrase “purely aesthetic” in irony- denoting quotation marks, Silliman contends that contrary to what critics might claim, the importance of aesthetics to Language poetry does not exclude it from prolonged engagement with social and political concerns. However, his binary construction also suggests that the avant- garde poetry for which he advocates lacks codes comparable to those of “oppressed people” that would locate the work within an identifiable social context.42 Silliman’s position therefore implicitly assumes that white men are unmarked by race and gender, and that their perspectives carry a universalizing potentiality through their ability to unmoor themselves from the ropes of these fixed social identities and their attendant linguistic codes. Of course, that assumption is a wholly fictional construct. Yu recognizes as much when he reads Silliman’s Ketjak to argue that

Language poets effectively ethnicized the American avant-garde by positioning their whiteness as a form of racial absence in response to the claims of then-burgeoning identity politics.43 As a result of this ethnicization, poetry that reflects its author’s non-white social location becomes excluded from the avant-garde a priori because it supposedly reproduces traditional codes to address racial oppression rather than upsetting those inheritances through experimentation and innovation.

41. Silliman, The New Sentence, 31. 42. Furthermore, Silliman’s characterization of poetry written through the “codes of oppressed peoples” is itself an overgeneralization. 43. Yu, Race, 38-72. 22

However, as my analysis of poems by Cathy Park Hong and Douglas Kearney in

Chapters Two and Three will demonstrate, the “codes of oppressed peoples” are not static referents adhering to a closed tradition. In addition to diverging across myriad ethnic groups, they evolve over time in pronounced and surprising ways—usually as a direct result of the poets’ explicit efforts to refigure and redefine the racial discourse in which their writing participates.

Whiteness is therefore sublimated within the practices of the avant-garde in contemporary

American poetry, as the orientation towards other art forms through which it defines itself euphemistically displaces questions of race onto lyric principles while simultaneously belying its own reliance on inherited traditions of whiteness.

The entrenched whiteness that defines the contemporary avant-garde serves as an informal gatekeeper patrolling the borders of affiliation, suggesting a moral obligation for those that are “woke” (to use a contemporary parlance) to dissociate from and abolish the avant-garde as an ongoing project. Groups such as “The Mongrel Coalition Against GringPo,” an anonymous online collective of poets of color, advocate total and immediate detachment from avant-garde poetry in general. Their position may best be summed up in an untitled image created by Jennifer

Tamayo (Figure 1), which begins a special folio on the Coalition in an issue of the journal

Drunken Boat. This image features an illustration of a tulip infected with a strain of the tulip breaking virus, a disease that weakens the bulb’s strength while producing color variegation resembling stripes. Declarative text written in sharpie overlays the flower: “DECOLONIZE OR

DIE / DECOLONIZE TO LIVE.”44 Decolonization, or the active process of delinking people, institutions, and nations from the epistemological dominance of their colonial legacies and its

44. Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, “Mongrel Coalition,” Drunken Boat 22 (2015). http://www.drunkenboat.com/db22/mongrel-coalition. 23

Figure 1. Untitled Image by Jennifer Tamayo. https://bit.ly/2JHnDIQ.

Figure 2: His Master's Voice, Original Painting by Francis Barraud, 1899.Figure 3. Untitled Image by Jennifer Tamayo. https://bit.ly/2JHnDIQ. attendant whiteness, will be explored further in Chapter Two. On its face, however, the text’s anaphoric symmetry suggests that there is no middle ground for people of color when it comes to the avant-garde—they are fighting off the viral infection of colonialism. They might bloom, or they might wither away and perish (and so will their poesies)—the outcome will be determined through mass collective action that either expunges the mechanisms that support white supremacy or remains complicit with them.

Both this image and the Mongrel Coalition build off of an argument made by Cathy Park

Hong in her 2014 essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.” According to Hong, the avant-garde in contemporary American poetry functions by exploiting the advantages made available through their unacknowledged whiteness, and poets’ refusal to recognize that fact manifests as a shared group delusion. The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness”:

is the specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history. The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be “post-identity” and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are.45

Hong notably highlights voice and its relationship to the poetic subject in her definition, adopting the rhetoric of anti-lyric in order to characterize it as a racial delusion. In addition, her description of the avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” mirrors contemporary discourse on the benefits of “white privilege,” or the premise that institutional and cultural biases produce distinct advantages for white people in the United States that accumulate over the course of their lives while minimizing the potentially damaging consequences of their transgressive behaviors. The only option for poets of color, according to Hong, is to move forward with collective efforts that take account of race, as the avant-garde is effectively fossilized by a whiteness that it refuses to acknowledge and therefore can never overcome. She concludes: “Fuck the avant-garde. We must hew our own path.”46 That is, Hong sees no way forward for poetry that includes the avant- garde. Instead, poets of color must organize and “out-avant-garde” the contemporary avant-garde in American poetry.

I do not wish to dispute the accuracy or urgency of these assertions—to do so would

45. Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 7, November 3, 2014, http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/7/delusions-of-whiteness-in-the-avant-garde. 46. Ibid. 25 require dismissing the claims by people of color that white supremacy presents them with an immediate existential threat that must be addressed in forceful terms. However, an important question arises: why not, as the Mongrel Coalition Against GringPo suggests, put the avant- garde out of its misery by finally laying it to rest, exquisite corpse and all? This task may not be as simple as it sounds—the difficulty in abolishing the avant-garde derives from the fact that as much as specific groups like the Language poets organize themselves through the avant-garde’s theories and genealogies, the term itself has become part of the wider lexicon. Its popular adoption suggests that even if its current manifestations are theoretically exhausted, a new more

“forward-thinking” avant-garde will soon take its place. As Paul Mann notes in describing resistance to previous avant-gardes, “every resistance is only further production—a ‘new’ negation, and hence a pole of the next level of dialectical exchange. Every theoretical break is only the opening movement of the next recuperation.”47 That is, the “death” of the avant-garde has been called for before, and its eulogies were already issued. In fact, these declarations announcing the death of the avant-garde have been made so many times before that Mann claims the only characteristic linking the avant-garde’s various manifestations over the past century is that the avant-garde continues to rise like a phoenix, reinventing itself with each obituary. To bury the current avant-garde without reforming its racial politics leaves the door open for the next generation of artists proclaiming themselves to be avant-garde to resurrect their forbearers’ oppositional stances towards race.

It is also important to differentiate between the threats posed by the whiteness of the avant-garde in contemporary American poetry and those posed by Donald Trump’s presidency and its attendant rise in popular support for white ethno-nationalism. For all intents and purposes,

47. Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991): 19. 26 avant-garde poets tend to articulate political beliefs far left of center, and in most cases their positions directly align with those frequently advocated by poets of color. Many Language poets directly resist the normative exercise of state power in their poetry, including American military aggression and imperialist agendas; economic policies that produce inordinate wealth inequality; the role of mass media in normalizing abhorrent practices; the neoliberal decimation of the public sector; the prison-industrial complex and incarcerative practices; and the institutionalized practice of segregation and discrimination (which in addition to race includes gender, sexuality, and disability). For example, Charles Bernstein, as a prominent academic at major research university, argued in the 90s for more expansive conceptions of American literature that actively include Central and South American writers.48 He continues to use his institutional influence to promote non-Anglo experimental poets, most recently as a founding member of the

Chinese/American Association of Poetry and Poetics (CAAP), whose founding board also includes Marjorie Perloff.49 Moreover, one of PennSound’s most extensive collections is “Cross

Cultural Poetics,” a radio program produced at Evergreen State College in Washington, which features interviews with primarily non-white and non-American poets spanning nearly 400 hundred episodes across fifteen years.50 I do not raise these efforts in order to dismiss the ways in which the avant-garde attempts to shield itself from criticism through its inherent whiteness, nor

48. In “Poetics of the Americas,” Bernstein advocates redefining the category of “American Literature” by moving outside national and linguistic boundaries to include non-white and non-English-speaking poets across the American continent. In his argument, he reads Kamau Brathwaite, Louise Bennett, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Claude McKay for their formal and linguistic innovations—breaking with the common criticism that the avant-garde ignores non- white poets. He also argues against the bleaching of American Modernism, writing, “As our literary history is usually told the nonstandard language practices of the radical modernists, and their descendants, are not linked to the dialect and vernacular practices of African-American poets.” See Charles Bernstein, “Poetics of the Americas,” My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1999), 119. 49. “Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics,” The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, accessed March 8, 2018, http://writing.upenn.edu/news/CAAP.html. 50. Leonard Schwartz, “Cross Cultural Poetics,” PennSound, accessed March 8, 2018, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/XCP.php. 27 do I intend for them to serve as a consolation prize to those who, like the Mongrel Coalition, consider the avant-garde to be an eminently dangerous enterprise. Rather, the extensive overlap in political orientations suggests the possibility of active cooperation between the avant-garde and poets of color in order to bring about desirable shifts in American political, pedagogical, and publishing norms.

Some poets of color already have attempted to bring these rival groups together. In her essay, “Poetry and Identity,” Harryette Mullen describes the divergent audiences for her first three books; while her first book, Tree Tall Woman (1981), could be described as a collection of lyric poems engaged in questions of black identity and representation, her next two books,

Trimmings (1991) and S*PeRM*K**T (1992), engage with gender and race while resisting direct linguistic referral. As a result, her earlier poems found an audience among black readers, while her later poems were embraced by the avant-garde. As she describes the arbitrary classifications that govern her reception as a poet:

The assumption remains, however unexamined, that “avant-garde” poetry is not “black” and that “black” poetry, however singular its “voice,” is not “formally innovative.” It is my hope that Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse, 1995) might alter or challenge that assumption, bridging what apparently has been imagined as a gap (or chasm?) between my work as a “black” poet and my work as a “formally innovative” poet….For me, the dilemma is similar to the conflict Ron Silliman discusses in The New Sentence between “codes of oppressed peoples” (a poetry with its own urgent aesthetics, hence the entire construction of the Harlem Renaissance, negritude, and the Black Arts/Black Aesthetics movements) and so-called purely aesthetic schools (whose aesthetic mode itself can be read as a social code and an ideological weapon).51

In addition to highlighting “voice” as a dominant figure in her bifurcated reception and framing this “gap” through Ron Silliman’s aforementioned self-contrast with the “codes of oppressed people,” Mullen describes her fourth book, Muse & Drudge, as an attempt to bridge her

51. Harryette Mullen, “Poetry and Identity,” The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2012), 11-2. 28 divergent audiences. Her desire to undermine a divide that she views as premised on unexamined assumptions implicitly acknowledges that the boundaries between the avant-garde and poets of color are remarkable in that the similarities between these groups could make them allies rather than rivals.

In examining her reception, Mullen pays particular attention to the role anthologies play in relation to the competing commercial and academic demands of the publishing industry.

While attempting to unite the avant-garde and people of color into a single reading public is not a new idea, the burden of building a progressive coalition between poets ought not continue to depend entirely upon the labor of people of color—and especially women of color—as the publishing industry historically disenfranchises them based on a perceived limited appeal among

“mainstream” audiences. In 2017, the non-profit group VIDA: Women in Literary Arts published their most recent annual report tracking gender, race, sexuality, disability, and age disparities among literary journals; the results show distinct imbalances favoring white men at a plurality of major publications (for example, their report shows that both Harper’s and London Review of

Books published zero female writers of color in 2016).52 These numbers suggest that in attempting to reach the largest possible audiences, literary journals adopt a logic similar to that of the avant-garde—by eschewing the “codes of oppressed people,” writing by white men presents itself as unmarked and therefore universal in its potential appeal. In light of these continuing disparities, there exists a moral obligation for all poets—especially white poets who benefit from current publishing norms—to acknowledge these systemic pressures and attempt to mitigate their influence.

However, one of the major obstacles to reforming the avant-garde is that anti-lyric

52. “The 2016 VIDA Count,” VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, October 17, 2017, https://www.vidaweb.org/the- 2016-vida-count/. 29 critique obfuscates the racial politics at stake in its premises to such a large degree that many avant-garde poets refuse to believe that they have committed transgressions in the first place.

Ron Silliman, in defending Vanessa Place following accusations of minstrelsy and blackface resulting from her controversial “Gone With the Wind” project, decried the “objectionable, thuggish, stupid” response from people of color by claiming that their censorial attacks on

“freedom of speech” make Place’s critics comparable to Darren Wilson, the police officer who murdered Michael Brown.53 His use of the dog whistle “thug,” combined with the rhetorical exploitation of the national trauma surrounding the events in Ferguson show not only an unwillingness on Silliman’s part to acknowledge the avant-garde’s racially transgressive acts

(even in the possibility of their existence), but a readiness to deploy further racist tropes in response to accusations of wrongdoing. In this sense, contemporary avant-garde poets inhabit an echo chamber resonating with whiteness. But like a real echo chamber, the slightest acoustic shifts can produce anechoic results.

“I AM I BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME”: VOICE, IDENTITY, AND SOUND TECHNOLOGY I now turn to technology for sound recording and reproduction in order to estrange our critical assumptions about the links between voice and race in poetry and test the limits of anti- lyric arguments. My focus on this technology is not an arbitrary swerve in what has been, up to this point, predominately an account of the avant-garde in contemporary American poetry as described by its adherents and critics. In fact, the history of sound technology is (perhaps unsurprisingly) intimately bound to poetry. The first device for recording sound, the phonautograph, was patented in 1857 by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.

53. Ron Silliman, “Je Suis Vanessa,” Silliman’s Blog, May 22, 2015. http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2015/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_22.html. 30

Modelled on the structure of the human ear, Scott de Martinville’s device is most notable in that he did not design it to reproduce sound.54 Instead, it created phonautograms, visual representations of sound intended to replace the work of stenographers. In 2008, audio researchers were able to recover and reproduce these recordings for the first time using technology developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. These phonautograms, which are dated to 1860 and are now considered the earliest known examples of recorded human voices, include recitations from literary sources, including Shakespeare’s Othello.55 In 1877,

Charles Cros, a French poet associated with the French Decadents and Symbolists (the latter of which is often considered an early avant-garde formation), filed patent paperwork proposing that

Scott’s phonautograms could be engraved on glass discs, allowing their sounds to be reproduced.

Before Cros could build a prototype, however, Thomas Edison invented his own device for recording and reproducing sound, followed shortly after by Alexander Graham Bell.56 The first time Thomas Edison recorded a human voice with his phonograph in 1877, he recorded himself reciting the opening stanza of Sara Josepha Hale’s poem, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”57

In the years that followed, Edison continued to make recordings of poems to be played at events in order to demonstrate his invention to the public. In addition to other nursery rhymes, these recordings included poetry by Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,

54. Jonathan Sterne details the importance and implications of the human ear as a model for developing sound technology in the nineteenth century, including Alexander Graham Bell’s use of an actual human ear in his first phonautograph, in The Audible Past, 31-51. 55. For more archival detail and downloadable MP3s of these recordings, see “The Phonautograms of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville,” First Sounds, accessed March 9, 2018, http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php. 56. It is worth noting, however, that both Bell and Edison used cylinders—Cros’s discs would ultimately prevail and the standard medium. 57. The details of this account can vary slightly, as Edison recorded “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at several points in 1877 and 1878 in order to demonstrate the phonograph as a functioning technology. My use of the date and the specificity of the first verse follows Charles Bernstein, “Making Audio Visible: Poetry’s Coming Digital Presence,” Attack of the Difficult Poems (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011): 108. 31

William Shakespeare, and Lord Alfred Tennyson.58 The technical limitations of Edison’s tin cylinder prototypes meant that these recordings usually only included individual stanzas, rather than complete poems (early cylinders could only record for about one minute); the low fidelity of these reproductions also mandated measured, simple, and familiar language in order to mitigate the effects of signal interference (such as acoustic static) obscuring the speaker’s voice. Bell, who hoped to improve upon the technical limitations of the phonograph in order to study deafness and improve pedagogy for the deaf, founded the Volta Laboratory in 1880. David

Giovanni, an audio historian and researcher who led the team that recovered Scott’s phonautographs, produced the following transcription from one of the earliest recovered Volta

Labs recordings: “[...] by inventors Sumner Tainter and H. G. Rogers. It’s the eleventh day of

March, eighteen hundred and eighty five. [Trilled R] How is this for high? Mary had a little lamb, and its fleece was [...], and […] — oh, fuck.”59 Giovanni believes that the recorded expletive was the result of a minor gaffe—the scientists were likely attempting to record the rhyme with alternate phrases such as “black as soot” in order to test whether listeners could hear the recordings accurately or just used their familiarity with the poem to fill in unintelligible gaps.60

That both Edison and Bell would choose to record poems to demonstrate and test their inventions is itself a reflection of late-nineteenth century attitudes towards poetry as a compact art form with which the majority of the American reading public regularly engaged in newspapers and periodicals. The brevity of these early recordings, combined with their ability to

58. Matthew Rubery, “Thomas Edison’s Poetry Machine,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 18 (2014), accessed February 14, 2017, http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.678. 59 David Giovanni, “Notes regarding the initial playback of Smithsonian NMAH 287654.11,” First Sounds, accessed March 9, 2018, http://firstsounds.org/research/observations.php. Emphasis in original. 60. Ibid. 32 make voice an immanent aspect of poetry for its audience, portrayed poetry as condensed and linguistically accessible verse intended to be spoken aloud; in all likelihood, this characterization played a role in the High Modernist rejection of mass culture over the following decades, the embrace of Mill’s description of lyric as “overheard” under the tenets of New Criticism, and the anti-lyric rejection of voice. In the latter case, figures for the noises generated through signal interference would actually become fecund figures for describing the poetic practices of

Language poets, as when Perloff writes: “noise is not only incidental but essential to communication, whether at the level of writing …of speech…or of the technical means of communication (‘background noise, jamming, static, cut-offs, hyteresis [sic], various interruptions’)…the phenomenon has always, of course, been with us.”61 The use of these figures to describe avant-garde practice suggests that whether it was conscious or not, the discourse of

Language poetry was at least in part a response to cultural shifts in the public’s relationship to poetry that were spurred by sound recordings made just before the start of the twentieth century.

Of course, the invention of sound recording technology also had wide-ranging cultural implications outside of its relation to poetry. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, a foundational text within sound studies, Jacques Attali writes:

In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men...Everywhere codes analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and others. All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all of its forms.62

Given that “early users of sound-reproduction technologies in the United States were

61. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice, 15-6. Emphasis in original. The published text includes a misspelling of “hysteresis.” 62. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985), 6. 33 overwhelmingly white and middle and upper class,”63 it is difficult to imagine the cultural impact of technology for sound recording and reproduction outside of the communities that most dominated—and were most organized through—the power of reproducible sound. That is, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, techniques for racialized listening developed in response to the possibility of recorded sound, and these techniques are illegible outside of the white middle/upper class influence of sound technologies’ primary early users. Lisa Gitelman, for example, argues that “sounding black” began to displace makeup in white actors’ minstrel performances in the aftermath of Edison’s phonograph.64 Jenifer Lynn Stoever, whose arguments in The Sonic Color Line: Race & the Cultural Politics of Listening will be explored in more detail in Chapter Three, similarly asserts that the rhetoric of racial colorblindness in America arose in the twentieth century alongside the development of radio culture, which in its creation of national listening audiences helped to codify the sounds of blackness. This codification allows the ear to continue to racially discriminate in the face of laws that banned discrimination based on visual manifestations of race—so much so that courts in the United States have affirmed aural discrimination as a reasonable practice for witnesses to identify accused perpetrators.65

Listening, both to and for voice, is therefore a discriminatory process by definition, whether considered in its broadest sense as a tactic developed through evolutionary biology to differentiate between atmospheric noise and the presence of predators, or in the more limited cultural context of twentieth century attitudes towards voice, race, and sound technology. In both

63. Sterne, Audible, 191. 64. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999). 65. “In 1999 the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that since witnesses’ recognitions of female voices are admissible as evidence, ‘we perceive no reason why a witness could not likewise identify a voice as being that of a particular race or nationality, so long as the witness is personally familiar with the general characteristics, accents or speech patterns of the race or nationality in question.’” See Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 645. 34 cases, identification and representation play key roles. The ability to clearly identify a voice as representative of a familiar source makes it intelligible to listeners. Consider a common trope in film and television: a woman attempts to call her husband, but a female voice answers the phone instead. The listener (whether the caller or the audience watching at home) discriminates between the lower vocal range they expect and the higher range that answers the call, allowing them to identify the voice on the other end of the line as representative of a feminine source. The obvious conclusion—infidelity—is not the product of any essential connection between the sound and the person on the line, but an extrapolation informed by the discriminatory process of listening.66

Poetry is no exception when it comes to voice. As Charles Bernstein describes the role of voice in poetry: “‘The voice of the poet’ is an easy way of contextualizing poetry so that it can be more readily understood (indiscriminately plugged into) as listening to someone talk in their distinctive manner (i.e., listen for the person beyond or underneath the poem).”67 By linking voice to the ability to identify the distinct person “underneath the poem,” this description assumes that the voice of the speaker in lyric poetry—whether a persona or an autobiographical representation of the poet herself—becomes legible for the reader through the textual narration of experiences that are shared by (and therefore representative of) a common group identity. This approach reflects Meta DuEwa Jones’s argument against the tendency to read the poetry of

Langston Hughes through a “‘voice as spokesperson’ model,”68 whereby readers (erroneously) interpret the myriad voices in his work as a representative collation that reflects a standardized

66. I am immediately reminded of The Simpsons episode “Bart of Darkness,” which lampshades this trope. In a parody of Rear Window, Bart hears a woman’s scream in the middle of the night and becomes convinced that his neighbor, Ned Flanders, murdered his wife. In the episode’s denouement, it is revealed that Ned simply has an unusually high-pitched scream. 67. Charles Bernstein, “Stray Straws,” 44. 68. Jones, Muse, 48. 35 expression of black identity.

Audre Lorde’s widely anthologized poem, “A Woman Speaks,” reflects on the ill-defined boundaries circumscribing lyric poetry and the tensions in the figure of “the voice of the poet” as an identifying marker for readers. Lorde’s poem appears to fit common definitions of lyric; it is medium-length and structured by an “I” who, as the title states, engages in speech through the poem’s text. While the poem slightly breaks with the description in “Aesthetic Tendency” (in that it does not describe an experience with concrete details), the poem’s final three lines, “I am / woman / and not white.,”69 serve as a volta that recontextualizes the rest of the poem by providing a possible narrative through which to frame the poem as a dramatic speech and raising a moral implication in its demand for an intersectional approach to feminism that includes race alongside gender. By forefronting the speaking voice as a major concern through its title, “A

Woman Speaks” both supports and negates Bernstein’s claims. On the one hand, the final lines affirm his premise that the speaking voice allows one to identify the person “underneath” the poem, especially when it comes to racial identification (while the speaker describes herself as

“not white,” the reference to the African Kingdom of Dahomey in the previous stanza affords a more specific ethnic delineation). But at the same time, the final lines refute the assumption that one can be identified from their speaking voice at all. The poem’s concluding lines hinge on the premise that the speaker’s voice exceeds the reader’s capacity to identify it—hence the need to clarify that she is “not white.” The break between the final two lines reinforces this idea, as the

“and” denotes additional substance and is withheld from the penultimate line. Given that in

Lorde’s poetry her “strategic invocations of identity are implicitly problematized by her multiple

69. Audre Lorde, “A Woman Speaks,” The Black Unicorn: Poems (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978): 5. Lorde ends the poem with a period, which I reproduce in my citation in defiant spite of the rules laid forth in The Chicago Manual of Style. 36

Figure 4: His Master's Voice, Original Painting by Francis Barraud, 1899.

Figure 5: His Master's Voice, Original Painting by Francis Barraud, 1899. positioning,”70 which in addition to her race and gender includes her position as a lesbian, “A

Woman Speaks” troubles—in both content and form—the premise that one can accurately identify “the person underneath poem” as representing any single identity category.

The notion that one’s identity exceeds the limits of the discriminatory process of listening

(which necessarily smooths over complexity to make that identity intelligible), touches upon a cornerstone of technology for sound recording and reproduction as it was conceived and marketed. “His Master’s Voice” (Figure 2), originally painted in 1899 by Francis Barraud and

70. Brenda Carr, “‘A Woman Speaks … I Am Woman and Not White’: Politics of Voice, Tactical Essentialism, and Cultural Intervention in Audre Lorde's Activist Poetics and Practice,” College Literature 20, no. 2 (1993): 133. 37 later featured in famous advertisements by the Victor Talking Machine Company (eventually acquired by EMI) in the United Kingdom and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in the

United States, is an image scholars frequently discuss as an archival representation of early twentieth century attitudes towards sound recording technology and the cultural roles these devices developed over the past century. In the image, an English terrier mix named Nipper stares into the horn of a gramophone. His head, slightly cocked to his left, suggests a seemingly quizzical orientation. Given the painting’s title, we are meant to attribute a mix of confusion and awe to Nipper’s posture as he appears to wonder why his master’s familiar voice emanates from this alien object. As an advertisement, the image suggests that Victor gramophones produce such higher fidelity reproductions than their competitors that even dogs cannot tell the difference between a human and a machine.71 Contemporary critics often describe “His Master’s Voice” within the context of Victorian grieving practices and the technology’s proposed ability to preserve the voices of the deceased.72 This interpretation supports the image’s original advertising goals by emphasizing the importance of acoustic correspondence in recordings over their semantic content. Given that a dog, whose hearing extends beyond the range of humans, is able to identify its owner, “His Master’s Voice” presents gramophone recordings as ontologically distinct from written text in their ability to make the paratextual content of speech available for listeners. While both written and sounded texts propose a use-value of archival posterity, recorded sound seems to include something outside of mere content that reflects the individuality—or identity—of the person recorded.

71. Barraud’s original painting, titled “Dog Looking at and Listening to a Phonograph,” was redesigned upon purchase by the Victor Talking Machine company, who provided Barraud with their competing gramophone to use as a model. 72. For a detailed account of this reading and an overview of the attendant conversation between critics, see Sterne, Audible, 301-7. 38

Charles Bernstein provides his own reading of “His Master’s Voice,” describing Nipper’s posture through Gertrude Stein’s refrain in Identity A Poem (1940): “I am I because my little dog knows me.”73 While Bernstein’s allusion to Stein is only a small component of a larger description of poetry’s audiovisual makeup, this brief moment of intertextuality in an essay that is largely unconcerned with lyric and anti-lyric arguments suggests that it may serve as an unguarded entrance into the relationship between voice, identity, and recorded sound in avant- garde discourse. The citation from Stein’s verse, when read alongside “His Master’s Voice,” suggests that in the absence of immediate bodily presence, identity is wholly a function of its ability to be listened to through voice. The statement “I am I,” a proposition predicated on the principle of identical equivalence (we might also say “I = I”), syntactically and syllogistically relies upon “because my little dog knows me” as its modifying clause, in which evidence proves the proposition to be true. Accustomed to the sound of his owner’s voice, Nipper is able to identify him through the recording—therefore voice, even as a sonic event isolated from the body from which it originally emanated, signifies an underlying singularity that the listener can identify. Such a reading mirrors the logic of the fused-writer-reader in Language poetry—the speaker’s ability to express their “self” is wholly a function of the reader’s ability to recognize it in the poem.

However, the ability to be identified through a recording of one’s voice pushes against the boundaries of one of sound technology’s strangest phenomena: the alienating experience of hearing yourself speak. On a recording, you never sound the way you hear yourself on a day-today basis due to sound’s physical properties; sounds are vibrations passing through media. When we speak, the vibrations generated within the larynx travel through the flesh, bone, blood, and

73. Bernstein, “Making Audio Visible,” 109. 39 space of our cavernous skulls to drum against the tympanic membrane and produce electrochemical signals in the cochlea. The acoustic result is the voice we hear and identify as our own. But this voice is an utterly private one inaccessible to others, who are able to hear our voices only after they travel to the outer ear by way of the lips.

This phenomenon thus begs the question: how can a reader identify the poetic subject through their voice at all, if that voice is never the one that subject hears herself? Near the end of her playful linguistic permutations in Identity A Poem, Stein offers a crucial revision of her repeated figure for canine-self-identification:

I am I because my little dog knows me even if the little dog is a big one and yet a little dog knowing me does not really make me be I no not really because after all being I I am I has really nothing to do with the little dog knowing me, he is my audience, but an audience never does prove to you that you are you.74

Stein begins this sentence by qualifying her initial statement, lest readers place too much emphasis on the size of the dog in her formulation. It does not matter that the dog is little—a big dog would function just the same. She then states a claim completely contrary to her original proposition, which she deliberately obfuscates in a series of her signature syntactic slips. If punctuation were added to this citation in order to increase comprehension, it would read: “And yet, a little dog knowing me does not really make me be I. No, not really. Because after all, being

I, ‘I am I’ has really nothing to do with the little dog knowing me.” According to Stein, exterior attribution cannot identify a subject. The dog is an audience, and the “I” we communicate is a performance for that audience. When speaking to our little (or big) dogs, we might use a high- pitched voice, simplified diction, and baby-talk. And although our dogs may use those sonic cues to identify us as distinct individuals associated with specific experiences, that identification is

74. Gertrude Stein, “Identity a Poem,” A Stein Reader, ed. by Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993), 593. 40 mediated by the modes through which we outwardly perform our identity.

Stein’s voltaic reversal returns us to Yu’s claim that the avant-garde ethnicized itself in response to the development of identity politics in the 1970s. In identity politics, shared experiences allow for group affiliation, which can be mobilized towards achieving political goals. But building groups based on correspondences between identities requires voicing those shared experiences—narrating them so that the others who listen can identify them as representative of their own experiences. “I am I because my little dog knows me” thus resembles the externalizing logic that promotes collectivization in identity politics. But as Stein’s fuller description indicates, listening to a voice does not reveal the person behind, underneath, or beyond, only the performance of a person. The rejection of voice in anti-lyric arguments, then, does not describe voice as it functions phenomenally, nor does it describe voice as it manifests through the performance of a speaking persona in lyric poetry. Instead, the Language poets’ characterization resembles voice’s function in identity politics. Anti-lyric therefore appears to be animated by the desire to negate cultural shifts that formed alongside the development of identity politics, which avant-garde thinkers displaced onto voice and lyric through their similar tropological characteristics. That is, anti-lyric rejects race, which it sonically cathects to voice, and by association, lyric poetry.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES In this dissertation, I develop this central argument—that anti-lyric arguments are motivated by a logic of racial exclusion—by tending to poets who use technology for sound recording and reproduction in their work so that I may demonstrate in more detail the particularities and peculiarities of voice and its relationship to the poet “underneath the poem.”

The devices and media used by these poets include reel-to-reel tape recorders, (damaged)

41 cassette tapes, radio broadcasts (both licensed and pirate), and MP3s. The poets’ applications of these technologies vary considerably across chapters and include the use of recording devices to aid in the composition of poems, fictional recorders that frame poetic narratives, and the adoption of digital audio processes as structural premises.

While the majority of the poets discussed in the following pages are living authors who are writing and publishing in the twenty-first century, this dissertation’s first chapter begins in the 1950s with Allen Ginsberg. There are two reasons for this seemingly incongruous starting place. First, I begin this study soon after the end of World War II because the early postwar period saw a number of artists begin experimenting with recorded sound in their work. Although technologies for sound recording and reproduction were nineteenth century inventions that gained traction with the American public in the early twentieth century, the radio and telephone initially were much more influential and popular than the gramophone, phonograph, dictaphone, and their assorted cousins. Cost was the primary factor; radios and telephones, in addition to their lower price-points, did not require consumers to purchase additional media in order to use.

While record manufacturing grew as an industry prior to the 1940s, the Great Depression fostered an economic environment that prohibited widescale adoption by individual consumers.

The technical limitations of available recording media exacerbated the problem as well—once a recording was made on a cylinder or disc, the media could only be used for playback, not further recording. That changed with the introduction of magnetic tape recording in the United States in

1946. With the country in the midst of a postwar economic boom, sound recording became financially feasible for the majority of the American public for the first time. By the 1950s, cheap recording media that could be reused and re-spliced through primitive editing techniques encouraged widespread audio experimentation across artistic genres, particularly among those

42 associated with the nontraditional techniques and aesthetics of the avant-garde. In 1952, John

Cage composed the four-minute long Williams Mix, in which eight separate tape recorders play in aleatoric combinations according to a score based on the principles of the I Ching. In 1958,

Samuel Beckett wrote Krapp’s Last Tape, a play about an elderly man who celebrates his birthday hunched over a tape recorder listening to his younger self (who has just finished listening to a recording made by an even younger version of himself). By 1968, this artistic (and acoustic) enterprise expanded to include projects such as Andy Warhol’s a: a novel and John

Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem” service, both of which were made possible through the ease and affordability of magnetic tape.

Second, the early postwar period spans the time between the efforts of the historical avant-garde and the Language poets. Examining the trends in experimental writing during this time—and particularly those involving poets in the Poundian tradition whom the Language poets would later claim in their genealogy, such as Allen Ginsberg—allows an intensive study of voice and its role in avant-garde poetry before anti-lyric implicated voice as a major figure in its critiques. Such a perspective will allow a distinction to be made between aspects of voice that were part of the pre-Language discourse and those that were invented by the Language poets later on.

My first chapter, “One Track Mind: Auto Poesy and Alternative Consciousness in Allen

Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: poems of these states,” attends to a mid-career work of

Ginsberg’s that scholars do not often discuss. In late 1965, Ginsberg purchased a Volkswagen bus and an Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder, then traveled across the United States with the recorder running. The resulting poems, which he called “auto poesy” for short, combine radio news broadcasts, conversations, pop music, and descriptions of landscape in order to protest the

Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex. Drawing on original archival research, I elucidate how Ginsberg used the tape recorder to compose his poems and contextualize auto poesy within his larger oeuvre, arguing that even before Language poets began formulating anti- lyric arguments, Ginsberg’s experiments with the tape recorder led him to conclude, in spite of his previous assumption while writing Howl and Kaddish, that there was no essential connection between voice and the poetic self.

Because this introduction already lingers in the Language milieu of the 80s and 90s, my second chapter fast-forwards to the twenty-first century in order to assess voice at a point following the widespread dissemination of anti-lyric critiques. This temporal leap, while noticeably large, is also intentional. While there are a number of poets whose work with sound technology could be examined between these chapters—most notably poems by David Antin, a

Language poet who recorded pseudo-improvisatory lectures that he transcribed into published texts—my primary goal in these arguments is to question the legacy of anti-lyric critique in the context of twenty-first century racial discourse. To return to the work of Language poets risks reifying the implicit whiteness in their positions while downplaying the important and engaging work currently being conducted by poets of color.

Therefore, the second chapter, “Creolizing Empire: Linguistic Variation as Decolonial

Practice in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution,” turns to a 2007 work by the aforementioned Asian-American poet and critic in order to consider language and colonial history as they pertain to voice. A fictional diegetic tape recorder frames the narrative of Hong’s book, the text of which is drawn from the incomplete transcripts of tapes created during an historian’s visit to “The Desert,” an imaginative amalgamation of Dubai and Las Vegas. The

Desert’s economy relies on a tourist industry that has left the oppressed locals speaking an ever-

44 changing creole that combines hundreds of languages. I argue that race manifests everywhere in

Hong’s collection—except for the poetic subject and their voice. The polyglottal creole in which the protagonist of this poetic narrative speaks serves as a tactic for epistemic decolonization, suggesting that voice—sans subject—can in fact function as a vehicle for anti-racist discourse and political critique.

The third chapter, “Ekoustic Poetry: Writing the Masked Sounds of Blackness in Douglas

Kearney’s The Black Automaton,” focuses on the experimental visual poems that Kearney employs in his 2009 collection. These poems make frequent use of typographical variation through braces, arrows, footnotes, and fonts in order efface literary and historical allusions by inserting palimpsests of hip-hop lyrics, which in turn allow Kearney to critique manifestations of systemic racism in American culture. While the importance of typography to these poems at first seems to emphasize their visual dimensions, Kearney relies on the methods of digital audio technologies and MP3s in order to sample and remix tracks in his poems, a process which I argue interrogates sonic manifestations of blackness by working against the ways in which white listeners hear voices as black. By pointing to the historical and cultural cues that create such expectations within the white imaginary, I argue that listening to voice is always a social process mediated by power dynamics and, therefore, the anti-lyric rejection of voice is only legible through its accompanied rejection of race.

In the coda, I “hit pause” on the avant-garde by considering two racially transgressive and controversial projects by conceptual poets Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. In published defenses of their work, these poets describe these projects as attempts to engage in anti-racist discourse. In addition to articulating the myriad reasons that these projects enact harm rather than produce intended effects, I consider the authority of the anthology and its role in both

45 canonizing avant-garde poets and excluding non-white poets in order to advocate the potential for a racially inclusive future avant-garde.

One Track Mind: Auto Poesy and Alternative Consciousness in Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: poems of these states

For many people, the phrase “The Beat Generation” conjures images of jazz, sex, drugs, cigarettes, and fast cars, not serious literary inquiry and avant-garde invention. But the Beats are especially notable for their early and influential experiments with magnetic tape recording during the 1950s and 60s. Jack Kerouac famously transcribed recordings of telephone conversations with Neal Cassady for Visions of Cody, which was written in 1952 as an alternative On the Road manuscript and published posthumously in 1972. William Burroughs’s 1962 novel The Ticket

That Exploded not only includes audio cut-ups made using magnetic tape recorders, but also uses the device as a major narrative element and allegory for mind control. But it was Allen Ginsberg who had one of the most dynamic and evolving relationships with magnetic tape recording.

According to biographer Michael Schumacher, Ginsberg was already producing multiple taped recordings of his early poem “The Green Automobile” in 1954,1 two years prior to the publication of Howl and Other Poems, the book whose 1957 obscenity trial propelled him into the public consciousness and signaled the start of his career as a major American poet.

Throughout his life he would continue to experiment with recording poetry, producing not only commercial albums of his own work, but also setting the songs of William Blake to music, and even collaborating with Bob Dylan in the recording studio on multiple occasions.

Ginsberg’s sonic projects were not solely limited to producing albums, however. In

December 1965, Dylan gave Ginsberg $600 to purchase a top-of-the-line Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder. Having recently received a Guggenheim grant that allowed him to procure a

Volkswagen bus, Ginsberg began traveling across the United States, using his new tape recorder

1. Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: Expanded Edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 176. 47 to aid in the composition of poems. These journeys resulted in the 1972 publication The Fall of

America: poems of these states 1965-1971 (hereafter Fall), a “chronicle taperecorded scribed by hand or sung condensed, the flux of car bus airplane dream consciousness Person during

Automated Electronic War years, newspaper headline radio brain auto poesy…headlights flashing on road through these states of consciousness.”2 In Fall, Ginsberg makes use of everything caught on the tape recorder on these cross-country trips: consciously composed lines, descriptions of the landscape, snippets of conversation, portions of talk radio and news broadcasts, and pop songs; he referred to these experimental recorded poems as “auto poesy” for short.

While Fall received the National Book Award in 1973, auto poesy receives relatively little attention from scholars, critics, and the public, especially when compared with Howl and

Kaddish, Ginsberg’s most famous and most widely anthologized publications. The period during which Ginsberg wrote Fall corresponds to the middle of his life and career, a traumatic time that saw the deaths of both Kerouac and Cassady. This time also saw Ginsberg at the height of his literary celebrity and public influence; in a 1968 episode of the interview program Firing Line, conservative pundit William F. Buckley, Jr. even described Ginsberg as “the most famous poet in America.”3 But in his middle age, he was not the same poet that the public often imagines— madly punching away at the typewriter all night, high on pot, spontaneously confessing his innermost thoughts by writing about his life, his friends, and his sexual experiences. However much this characterization describes the poet who wrote Howl and Kaddish in the 50s, by the time Ginsberg experimented with auto poesy in the late 60s his poems were actively undergoing

2. Allen Ginsberg, “After Words,” The Fall of America: poems of these states (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1972). 3. Allen Ginsberg, interview by William F. Buckley, Jr., “The Avant-Garde,” Firing Line, PBS, September 24, 1968. 48 dramatic shifts in form, content, and appearance. Among the reasons for these shifts was that throughout his life Ginsberg thought of himself as working within a wider avant-garde tradition, and therefore continually searched for new and innovative approaches to writing poetry. While he adopted the principles of spontaneous composition from Kerouac—“first thought, best thought,” as Ginsberg frequently summarized it—he understood this strategy as a reflection of the Surrealists’ method of automatic writing, which is intended to sublimate the influence of the individual’s ego in favor of unconscious expression. Ginsberg was also a “student” of fellow

New Jersey native William Carlos Williams and an active reader of Ezra Pound, and his inclusion in The New American Poetry 1945-1960, the influential anthology edited by Donald

Allen that was instrumental in the Language poets’ attempts to invent their avant-garde lineage, effectively canonized him as a major experimental and innovative poet in America.

Yet when critics engage with Ginsberg’s markedly distinct mid-career poems, they tend to rely upon critical strategies that are more applicable to Ginsberg’s preoccupations when writing Howl and Kaddish in the 50s. For example, in a chapter titled “Auto Poesy,” Timothy Yu focuses his attention on “Howl” and “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (Ginsberg’s most famous auto poesy poem, which was originally published in Planet News and retroactively situated within

Fall’s sequence at a later point), describing the latter as “perhaps the most willed poem in the

Fall of America sequence” while dismissing the rest of the book as “almost entirely landscape poems” and curiously side-stepping the role of the tape recorder in his analysis.4 Similarly, Amy

Hungerford addresses the function of the tape recorder in auto poesy, concluding: “The listener or reader is then imagined as functioning not unlike the tape recorder.”5 That is, Hungerford

4. Yu, Race, 34-5. 5. Amy Hungerford, “Postmodern Supernaturalism: Ginsberg and the Search for a Supernatural Language,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18 no. 2 (Fall 2005), 279. 49 argues that in auto poesy, the reader is figuratively situated in the position of the tape, and

Ginsberg’s goal is to “record” his consciousness so that it can be replayed and reproduced in the neural-tape of his readers. Such a description squares with Ginsberg’s emancipative goals and proto-Confessional techniques in “Howl.” However, this model of poetic transmission, which structurally mirrors the mid-century model of lyric expression against which Language poets would later revolt, relies on a double-negative definition of the tape recorder as “not unlike” the reader and ignores the fact that the device and its complementary media were not just rhetorical figures for Ginsberg—they were actual physical objects that he lugged back and forth as he travelled across the country. In fact, the decision to use—and then abandon—the tape recorder in his compositional process corresponds to a time in which Ginsberg experienced a number of personal crises that threatened his most deeply held beliefs about poetry and transformed how he understood his own role as a poet.

In this chapter, I examine auto poesy within the context of Ginsberg’s poetics and biography, as well as the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War and its effects on the domestic political landscape. Beginning with a biographical survey of his poetics in the 50s and

60s, I attend to Ginsberg’s evolving formal practices in in light of the artistic crisis that disrupted his practice following the publication of Kaddish in 1960. The shifts in his formal techniques and political goals reached an apotheosis in his experiments with auto poesy, which continued to inform his writing even after deciding to abandon the tape recorder as a compositional tool. I have three goals in this analysis: 1) to advance “these states” of Ginsberg scholarship by moving beyond his most commonly discussed works and demonstrating the need for sustained engagement with his theoretically complex ideas, 2) to give a clear account of auto poesy as a process and product, which to date has not been done, and 3) to consider the relationship

50 between voice and identity in Ginsberg’s poems in order to show that the cathexis between voice and race in anti-lyric is not inherited from the avant-garde tradition, but is in fact an invention of the Language poets.

“COMPOSED ON THE TONGUE”: GINSBERG’S EARLY POETICS Before he began writing “Howl” at age 29, Ginsberg developed his craft under the direction of William Carlos Williams and Jack Kerouac. Although he wrote his earliest poems using traditional metrical patterns and rhyme schemes, Ginsberg’s correspondence with William

Carlos Williams in the 1940’s led the former to begin writing poems “arranged by phrasing or breath groups into little short-line patterns according to ideas of measure of American speech…picked up from William Carlos Williams’ imagist preoccupations.”6 While some of these imagist-imitating poems, including “An Asphodel,” “Wild Orphan,” and “In Back of the

Real,” were included in later editions of Howl, the majority of the them were first published in

Empty Mirror in 1961. These early poems are notable as verbal sketches, incorporating

Williams’s “no ideas but in things” into poems whose short lines include direct observations of the people and objects in Ginsberg’s everyday life. Under the influence of Jack Kerouac’s

“Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” the essay that gave the name to the more commonly used phrase “spontaneous composition,” Ginsberg also drew connections between the unit of thought and the physical manifestation of sound via breath in order to write, as Kerouac describes it, as if he was “blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.”7 Retaining an emphasis on concrete images as basic subject matter, Ginsberg subsequently moved from the brevity of Williams to the

7. Allen Ginsberg, “Notes on Finally Recording Howl,” Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Perennial, 2001), 229. 7. Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Composition,” The Portable Beat Reader, ed. by Ann Charters, (New York: Penguin, 1992), 57. 51

“Hebraic-Mellvillean bardic breath,”8 a transition from tightly constructed short lines to long lines meant to access the “real mind”9 that dictates poetry. In order to more easily facilitate the capture of spontaneous thought on the page, Ginsberg used repetition as a “base to keep measure”10 and began to focus on breath as his organizing principle for composition: “Ideally each line of Howl is a single breath unit. My breath is long—that’s the measure, one physical- mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath…So these poems are a series of experiments with the formal organization of the long line.”11 The balance of “physical-mental” is a key premise of Ginsberg’s poetics in the 1950s—in order to more easily replicate the speed and force of thought, the repeated base and use of breath dictate the form of the line, and the line itself becomes the primary unit of composition in Ginsberg’s poems. This long breath-line can be observed throughout Howl and Kaddish.12

Just before he began writing “Howl,” Ginsberg was already using the phrase “The Fall of

America” in letters to Kerouac,13 and by 1958 he referred to various poems and sequences under that title and noted their connection to Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas.14 In this prose piece,

Whitman argues that despite the democratic foundations of the United States, the political and economic inheritance of European Feudalism continues to propagate substantial economic and political inequality, most notably in the exclusion of women from universal suffrage. Taking

“America” and “Democracy” as synonymous terms, Whitman uses the deictic epithet “these

States” to refer to the United States as a physical nation temporally situated in the ever-shifting

8. Ginsberg, “Notes on Finally Recording,” 229. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 230. 12. See “Kaddish,” “Poem Rocket,” “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” “The Lion for Real,” “Magic Psalm,” and “The End” as examples. 13. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, ed. by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, (New York: Viking, 2010), 232. 14. Ibid., 397. 52 present in order to argue that “a new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to These States”15 in the pursuit of democratic ideals.

While Ginsberg used illicit substances recreationally during this time, he was usually sober when writing poems.16 However, Ginsberg’s burgeoning association with Timothy Leary in the early 60s led him to experiment with writing under the influence of ether, psilocybin, and

LSD as “a new theory of literary composition,” in Whitman’s terms.17 Drug-induced writing held

Ginsberg’s interest as a variation on the premises of spontaneous composition, which would fulfill what Kerouac called the style’s “Mental State”: “If possible write ‘without consciousness’ in semitrance…allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so

‘modern’ language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly.”18 That is, writing “without consciousness” under the influence of psychedelic drugs offered Ginsberg the possibility of original, authentic, and sincere expression divorced from personal inhibition.

Moreover, consuming illegal drugs also constituted an act of civil disobedience, leading

Ginsberg to more closely scrutinize and hone the political edges of his writing. According to

Michael Schumacher, “Where he [Ginsberg] had begun with the hope that such drugs would have a profound effect on the individual and his creativity, he now [in 1960] believed that the widespread use of hallucinogens could lead to the alteration of the public consciousness and a

15. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas: The Original Edition in Facsimilie, ed. by Ed Folsom (Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2010), 76. 16. One of the most common public misconceptions about Ginsberg is that he wrote “Howl” under the influence of psychedelic drugs. This was not the case—Ginsberg was sober during the major writing sessions for “Howl.” While the second section of “Howl” uses imagery drawn from notes taken during an experience with peyote, the actual writing sessions that produced the section occurred over several weeks. See Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 205-7. 17. For an account of Ginsberg and Leary’s first meeting, during which Ginsberg ingested psilocybin in Leary’s home, see Timothy Leary, “Turning On the World,” The Portable Beat Reader, ed. by Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 1992): 331-43. 18. Kerouac, “Essentials,” 58. 53 subsequent political change for the better.”19

Ginsberg’s experiments with psychedelic drugs also drew him closer to the confluence between technology, media, and economic institutions in producing new forms of public consciousness: “The way Allen saw it, by using every available means—‘radio, newspapers, television, lottery banks & gossip’—the world could be connected to one consciousness, to a blissful state that would eliminate suffering, despair, cruelty, and anger.”20 Writing under the influence, Ginsberg began exploring the intersections between media, consciousness, and their political implications in earnest, as seen in: “Laughing Gas,” published in Kaddish; “Aether,” composed in 1960 and published in Reality Sandwiches; and the 1961 poem “Television was a

Baby Crawling Towards the Death Chamber,” also referred to as “TV Baby,” published in

Planet News. These poems show Allen Ginsberg moving away from his habit of composing through repeated base lines, increasingly incorporating styles reflecting Ezra Pound’s proclivity for collaging text through radical juxtaposition alongside the techniques of Charles Olson’s composition by field.

According to Olson, composition by field is a method of writing that strives towards an

“open” form of verse and is “opposed to the inherited line, stanza, over-all form.”21 Within

Olson’s schematic, the “process” of the poem, emphatically summed up as “ONE PERCEPTION

MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION,”22 mobilizes the “principle” of the poem, that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN

EXTENSION OF CONTENT,”23 in order to shape the “kinetics” or energy of the poem.

19. Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 342. 20. Ibid., 347. 21. Charles Olson, “Projective/Verse,” Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 1054. 22. Ibid., 1055. 23. Ibid., 1054. 54

Composition by field attempts to move beyond the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the ‘subject’ and his soul,”24 while adding a new emphasis on breath, which the poet represents through the carefully arranged inclusion of white space on the page. The page effectively becomes the “field,” with the poet making use of the entirety of the space available to them, rather than relying solely on left-hand justification.

However, it was the then-lesser-known William Burroughs who would make the most significant impact on Ginsberg’s artistic development during this period. In September 1959,

Burroughs’s friend and collaborator Brion Gysin accidentally “discovered” the cut-up while the two were living together in Paris:

Gysin was cutting a mount for a drawing and sliced through a pile of old newspaper and back issues of Time and Life with his Stanley blade. He noticed that the sliced-up strips of newspaper made new texts when a piece of one article overlapped another and was read across. He was delighted with his discovery. He was literally reading between the lines: ‘Cut through the word lines to hear a new voice off the page.’25

Gysin’s innovation excited Burroughs, who had been using similar techniques as part of a bricolage method for some time—while Naked Lunch is not a cut-up in the technical sense, its collaging of non-sequential vignettes disrupts narrative in an attempt to “read between the lines” of American culture’s violence, paranoia, materialism, and addiction. The enraptured Burroughs spent the beginning of 1960 in a productive fugue, slicing up not only written texts but pictures and magnetic tapes as well.26 The cut-up utterly transformed Burroughs’s long-held beliefs about a government-inflicted mass hypnosis on the public. As Barry Miles describes,

His cut-up experiments had led him to conclude that everyone had been conditioned by language and that all apparent sensory impressions were in fact illusory. He was now attempting to trace back along the word lines, to find out when and where the

24. Ibid., 1060. 25. Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 285. 26. “He [Burroughs]began work on a series of tape recorder experiments in which the spoken word was subjected to the same technique, enabling him to use the further dimension of time…He was cutting up the word in time and space.” Ibid., 285-6. 55

programming had taken place and who was responsible. He suspected that the entire fabric of reality was completely conditioned and that someone was running the universe like a sound stage, with banks of tape recorders and films.27

While contemporary readers may see the motives and methods of the poststructuralist thinking that would gain traction in the mid-1960s embedded in this methodological description—that reality is a product of the power relations inherent to and expressed through discourse and language as constructed systems, a confluence reflected by Miles’s incorporation of the word

“trace” in his description of the cut-up—Burroughs independently developed his theories about the cut-up through the methods of avant-garde literary production.

Burroughs’s cut-up has roots in the work of Dada writer Tristan Tzara, whose aleatoric incorporation of lines literally cut from other texts was meant to surrender the active rational mind to the impulses of the unconscious, an approach shared by Surrealists and their automatic writing in the historical avant-garde. What interested Burroughs, however, was not the cut-up’s prowess at invoking the unconscious mind as an independent producer of texts, but its innate ability to demonstrate the warfare inflicted on the unconscious through subliminal messaging.

For Burroughs, cutting up a text does not show anything new about the world—it illuminates what was always there. By studying cut-ups as a method of literary production, Burroughs hoped to find a way to dismantle linguistic mind control and repurpose it for his own ends.

Initially, Allen Ginsberg did not seem to be concerned with the cut-up. When Burroughs began writing to his friends about his recent discovery, Ginsberg’s letters to Kerouac were particularly dismissive: “Bill writes he is sifting and panning thru cut-ups of his prose for the gold and joining them together with virus glue. I think he hasn’t been laid so long he’s going fruity…however latest letters are very sweet and kind, he even cut up and typed out some of my

27. Ibid., 286. 56 poems to show me how he’s working.”28 His early skepticism, which notably denigrates

Burroughs’s unconventional theories by attributing them to a lackluster sex life (Ginsberg and

Burroughs had a sexual relationship in 1953, which Ginsberg ended because he was not physically attracted to Burroughs),29 suggests that Ginsberg more or less ignored Burroughs’s cut-ups at first, thinking of them as a kitschy experiment and a throw-back to Dada that would serve as a footnote in their now two decades of association. That would change in the summer of

1962, however. Ginsberg, having shepherded Kaddish to press, set off on a long international voyage with his partner, Peter Orlovsky. The two planned to visit Burroughs in Tangiers before continuing on to Israel, followed by extended stays in India and Japan.

Up to this point in his life, Ginsberg viewed his poems as sacred texts in service of humanity’s welfare. Describing this initial position, he later wrote:

Various basic rules have evolved, as far as my instincts and feelings, which is that all creation and poesy as transmission of the message of eternity is sacred and must be free of any rational restrictiveness; because consciousness has no limitations. And this led to experiments with new kinds of writing and literary renaissances and new energies and compositional techniques—most of which I got from Kerouac who all along let himself go to the ball with his spontaneous art…And I expected that, given this widening of belief and tolerance and empathy, some touch of natural basic consciousness would emanate from poesy and my activities and serve to remind others outside of me of human original wide nature, and thus affecting their consciousness little though it be, serve the general uplift of man and…to aid the masses in their suffering.30

Ginsberg’s belief in the sacral nature of poetry and its wider political consequences reflects an ideal model of poetry as unmediated expression. Spontaneous composition was intended to remove ideological obstacles to sincere and authentic self-expression and thereby stoke the reader’s empathy towards humanist ends. This poetic teleology relied upon the unyielding

28. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, 454. 29. When ending their sexual relationship, Ginsberg told Burroughs, “I don’t want your ugly old cock.” Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 157. 30. Allen Ginsberg, “Prose Contribution to the Cuban Revolution,” Deliberate Prose, 139. Emphasis mine. 57 affirmation of freedom and love as virtues: “I began to get a fixed identity and creational life…as far as public ‘pronouncements’ I kept to just urging freedom, of meter and technique in poesy, to follow the shape of the mind, and laws (narcotic) to follow thru to wider consciousness, and love, to follow natural desire.”31 That is, Ginsberg identified a thru-line between himself and his poems through a shared advocacy for love, free will, and broadly anti-establishment messages.

But now Ginsberg was faced with a crisis that posed an existential threat to his poetics, the virtues he extolled, and his sense of self.

This crisis was two-fold. On the one hand, Burroughs’s personality underwent radical changes over the years. The older artist was hugely influential to Ginsberg’s development in the

40s and early 50s, so the “new” Burroughs threatened Ginsberg’s belief in his own fixed identity—an identity in which the queer and Jewish Ginsberg had finally gained confidence following the commercial success of Howl. “He [Burroughs] was cutting up his own consciousness and escaping as far as I can tell outside of anything I could recognize as his previous identity. And that somewhat changed my identity since that had been something built I had thought and permanently shared with him.”32 Burroughs’s relationships with Ian

Sommerville and Michael Portman, whom he had taken on as sexual partners and students, further exacerbated Ginsberg’s sense of alienation. Sommerville and Portman bullied Orlovsky incessantly during this visit, contributing to an antagonistic atmosphere between new and former lovers that caused Peter to depart Tangiers for Israel ahead of schedule, and without Allen.

Rather than continue to affirm his own identity as a stable concept, Ginsberg was forced to contend with the importance of relationships between inconsistent and constantly evolving selves.

31. Ibid.,140. 32. Ibid., 141. 58

On the other hand, Ginsberg’s crisis also arose from the fact that the cut-ups that he derided to Kerouac years earlier were in fact better at engaging with politics than his own poetry.

With the full force of Burroughs and the cut-ups in front of him, Ginsberg began to tangle with the implications of this new method:

Now the serious technical point that Burroughs was making by his cut-ups, which I resisted and resented since it threatened everything I depend on…[was that] poesy itself became a block to further awareness. For further awareness lay in dropping every fixed concept of self, identity, role, ideal, habit and pleasure. It meant dropping language itself, words, as medium of consciousness. It meant literally altering consciousness outside of what was already the fixed habit of language-inner-thought-monologue-abstraction- mental-image-symbol-mathematical abstraction. It meant exercising unknown and unused areas of the physical brain…But that’s what I thought poetry was doing all along! But the poetry I’d been practicing depended on living inside the structure of language, depended on words as the medium of consciousness and therefore the medium of conscious being.33

The importance of this epiphany cannot be understated. The hermeneutic impulse among both scholars and the public to read Ginsberg’s corpus as an assortment of predominately lyric and

Confessional poems that rely on the spontaneous expression of personal experience does not reflect the poetry Ginsberg wrote following the summer of 1962. Burroughs’s ideas effectively mandated that Ginsberg transition from a sacral poetics of identity and self-expression to writing poetry that questions the self as a constructed category interpellated through unknown habits and regulated by the medium of language. Ginsberg’s crisis led to a near-total halt in his poetic production. “Since then I’ve been wandering in doldrums, still keeping habit up with literature but uncertain if there is enough Me left to continue as some kind of Ginsberg. I can’t write, except journals and dreams down; as the next step if any for poetry, I can’t imagine.”34

Ginsberg’s writer’s block was an outgrowth of his assumptions about a link between the articulating self and lyric poetry that voices that self. Spontaneous composition, as Kerouac

33. Ibid. Emphasis in original. 34. Ibid., 141-2. 59 articulated the method, relies on accessing and giving voice to a suppressed subconscious and sincere self. But if the self is only articulated through the medium of language, then the sincerity to which Ginsberg aspired was little more than an illusion the entire time. No longer confident enough in his “I” to write poetry, Ginsberg’s realization that technology and media could be used to expand consciousness suddenly turned from breakthrough to liability. Technology and media are not neutral tools, but key agents through which language can restrict and control consciousness. As Ginsberg explains:

How escape rigidification and stasis of consciousness when man’s mind is only words and these words and their images are flashed on every brain continuously by the interconnected networks of radio television newspapers wire services speeches decrees laws telephone books manuscripts? How escape centralized control of reality of the masses by the few who want and can take power, when this network is now so interconnected, and the decision over the network? Democracy as previously sentimentally conceived now perhaps impossible (as proved in U.S.) since a vast feedback mechanism, mass media, inescapably orients every individual, especially on subliminal levels.35

This passage shows the ways in which Burroughs’s cut-up threatened Ginsberg’s belief in the possibility of a Whitmanian Democracy. Ginsberg began to wonder how he could combat this newly-extended technocratic mass hypnosis while shorn of his previous methods for composing poetry as a form of political resistance: spontaneously and under the influence of drugs.

Ginsberg’s personal crisis and its attendant writer’s block in the early 1960s have been well-documented by scholars, as they form the basis for Indian Journals, a volume of selections from Ginsberg’s journals written as he traveled across India in the nine months following his encounter with Burroughs. Few, however, connect these difficulties to the cut-up specifically.

Ginsberg biographers Schumacher and Miles, for example, narrate the cut-up as if it were a synecdoche for Burroughs himself by assuming that Ginsberg was unable to write poetry in this

35. Ibid., 142-3. 60 period because of his romantic difficulties with Peter Orlovsky, which resulted from their encounter with one of Allen’s former lovers. While Ginsberg’s difficulties with Burroughs and

Orlovsky undoubtedly caused him immense grief at the time, this narrative overplays biography as ars poetica by failing to account for Ginsberg’s decreasing confidence in his poetry and his inability to produce new poems. After all, Ginsberg had experienced a broken heart and quarreled with friends and lovers before, and he would continue to do so throughout his life. But none of these experiences resulted in the self-doubt and total shutdown in poetic production that followed his visit with Burroughs. It is important to emphasize, therefore, that the cut-up was an immensely troubling literary insight for Ginsberg that directly influenced the evolution of his poetics towards writing—and then abandoning—auto poesy a few years later.

“PARALLEL BLACK WIRES ON THE GREY HIGHWAY”: AUTO POESY, DEFINED On December 15, 1965, Ginsberg traveled to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin in Big Sur with his newly purchased Uher tape recorder in tow. That evening he began experimenting with his machine. As Barry Miles describes Ginsberg’s first experience with the tape recorder:

He spent a lot of time sitting, high, on the beach, mumbling into his new tape recorder, getting to know it as a writing tool: “A new ax for composition,” as he described it to Gregory [Corso]…he sat there and made a number of recordings of mantras, accompanying himself on his finger cymbals, while the sea sighed in the background. He practiced deep “Om”s, which blended in with the waves, and began to use the machine to record his impressions. When they were transcribed, they gave his journals a conversational tone.36

Recognizing the inclusion of ambient ocean noise as substance, as well as the ability to more accurately imitate conversation and ordinary speech patterns with his “new ax,” Ginsberg made his first formal experiment in composing poetry with the tape recorder on the evening of

December 17, continuing his work into the morning hours of December 18. This recording

36. Miles, Ginsberg, 381. Emphasis mine. 61 eventually became “Continuation of a Long Poem of These States: S.F. Southward,” the second poem in Fall’s sequence. Ginsberg quickly invented rules for using the tape recorder to write poems in order to standardize the process, similar to his use of repeated base lines when writing

“Howl.” As Ginsberg explains,

I dictate it on this Uher tape recorder. Now this Uher microphone has a little on-off gadget here (click!) and then when you hear the click it starts it again, so the way I was going it was this (click!); when I clicked it on again it meant I had something to say…So when transcribing, I pay attention to the clicking on and off of the machine, which is literally the pauses…as I wait for phrases to formulate themselves…And then, having paid attention to the clicks, arrange the phrasings on the page visually, as somewhat the equivalent of how they arrive in the mind and how they’re vocalized on the tape recorder.37

In order to demonstrate Ginsberg’s process, as well as the differences between his recordings and the final published poem, I include my own transcript of a portion of Ginsberg’s first auto poesy experiment. The beginning of the recording is difficult to parse—a loud radio in the background obscures Ginsberg’s voice, reflecting the highly experimental nature of the process. Therefore, the following transcription begins after the first “(click!),” a term which I reproduce exactly as stylized in the quotation above for consistency. In this transcript, I use the virgule (/) to indicate an intentional short pause of approximately two seconds, and multiple virgules to represent proportionally longer pauses. Ginsberg speaks:

Bright neon signs like Christmas trees // Bright neon signs like Christmas trees //// and Christmas / and its eves / in the midst of the same / deep wood /// lost /// in the same world / as every sad Christmas before // surrounded // by forests / of stars

(click!)

Metal columns with smoke pouring out of them // cloudward // on the lighted horizon / the warplant moves // tiny /// planes line the fields of the Avionic plant

(click!)

37. Allen Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, edited by David Carter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 134-5. Emphasis mine. 62

[several minutes of mantra chanting accompanied by finger cymbals]

(click!)

Meanwhile the girls are working at the post office sorting mail into the red slot / the rivers of newsprint / to the soldiers of Vietnam, the Infantry Journal / The Wichita Star // The Kanackee Social Register / new and improved ways / to fire the polished aluminum

(click!)38

Compare this passage to the version of the poem published in Fall, rendered to preserve its spacing and appearance on the page:

And Christmas and its eves in the midst of the same deep wood as every sad Christmas before, surrounded by forests of stars— Metal columns, smoke pouring cloudward, yellow-lamp horizon warplants move, tiny planes lie in Avionic fields— Meanwhile Working Girls sort mail into the red slot Rivers of newsprint to soldiers’ Vietnam Infantry Journal, Kanackee Social Register, Wichita Star39

Beyond revisions in diction, there are several key differences between the original recording and the published poem. First, while Ginsberg occasionally renders the (click!) in the published poem with an em-dash, a return to full left-justification on the page always indicates a (click!), like a typewriter carriage returning to its starting position. Second, the arrangement of words on the page and the use of white space more or less correspond to Ginsberg’s pauses, although the process is not standardized and is left to his editorial intervention. Finally, Ginsberg omits the mantric chanting between the second and third stanza in the published poem, suggesting that he did not use every part of his recordings when composing auto poesy.

38. My transcript is produced from Ginsberg, Allen, Series 11, Subseries 11c, Reel 226, Tape 70A1/025D, Allen Ginsberg Papers (M0733), Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. 39. Allen Ginsberg, “Continuation of a Long Poem of These States: S.F. Southward,” Fall, 7. 63

That is, the published poems do not replicate the entire recording as captured on tape, indicating that they are not part of a documentary effort. Ginsberg’s editorial interventions are a significant part of the second step in his compositional process—one that critics never discuss in the context of auto poesy—the transcript. After making his recordings, Ginsberg listened to them, transcribing their content into his journals. He then created a typescript from his handwritten transcript before crafting his poems. We can see the transcript as a unique and crucial step in writing auto poesy in “Bayonne Turnpike to Tuscarora,” the 15th poem in Fall’s sequence, and one of Ginsberg’s final auto poesy poems. While the poem is undated in Fall,

Ginsberg’s transcript, which bears the title “Bayonne Tuscarora,” notes that the poem was initially recorded in January 1967.40 In the following passage, I transcribe Ginsberg’s handwritten journal, using typographic variations in red font to represent Ginsberg’s handwritten edits to his transcript in preparation for the typescript:

Bayonne Tuscarora

Grey water tanks in the Grey mist,

grey robot thru towers carrying past Bayonne’s thru in white smog, silver thru domes, green Chinaworks steaming thru | [Christmas’s leftover lights hanging thru

thru from a smokestack—]

Monotone thru the truckthru window

pla parallel blackthru wires on the grey highway

thru 40. Ginsberg, Allen, “1967 Jan. 8-14,” Series 2, Box 21, Folder 3, Journal 67-05, Allen Ginsberg Papers (M0733), Special Collections and University Archives,thru Stanford University Libraries.

thru 64

thru

into the grey West—41

In this passage, Ginsberg’s edits to his handwritten transcript fall into one of three categories: 1) the change from “past” to “thru” is a correction to accurately transcribe what was said on the tape; 2) “pla” is a misspelling of the word “parallel” that was subsequently corrected; and 3) the couplet “Christmas’s leftover lights hanging / from a smokestack” has brackets and arrows indicating that the lines should be justified under the word “green” in the previous line.42

The poem’s typescript replicates the handwritten transcript, with additional corrections towards the final manuscript version. The typescript for the poem reads: Turnpike to Bayonne / Tuscarora Turnpike to Grey water tanks in Grey mist, Figure 6. grey robot“The Black towers carrying wires thru Bayonne’s Automat on in white smog,What silver It domes, Is #2: domes, green Chinaworks steaming Hyperten sion in Christmas’s leftover lights hangingEffizzect, ” by from a smokestackDouglas — Kearney, Monotone thru the truck window The Black parallel black wires on the [grey highwayAutomato] n (New into the greyYork: West —43 Fence In the typescript, additional editorial interventions Books,can be observed. The most significant of these 2009), 26.Turnpik e to

41. Ibid. Turnpike to 42. There are two edits that I have omitted from my reproduction for clarity. “Bayonne” has two n’s neatly printed above the word, and “Chinaworks” is printed in clear letters aboveFigure its 7appearance. on the page. Both edits were made to assist in creating the typescript, as Ginsberg’s handwriting is “Thenotoriously sloppy. 43. Ibid. Black 65 Automat on in What It Is #2: Hyperten interventions concerns the use of white space; red lines connect phrases across lines, suggesting that they be placed adjacent to one another in the manuscript. The poem was finally published in the following form:

BAYONNE TURNPIKE TO TUSCARORA

Grey water tanks in Grey mist, grey robot towers carrying wires thru Bayonne’s smog, silver domes, green chinaworks steaming, Christmas’s leftover lights hanging from a smokestack — Monotone grey highway into the grey West —44

In the published version, white space continues to function as an important aspect of the poem’s appearance. Additionally, Ginsberg rejects several of his edits on the typescript, such as moving the word “domes” to follow “silver”; he also reinstates the word “Monotone,” which is no longer fully justified on the left side of the page.

My examination of Ginsberg’s archival materials leads me to make three claims about auto poesy. First, auto poesy does not transduce Ginsberg’s recordings with absolute fidelity.

Instead, the poems went through a series of edits before publication. Second, rather than using the long expressive lines of “Howl” and “Kaddish,” Ginsberg composed auto poesy stanzaically.

Stanzas represent discrete portions of Ginsberg’s recordings, with breaks between stanzas standing in for the (click!) on the tape. In addition, stanzas always begin with full left-hand justification. Finally, auto poesy is highly rhapsodic, incorporating the principles of Olson’s composition by field and its focus on breath. However, Ginsberg’s use of Olsonian breath is the direct inverse of its application in his early poems. Instead of a continuous line of text representing a single breath, the white space surrounding the words as they move across the page

44. Allen Ginsberg, “Bayonne Turnpike to Tuscarora,” Fall, 55. 66 mirrors the breaths between ideas as they were recorded on tape.

Auto poesy was an ongoing experiment, and because Ginsberg adapted many of the technique’s stylistic principles for later poems, there are few formal characteristics that allow auto poesy to be identified solely from its appearance on the page. One of the more prominent features of auto poesy is that it was recorded in the car, or “auto,” but “Iron Horse,” which was recorded on a train, defies even that simple attempt at categorization. Additionally, while auto poesy always makes reference to specific geographic locations in Ginsberg’s travels, not all poems that include these markers in Fall are examples of auto poesy. For example, poems written on airplanes, such as “Chicago to Salt Lake by Air” and “Going to Chicago” were not composed using the tape recorder, though their style and appearance suggest that they were influenced by the tenets of auto poesy. Despite the inherent difficulties in identifying the auto poesy poems, I have generated the following list of Ginsberg’s auto poesy through archival research and (some) intuition. In chronological order by their date of composition, Ginsberg’s auto poesy poems are:

“Continuation of a Long Poem of These States: S.F. Southward” (December 18, 1965)

“These States, Into L.A.” (December 24, 1965)

“Hiway Poesy LA-Albuquerque-Texas-Wichita” (January 28-29, 1966)

“Wichita Vortex Sutra” (February 15, 1966)

“Auto Poesy: On the Lam from Bloomington” (February 1966)

“Kansas City to Saint Louis” (March 1966)

“Bayonne Entering NYC” (March 1966)

“Cleveland, the Flats” (June 1966)

“Iron Horse” (July 22-23, 1966)

“Autumn Gold: New England Fall” (October 17, 1966)

“Bayonne Turnpike to Tuscarora” (January 4, 1967)

“Returning North of Vortex” (January 8, 1967)

“Thru Rockies” (January 10, 1967)45

These thirteen poems were recorded between December 18, 1965 and January 10, 1967, meaning that for the most part auto poesy was a year-long experiment during 1966. Within Fall’s sequence, auto poesy appears only in the first two sections but constitutes the overwhelming majority of the poems of these sections.

Auto poesy, I contend, is not a radical break in Ginsberg’s poetics, but an evolved method of spontaneous composition that directly responds to concerns raised by Burroughs’ cut- up. For Kerouac, spontaneous composition was intended to be an all-inclusive process in which the finished product should be revised to a minimal degree. “No revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting).”46

Ginsberg, however, always approached composition as a single step in the process of writing. In the 1950s, Ginsberg wrote the initial draft of a poem spontaneously (preferably writing in a single session) but followed that composition with a period of intensive editing and revision.

Most famously, the first draft of “Howl” begins with the lines “I saw the best minds of my generation / generation destroyed by madness / starving, mystical, naked,”47 rather than the published version’s famous opening salvo: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”48 In an annotation for this edit, Ginsberg writes, “Crucial

45. “Thru Rockies” has never been published. The handwritten transcript can be found in Ginsberg, Allen, “1967 Jan. 8-14,” Series 2, Box 21, Folder 3, Journal 67-05, Allen Ginsberg Papers (M0733), Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. 46. Kerouac, “Essentials,” 57-8. Emphasis in original. 47. Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, edited by Barry Miles (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1995), 12. 48. Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956), 9. 68 revision: ‘Mystical’ is replaced by ‘hysterical,’ a key to the tone of the poem. Tho the initial idealistic impulse of the line went one way, afterthought noticed bathos, and common sense dictated ‘hysteria.’”49 Here, Ginsberg indicates a desire to change the opening tone of “Howl” with a revision that challenges the limits of Kerouac’s caveat allowing insertions but not revisions. By 1982, Ginsberg codified his writing process in “Fourteen Steps for Revising

Poetry,” a series of prescriptions that lists “Composition” as the second step in writing following

“Conception.” His instructions for revising includes proscriptions such as, “Review it with eye to the condensation of syntax,” and, “Review it for weak spots you really don’t like, but just left there for inertial reasons.”50 The latter two instructions notably violate Kerouac’s cardinal principle of writing spontaneously without revising, and the fact that conception and composition are subsumed under the broader category of revision indicates that while Ginsberg may have clung to the tenets of “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” throughout his career, his personal version of spontaneously composed poetry was always revised, edited, and mediated before publication.

This mediation is precisely why auto poesy should be considered an extension of spontaneous composition, despite the numerous edits made to the substance of the original recordings. Ginsberg was drawn to Kerouac’s conception of spontaneity because it offered a refuge from the self’s conscious mind and promised sincere expression. By revising the text, and later writing poems under the influence of psychedelic drugs (he also revised those poems),

Ginsberg developed his own techniques for spontaneous composition while attempting to stay true to the values Kerouac originally laid out. By speaking into a tape recorder, Ginsberg both emulated Kerouac’s technique in Visions of Cody and carried the experiment further; by

49. Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft, 124. 50. Allen Ginsberg, “Fourteen Steps for Revising Poetry,” Deliberate Prose , 261. 69 recording speech, which naturally proceeds faster than writing, Ginsberg further decreased the time between conception and composition while simultaneously including the polyvocal spontaneity of sights, conversations, and radio broadcasts, all of which were literally “cut up” between speech acts and recorded on tape. Given that Burroughs traced the cut-up through the

Dada tradition, auto poesy ought to be considered in the lineage of Surrealist “automatic writing,” which limits the input of the conscious rational mind in the act of composition. The techne of automatic writing is even reflected in the wordplay between automatic and automobile, both of which contribute to the abbreviated “auto” in the phrase “auto poesy.”

Auto poesy, then, synthesizes the spontaneity and sincerity of Kerouac’s method with the ability to slice and reorient media language in Burroughs’s cut-ups. I do not wish to undercut

Ginsberg’s own role in developing this method—rather than plagiarizing the insights of his friends, I view this synthesis as a significant development that should be regarded as an individual triumph of experimentation that was preceded by many months of personal turmoil, introspection, and deep artistic reflection. Most importantly, understanding Ginsberg’s personal unease in the early 1960s and his subsequent development of auto poesy within the context of the

Beat coterie and Ginsberg’s poetics bears directly on Ginsberg scholarship as a whole. With auto poesy, Ginsberg moves beyond his earlier methods of poetic composition. Instead of embracing poetry as a sacred text, he adopts a new approach in which he directly interrogates the self—both within and outside of poetry—by directly engaging with media broadcasts as public speech acts.

“HEARING THE HORROR SYNDICATE”: VIETNAM AND THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Ginsberg wrote Fall between 1965 and 1972, a period that also comprises the majority of

America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. As such, opposition to the war is one of Ginsberg’s primary concerns in the collection—the horror of Vietnam even resonates in the title’s assertion

70 that America is experiencing its “fall.” As the first military campaign to have photos and videos disseminated in the American media seemingly instantly (it is often referred to as America’s first televised war), Ginsberg was acutely aware of the roles technology and mass media played in influencing the public, particularly when used by elected officials attempting to shore up support for their hawkish positions. While his protests are occasionally direct in voicing opposition, as in

“Wichita Vortex Sutra” when he famously announces, “I hereby declare the end of the War,”51

Ginsberg was also acutely aware of the broader impact of the military-industrial complex and its demand for ongoing warfare. After all, war can make some people quite rich. But as an expansive and ever-shifting structure within American politics, economics, and culture, the military-industrial complex is a protean monster that defies easy representation. Tracing its multiple manifestations through violence against indigenous populations, international conflicts outside of Vietnam, racist police brutality, and ecological destruction, Ginsberg attempts to name and locate the military-industrial complex through auto poesy as he encounters it in his cross- country travels—over the radio, in the newspapers, and especially outside his car window.

Beginning with the very first and only pre-auto poesy poem in Fall, Ginsberg starts making preliminary connections between the various manifestations of the military industrial complex.

Up hills following trailer dust clouds, green shotgun shells & beer-bottles on road, mashed jackrabbits—through a crack in the Granite range, an alkali sea—Chinese armies massed at the borders of India. Mud plate of Black Rock Desert passing, Frank Sinatra lamenting distant years, old sad voic’d September’d recordings, and Beatles crying Help! their voices woodling for tenderness. All memory at present time returning, vast dry forests afire in California, U.S. paratroopers attacking guerillas in Vietnam mountains, over porcelain-white road hump the tranquil azure of a vast lake.52

51. Allen Ginsberg, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Planet News, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968), 127. 52. Ginsberg, Fall, 4. 71

While he briefly mentions Vietnam, Ginsberg juxtaposes the War itself with myriad elements at stake in the military-industrial complex. From the refuse left by hunters who care nothing for life

(“green shotgun shells & beer-bottles on road, mashed jackrabbits”); to the Chinese occupation of Tibet (“Chinese armies massed at the borders of India”); to the commercial songs blasting over the radio (“Frank Sinatra lamenting distant years” and “Beatles crying Help!”); to the destruction of American wilderness (“vast dry forests afire”); to the “porcelain white road hump” of the Eisenhower-era expansion of domestic infrastructure that was central to America’s postwar prosperity and the development of the military-industrial complex piercing the otherwise

“tranquil” landscape—for Ginsberg, the military-industrial complex can be found not only in the intersection between the Vietnam War and American corporate interests, but in the very fabric of

American daily life. Ginsberg concludes this poem by writing “here is the city, here is the face of war,” a metonymic cathexis of metropolitan American culture and the military-industrial complex.

In “Hiway Poesy LA-Albuquerque-Texas-Wichita,” the auto poesy that immediately precedes “Wichita Vortex Sutra” in Fall’s sequence, Ginsberg names his foe with a particularly striking epithet: “Isolate farmhouses with radios / hearing the Horror Syndicate / take over the

Universe!”53 The military-industrial complex, as the “Horror Syndicate,” attempts a coup over the Universe not through military action, but through radio communication, attempting to sway the hearts and minds of the American populous by subsuming them under a unified national identity. In order to combat the Horror Syndicate, Ginsberg appropriates radio communication

(as well as other forms of media) in order to directly critique the Syndicate. “Hiway Poesy LA-

Albuquerque-Texas-Wichita” begins:

53. Ibid., 24. 72

up up and away! we’re off, Thru America—

Heading East to San Berdoo as West did, Nathaniel, California Radio Lady’s voice Talking about Viet Cong— Oh what a beautiful morning Sung for us by Nelson Eddy54

This passage relies on the radical juxtaposition of a number of cultural elements working in tandem. Beginning with the catchphrase of the comic book (and radio serial) character

Superman, both a metonymical stand-in for America at large and a sly dig at the assumption of

Nietzschean superiority by American citizens during the Cold War, Ginsberg situates the geographical setting of his long drive, which according to the title of the poem will span over half the length of the United States. “Heading East to San Berdoo / as West did, Nathaniel,” mixes a number of allusive elements. San Bernardino, home of Norton Air Force Base, is rendered in slang, alongside the misspelled name of Nathanael West, author of the 1939 novel

The Day of the Locust, whose protagonist resides in an apartment building named “The San

Bernardino Arms.” The spelling of “Nathaniel” evokes Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Puritan- inspired literature reflects the centrality of Puritanism to the American ethos. Nathanael West, on the other hand, became a Hollywood screenwriter late in his career, and in a punning twist, West would have had to head west to work as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. The use of “Heading

East” in combination with West’s name becomes a play on the phrase “Go West, young man.”

This quote was originally attributed to Horace Greeley as an expression of Manifest Destiny, and the reversal of directions from West to East suggests a rejection of American colonialism, which is affirmed as a major concern towards the end of the poem: “‘Right now they’re trying to take

54. Ibid., 14. 73 the Indian territories / away, near Hopiland. / Wanna build subdivisions.”55 Ginsberg then describes the discussion of the Vietnam War on the radio, which is followed by Nelson Eddy’s performance of the opening song to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma!, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin,’” the title of which is rendered without the ending apostrophe. Juxtaposing this song with news of Vietnam is meant to be a satirical criticism of the War, which is anything but “beautiful.”

Ginsberg’s juxtaposition of a comic book character, geographic allusion, idiomatic deconstruction, literary reference, talk radio subject matter, and popular music functions in much the same manner as Burroughs’s cut-up. It slices the detritus of American culture, placing the pieces alongside one another in order to “speak” the contemporary political, social, and cultural milieu. And like Burroughs’s technique, Ginsberg is not gathering radically disparate elements.

Instead he shows how they were always connected and speaking to one another. In the military- industrial complex, Superman is illegible without Manifest Destiny and the destruction of indigenous populations, which in turn are inextricable from the Vietnam War, The Scarlet Letter,

Broadway musicals, and the American Midwest.

At other points in Fall, Ginsberg appropriates media language in order to construct an interlocutor to whom he can directly respond. In “Kansas City to Saint Louis,” another auto poesy poem, Ginsberg writes:

“A great blunder…once you’re in, uh, One of these things, uh…” “Stay in.” Withdraw, Language, language, uh, uh From the mouths of Senators, uh Trying to think on their feet Saying uhh, politely56

55. Ibid., 26. Emphasis in original. 56. Ibid., 32. 74

Rather than juxtapose the speech of Senators with other elements of American culture, Ginsberg instead transcribes their stammering speech with ellipsis and “uh” in order to re-present the language in its uncommunicative and ill-conceived original form. He then directly addresses the failures of the Senators’ speech—they are attempting to “think on their feet” and speak

“politely,” but Ginsberg is able to expose this speech as intellectually vacant. Additionally,

Ginsberg directly responds to their suggestion to “Stay in” Vietnam by demanding that they instead “Withdraw.” In these moments, Ginsberg invokes the Situationist-style presentation of information in a new format and venue to expose political language as artificial, while simultaneously allowing himself to engage in direct rhetorical opposition against his political opponents.

In subsequent poems, Ginsberg continues to write an almost ekphrastic construction of the military-industrial complex by narrating American culture and landscape. In the auto poesy poem “Cleveland, the Flats,” Ginsberg introduces one of his recurring motifs in Fall: “Triple towers smokestacked steaming in blue nite,”57 an image of industrial pollution hanging over the city. Smog seeps through the stanzas of auto poesy such as “An Open Window on Chicago”

(“space above city misted with fine soot”),58 while “Wings Lifted Over the Black Pit,” a poem composed on an airplane and without the tape recorder, extends the image:

Vast hoards of men Negro’d in the gloom, Gnashing their teeth for miles Tears in attick’s blackness Swastikas worshipped in the White Urb, clean teeth bared in Reptilian smiles […] Living like beasts, befouling our own nests Smoke & Steam, broken glass & beer cans, Auto exhaust—

57. Ibid., 44. 58. Ibid., 61. 75

Civilization shit littering the streets, Fine black mist over apartments watercourses running with oil fish fellows dead—59

Here the figure of pollution creeps through the clouds of ominous smoke in order to highlight their impact beyond the smokestack. Litter and oil are the products of racist humans reduced to reptilian “beasts,” predecessors on the evolutionary timeline who destroy their own “nests.” This destruction is the direct result of an inhumane civilization that continuously dehumanizes its black population, whose virtuosity in spite of white America’s predation receives a nod in the punning allusion to Crispus Attucks (“Tears in attick’s blackness”). The “Black Pit” of the poem’s title therefore describes not only the accretion of pollutants in the environment, but the coextant relationship between polluted oil-filled rivers and the plight of black men and women in

America, especially in urban areas.60 Pollution and racism are here inextricable from the military-industrial complex, and this passage in particular is one example of why I disagree with

Timothy Yu’s statement that except for the auto poesy poems, the rest of Fall is “just landscape poems”: Ginsberg’s narration of landscape frequently tends to be ecocritical, rather than quietly pastoral.

In “A Vow,” Ginsberg writes a summation of his many concerns within the military- industrial complex. He describes the “money munching / War machine, bright lit industry” as:

everywhere digesting forests & excreting soft pyramids of newsprint, Redwood and Ponderosa patriarchs silent in Mediation murdered & regurgitated as smoke, sawdust, screaming ceilings of Soap Opera, thick dead Lifes, slick Advertisements for Gubernatorial big guns burping Napalm on palm rice tropic greenery.

59. Ibid., 42-3. 60. I sometimes find myself dumbstruck at the coincidence between Ginsberg’s emphasis on poetic “prophecy” and his ability to presage contemporary America with stunning accuracy. As I write this note, Flint, MI has been without clean water for four years. 76

Dynamite in forests, boughs fly slow motion thunder down ravine Helicopters roar over National Park, Mekong Swamp, Dynamite fire blasts thru Model Villages Violence screams at Police, Mayors get mad over radio, Drop the Bomb on Niggers! drop Fire on the gook China Frankenstein Dragon waving its tail over Bayonne’s domed Aluminum Oil reservoir!61

Again, Ginsberg presents the military-industrial complex not as the simple connection between domestic corporate interests and military interests in Vietnam, but a vast intersecting network of media (“soft pyramids / of newsprint”), popular commercial publications (“thick dead Lifes”), entertainment (“screaming ceilings of Soap Opera”), environmental destruction (“Redwood and

Ponderosa patriarchs / …murdered & regurgitated as smoke”), xenophobia (“drop Fire on the g[-

] China”), domestic racism (“Drop the Bomb on N[-]”), and the mining of natural resources

(Bayonne’s domed Aluminum / Oil reservoir”). Ginsberg collages these aspects of the military- industrial complex in close succession, utilizing Olson’s kinetics via composition by field to locate his perceived foe through the agglutination of its material, intellectual, and discursive effects.

Given that Ginsberg wrote Fall as an epic sequence relying on the continual collage and juxtaposition of historical and cultural elements, it is impossible to discuss its relationship with form and politics without directly addressing the importance of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos as a direct influence on Ginsberg’s poetry. However, presenting a brief and totalizing summation of

Ezra Pound’s multivalent, politically vexing, and occasionally demagogic argument in The

Cantos is not only an impossible task, but a disingenuous one. Pound’s own understanding of

61. Ibid., 46-7. 77 history and politics changed drastically across the decades over which he composed his epic,62 and despite Pound’s overt and shameful embrace of fascism and anti-Semitism, even these facets of his poems are inconsistent, ebbing in and out of his historical collages over the decades in which he wrote The Cantos. Ironically, Pound’s lengthy critique of banking and monetary systems, which includes many of The Cantos’ most overtly anti-Semitic passages, was one of the biggest draws for Ginsberg. Within Pound’s misplaced vitriol (it was in conversation with

Ginsberg that Pound famously stated “my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along, that spoiled everything”),63 Ginsberg saw a serious geopolitical thesis of massive importance. As Ginsberg explains in 1968:

Pound says the trouble with money system is not money as a measure, but private monopolistic manufacture of money (credit i.e., checks) by banks, and their use of money to multiply their own money monopolistically, even though they perform no productive service to earn their increase. Like, they skim the cream off everybody’s work. Whereas all the credit they give out and take interest on really belongs to the community, commune, state, i.e. demos. So how come the State licensed the banks to loan out our money? Of course a State Bank would lead to monopolistic authoritarian dictatorship of money too.64

Refiguring Pound’s largely anti-Semitic attack on the practice of usury as a leftist offensive on the appropriation of labor in an increasingly capitalist society, Ginsberg adopts Pound’s monetary history in The Cantos as evidence of the antidemocratic American plutocracy (also an evolution of Whitman’s critique of the influence of European Feudalism on American

Democracy for Ginsberg), which ties the State with the banking industry through the abusive

62. When meeting Ezra Pound in 1967, Ginsberg encouraged Pound to continue publishing Cantos, telling him that because of the nature of the epic, what he adds later casts the earlier cantos in a whole new light. “But it is an open- ended work, that is, epic…existing in time, and changing in time, anything you write now will refer back to the beginnings and alter all that went before…so anything you do now is OK and will be proper, appropriate, as means of altering preceding thought-flow by hindsight.” Pound disagreed and quickly brushed off Ginsberg’s suggestion: “It’s all tags and patches.” Allen Ginsberg, Composed on the Tongue: Literary Conversations, 1967-1977, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 2001), 12-3. 63. Ibid., 8. 64. Allen Ginsberg, “1968 Democratic National Convention,” Deliberate Prose, 49. 78 manipulation of currency in favor of a financial elite and against the interests of the laboring poor.

Ginsberg’s understanding of Pound’s monetary invectives echoes throughout Fall, especially through the juxtaposition of monetary interests and natural symbols—a comparison favored by Pound for its Confucian roots. In “Chicago to Salt Lake by Air,” another of

Ginsberg’s auto poesy influenced airplane poems, Ginsberg launches into an invective against

Hanson Baldwin, then the military editor of the New York Times:

Give ‘em all the orgasms they want Give ‘em orgasms, give Hanson Baldwin his lost orgasms. Give NY Times, give Reader’s Digest their old orgasms back.

It’s a gold crisis! Not enuf orgasms to go round … “Ever since the world began Gold is the measure of solidarity.” Golden light over Iowa, silver cloud floor, sky roof blue deep65

The orgasm, the sexual release which Ginsberg figures as the necessary recompense to satiate military hawks in Vietnam, has particular importance for Pound through the work of Remy de

Gourmont. More important to the present analysis, however, is the “gold crisis,” which refers to the 1968 economic crisis when US spending abroad, having drastically increased due to the

Vietnam War, led to massive inflation and a subsequent rush from investors to buy gold, in turn lowering the value of the American dollar. In response, President Richard Nixon abandoned the gold standard in favor of fiat currency, a decision that resulted in the largest economic disaster in the United States since the Great Depression and is said to mark the end point for America’s post-war economic boom.66 But in Poundian terms, the 1968 gold crisis was manufactured entirely through financial speculation and investor manipulation; Ginsberg cheekily refers to this

65. Allen Ginsberg, “Chicago to Salt Lake by Air,” Fall, 80-1. 66. Robert M. Collins, “The Forgotten Economic Crisis of ’68,” The Wilson Quarterly 21 (Winter 1997): 121. 79 loss of buying power through the terms of sexual dissatisfaction: “not enuf orgasms to go around.” Ginsberg then ventriloquizes a neighboring passenger on his flight to sarcastically argue that gold provides “solidarity,” effectively recasting the international pecuniary concern for gold as a masturbatory exercise of the self orgasming in “solidarity” with itself—an entirely non-reproductive act. Finally, Ginsberg follows these comments with a description of the scene outside his window. A “golden light over Iowa” contrasts with the gold crisis by demonstrating that the American landscape is in fact rich with a natural gold—just not the gold to which

America symbolically attached the value of its currency. Throughout these poems, Ginsberg does not simply ape Pound’s argument and metaphorical concerns—rather, he extends what he learned about the State and banking from Pound into an indictment of the entirety of the

American military-industrial complex, whose many manifestations rely on the financial industry.

While writing Fall’s poems in 1967, Ginsberg traveled to Italy where he met Pound in person for the first time. On October 30, Ginsberg visited Pound at the latter’s home in Italy, and during their (mostly one-sided) conversation, read one of his auto poesy poems for his idol.

Describing this meeting afterwards, Ginsberg wrote, “Then in silence still, to illustrate the effect of his composition on mine, read—with indifferent voice alas—few pages of ‘Middle Section of

Long Poem on These States.’ oops! Silence. Eek! Put that down fast after asking, do you see the relationship in method of composition? Silence.”67 “Middle Section of Long Poem on These

States” was published in the short collection TV Baby Poems in 1967 by the London based

Goliard Press in an edition of 100 copies,68 and was subsequently retitled “Kansas City to St.

Louis” when included Fall. While direct causation cannot be proven (at least not without

67. Ginsberg, Composed, 16. 68. Bill Morgan, Allen Ginsberg 1941-1994: A Descriptive Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 16-7. 80

Ginsberg’s statement on the matter), the close timing between Pound’s silence and Ginsberg’s decision to abandon auto poesy is a particularly striking coincidence. Ginsberg’s final published auto poesy poem was “Returning North of Vortex,” which he recorded on January 8, 1967. The next poem in Fall is the four-line poem “Kiss Ass,” composed on April 24, 1968. It is the only poem placed out of chronological order in Fall’s sequence. “Elegy Ché Guévara,” an ekphrastic poem on the iconic image of Guévara written in Venice, Italy in November 1967, follows “Kiss

Ass.” Finally, “War Profit Litany,” dedicated to Ezra Pound and composed on December 1,

1967, ends the second of Fall’s five sections. In terms of Fall’s chronology, Ginsberg’s meeting with Pound came after an unusually long period that coincides with the end of the auto poesy experiments. Ginsberg wrote to Robert Creeley several weeks after meeting Pound to say that he was “picking thru last 7 years poetry for City Lights Book,” adding, “So now about a third thru the poems, maybe done in couple weeks; then put together another book re U.S. Vietnam-States-

Volkswagen tape machine Wichita Vortex, that’s about 100 pages I hope.”69 The “last 7 years poetry” to which Ginsberg refers in the letter would be published as Planet News soon after.

However, Ginsberg’s claim that he will put together another book of “tape machine” poems suggests that he considered his work with auto poesy completed soon after meeting Pound.

Ginsberg was clearly affected by Pound’s silence to his poem and question, “do you see the relationship in method of composition?” Given that the tape recorder was central to the method of composition of “Middle Section of Long Poem on These States”/“Kansas City to St.

Louis,” it is not improbable that Ginsberg began to rethink his use of the tape recorder after meeting Pound. Regardless of the exact reasons for ending his experiment, however, the methodological similarity he raises in his question highlights auto poesy’s intended goals. By

69. Allen Ginsberg, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Bill Morgan (Philadelphia: De Capo Press, 2008), 337. 81 describing the military-industrial complex, Ginsberg attempts to instruct readers about the Horror

Syndicate and its efforts to control the consciousness of the American public by manipulating media and currency; with a better understanding of the threats posed by the military-industrial complex, Ginsberg hopes readers will adopt new ways of thinking. In a 1969 interview with

Playboy, Ginsberg states:

Average young guys have been so heavily conditioned to living in the closed circle of night-club-money-machine-airplane-taxi-office-bank-roll-television-family that they distrust other modes of consciousness and pathways of existence…Here’s the danger of the money man, thinking his security is dependent on money, afraid his supply will be cut off like junk from a junkie, may entirely reject his own unconscious, cutting himself off from his own nature and organic perceptions and becoming as William Burroughs says, a ‘walking tape machine.’70

By attempting to alter the consciousness of his readers, Ginsberg adopts Pound’s didactic approach to poetry. Yet Ginsberg eschews pedagogic instruction by focusing on his readers’ consciousness, and not their knowledge. His goal, therefore, is not epistemological but ontological. Burroughs’s figure of the “walking tape machine” characterizes the average

American citizen as unable to speak except by repeating (or playing back) what they previously heard. It is useless to tell them that what they say is wrong, especially since they are not even aware that they are a tape machine in the first place. If their mind were imagined as an audio tape, it would only include a single track playing on repeat. But with more than a “one track mind,” the music becomes something else entirely.

* * *

Following his experiments with auto poesy, Ginsberg continued to search for ways to alter the public’s consciousness and combat the military-industrial complex’s control. His experience during the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago offered him a

70. Allen Ginsberg, interview by Paul Carroll, Playboy, April 1969, Spontaneous Mind, 162. 82 new track:

I had this extraordinary experience chanting OM here in Chicago. On Sunday afternoon—the day before the convention began…Police fear everywhere. So I sat down and began chanting OM. I thought I’d chant for about 20 minutes and calm myself down, but the chanting stretched into hours, and a big circle surrounded me. A lot of people joined in the chanting. Then somebody passed me a note on which an Indian had written: “Will you please stop playing with the mantra and do it seriously by pronouncing the ‘M’ in OM properly for at least five minutes? See how it develops.” I realized I’d been using mantra as song instead of concentration, so I started doing it his way. After about 15 minutes, my breathing became more regular, even, steady—as if I were breathing the air of heaven into myself and then circulating it back out into heaven. After a while, the air inside and outside became the same—what the Indians call prana, the vital, silvery, evanescent air.71

Despite practicing Buddhist techniques for years following his trip to India, Ginsberg experienced proper mantric chanting for the first time in Chicago. During the chant, practitioners are supposed to vibrate their diaphragm when producing the “M” in “OM,” allowing the physical vibrations to resonate throughout the body. These vibrations are sound waves; focusing the mind’s attention on these physical sensations promotes bodily awareness as part of meditative practice. This sensation is key to altering states of awareness and consciousness during meditation. While technology for sound recording and reproduction are useful for replicating semantic information, timbre, and a host of other sonic phenomena, these devices cannot reproduce physical vibrations generated by the resonating space of the body.

Ginsberg’s revelation about sound’s physical reverberations directly influenced his poetry post-auto-poesy. Poems late in Fall’s sequence abandon media communication entirely in favor of explicit confrontations with the physical manifestation of sound. For example, “‘Have

You Seen This Movie?’” contrasts lines like, “Sing thy Kingdom to Language deaf America!

Scream thy Cry thru Radio electric Aether” with statements such as “Wailing whale ululating

71. Ibid., 178. 83 underocean’s sonic roar of Despair!”72 Here, Ginsberg suggests that whale songs, sounds effortlessly vibrating through water (a much denser medium than air), are superior to the screams and cries heard through non-vibrating electric signals of radio. “Bixby Canyon Ocean Path Word

Breeze,” meanwhile, adopts an emphasis on geographical movement from auto poesy, but links seemingly unrelated images and sounds in a radically paratactic construction that portrays language as appearing and disappearing like the ocean breeze. Moreover, the phonic poem “Hūṃ

Bom!” begins, “Whom bomb? / We bomb them! / Whom bomb? / We bomb them!”73 “Hūṃ

Bom!” is a particularly effective example of the physical manifestations of sound in mantra. The poem consists entirely of spondee and molossus, stressed syllables that when read aloud involve the reader in an atypical sonic experience that combines the forceful beat of the bomb exploding with a regular rhythm intended to bring the reader into a meditative state. The poem names the destructive practice of bombing and physically manifests it for the reader, whose consciousness is meant to be altered by the experience so that they oppose the practice.

The evolution of Ginsberg’s poetics between the 1950s and early 1970s thus show an intense focus on voice, self, and expression alongside ongoing experimentation with avant-garde techniques and theories. While Ginsberg presaged the anti-lyric rejection of self-expression in his post-cut-up turn away from sacral poetry, he nonetheless continued to incorporate voice, understood as both an ideological tool and a physical sensation, in his poetry. Rather than divesting from voice because it reflects the person “underneath the poem,” he chose to include voice both for its strategic ability to manifest the influence of external cultural forces and its potential for producing physical responses in the body—tactics with expressly political goals that function by drawing attention to linguistic traditions and ruptures. That is, in his rejection of a

72. Ginsberg, “‘Have You Seen This Movie?’” Fall, 166. 73. Ginsberg, “Hūṃ Bom!” Fall, 181. 84 unified poetic subject, Ginsberg not only saw subject and voice as always-already lacking an essential connection, he found voice to be a key tool for political engagement even in the face of the subject’s philosophical withdrawal. The Language poets’ rejection of both voice and subject, which began less than a decade after Fall’s publication, suggests that this particular anti-lyric preoccupation diverges from the poetics of at least some of their avant-garde predecessors. That is, the cathexis between voice and poetic subject is a rhetorical schematic invented by the

Language poets that opposes previous avant-garde efforts like Ginsberg’s.

While his progressive and radical politics far outstrip the norms of the 1960s in ways that are rarely acknowledged—particularly in his concern for ongoing abuses against African

American and Native American populations—Ginsberg’s preoccupation with cultivating new forms of public consciousness in his readers shows the limits of the ability to engage in anti- racist discourse while working within the customs and traditions of the avant-garde. Because

Western epistemology relies on individualistic constructions of self and subject, Ginsberg turns to Buddhist traditions and the practice of chanting mantra for alternatives. But through his inclusion of Buddhist thought, Ginsberg effectively extends the psychic and linguistic colonialist tradition through a clear act of Orientalist appropriation that he otherwise seems to oppose. In the next chapter, I will leap forward several decades and turn to a contemporary book of poetry:

Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution. Unlike Ginsberg’s literal tape recorder, Hong incorporates a fictional tape recorder into her narrative sequence in order to engage with colonialism’s effects on language. In turning to twenty-first century poetry, I will begin examining experimental impulses in American poetry after the Language poets in order to explore further the roles assumed by the subject in poems that actively engage in anti-racist discourse.

Creolizing Empire: Linguistic Variation as Decolonial Practice in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution

While Cathy Park Hong is far from the first poet to describe the simmering enmity between the Language poets and poets of color, her essay “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-

Garde” is notable for how quickly it received widespread attention and support among a number of poetry communities following its publication. Six months after the essay’s debut, Language poet Barrett Watten addressed Hong in a public Facebook exchange in an attempt to admonish her for what he perceived as widespread backlash against avant-garde poets: “You are the one who started this daisy chain of race-baiting with the ‘whiteness of the avant-garde’ article, and this disaster is one result. And don’t bring your mouth around my page—I don’t need to hear your ‘bullshit’ from a person supposedly with professional credentials.”1 Watten further opines that Hong’s essay is “Replete with projection and historical inaccuracy; barely at the level of an upper division essay.”2 In his response, Watten reproduces a litany of pejorative attacks and dismissals typical of contemporary racist rhetoric: he argues that Hong has done explicit harm to

(white) poets by “race-baiting,” or denouncing explicitly racist action where, in his view, none existed; he challenges her professional qualifications and intellectual capacity to comment on these issues by denigrating the sophistication of her prose; and perhaps most significantly,

Watten attempts to silence Hong by excluding her from further discussion, ironically reinforcing her original argument with his order: “don’t bring your mouth around my page.”3

1. Watten eventually deleted this post and its replies from his Facebook profile. However, screenshots of their content were widely circulated. See Hoa Nguyen, Twitter post, May 30, 2015, 10:22 p.m., http://twitter.com/peacehearty/status/604850401767227392. 2. Ibid. 3. In fact, Hong made one more reply to Watten, pointing out that his response only proved the points she made in the original essay: “WOW Barrett, it’s quite telling that you’re also silencing me, telling me I shouldn’t ‘bring my mouth around here’ all the while complaining about free speech!! You are actually proving me right, that poets of color have no right to say anything around this exclusive ag [avant-garde] discussion board.” Ibid. 86

While Watten’s comments further highlight the important role “voice” and its associated bodily metonymies (such as “mouth”) play in the racial divisions between the avant-garde and innovative poets of color writing in contemporary America, his comments are so despicable in their racist subtext and vitriolic assertions that I question even reproducing them through direct citation. Yet I begin this chapter with this anecdote because of Watten’s declaration that Hong is

“the one who started this…with the ‘whiteness of the avant-garde’ article.” While the greater political and cultural zeitgeist in America at the time was certainly more influential to ongoing racial discourse than Hong’s essay (Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, Missouri only months prior to the publication of Hong’s essay, catapulting discussions of racist police brutality to the national spotlight), the publication of “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” still coincides with a watershed moment of racial reckoning in the United States. Given that Hong’s final claim in her essay, that “we must hew our own path,” challenges the very potential of the avant-garde’s continued existence, she raises a question that animates this dissertation’s core premise: is there a future for the contemporary avant-garde in American poetry? Or has it become a living fossil whose obsession with its own whiteness has deluded it beyond any hope of redemption?

In responding to these questions, I turn to Hong’s 2007 collection Dance Dance

Revolution (hereafter DDR),4 which was selected by the preeminent poet and scholar Adrienne

Rich as the winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Drawing on the conventions of the

Western epic tradition, the poems in this collection constitute a fictional narrative set in “The

Desert,” an international tourist destination bearing the traits of both Las Vegas and Dubai. Hong writes the majority of the poems in “Desert Creole,” an invented language spoken by the

4. I will use the phrase “Dance Dance Revolution” without italics when referencing the book’s fictional uprising of the same name. 87

Desert’s inhabitants and described in the book as “an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects imported in the city, a rapidly evolving lingua franca.”5 The narrative focuses on two characters: the Historian and the Guide. Raised in Sierra Leone, the Historian travels to the

Desert to find the woman her father loved before meeting her mother. This woman is the Guide: a bald South Korean named Chun Sujin, who lives in exile as a tour guide in the Desert after her participation in the Kwangju uprising of 1980, an important revolt in South Korean history that

Hong connects to the Desert’s fictional uprising: the Dance Dance Revolution.

Set in the then-future year of 2016, most of DDR consists of excerpts of the Guide’s stories that the Historian ostensibly recorded on a series of cassette tapes and transcribed into text. DDR therefore shares a premise with Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America in that both collections are framed by poetic “speech” recorded on cassette tapes. However, Hong’s tapes are fictional artifacts, indicating a strategy that differs from Ginsberg’s attempts to increase the spontaneity of his compositional process. As the Historian notes in her foreword, “some of her

[the Guide’s] stories may be inexact due to technical glitches…I left my cassette tapes out in my patio during a rainstorm. It has not caused irreparable damage but the static has obscured parts of the recording so there may be some lapses in her testimonials. I have marked such lapses with ellipses.”6 Given that even at the time of DDR’s 2007 publication cassette tapes were an outdated and nearly obsolete recording medium, the futuristic setting and the inclusion of static from damaged tapes nonetheless insist on a use-value for the cassette tape as a recording medium.

While Ginsberg suppressed the presence of the tape recorder by editing his transcripts to remove the presence of noise and static, Hong instead forefronts this aspect of the cassette tape’s mediation.

5. Cathy Park Hong, Dance Dance Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 19. 6. Ibid., 20. 88

My analysis of DDR approaches the collection as a testing ground for the arguments

Hong would later make in “Delusions.” While the concerns and arguments in the former are not as pointed in voicing grievances against the avant-garde, Hong’s use of the tape recorder and

Desert Creole orbits similar conflicts between voice, the speaking subject, formal innovation, and race in contemporary poetic discourse. I am particularly interested in the ways Hong’s Asian

American ethnicity extends these conversations outside of the monochromatic boundaries in which scholars usually frame them. Dorothy Wang argues that when critics discuss minority or ethnic literature in relation to the avant-garde, they overwhelmingly tend to focus on writing by

African American authors. This abnegation, according to Wang, is due to the complexity of

Asians’ status in America’s racial taxonomy, and poetry by Asian Americans therefore functions as a “limit case”7 for questions of racial appropriation and exclusion. The white imaginary categorizes Asians as the “most white” of ethnic minorities due their status as “model minorities” in the United States; simultaneously, the white imaginary’s view of Asian languages as ineluctably foreign to English makes Asian Americans an unmistakably radical “other” in

American society, so much so that viewing Asians as an unassimilable people was used to justify barbarous policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment. This catch-22 produces its own unique form of racialized reading, in which writing by Asian American artists is read as “mimetic, autobiographical, ‘representative,’ and ethnographic, with the poet as a native informant (for example, Chinatown tour guide), providing a glimpse into her supposed ethnic culture.”8

Yet as we have seen, the essential alterity of Asian languages and culture are also what

7. Dorothy J. Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014), 24. 8. Ibid., 22. 89

made them attractive to historical avant-garde artists like Ezra Pound as a means of opposing

Western traditions and ideals—an impulse shared by avant-garde poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Ron Silliman that Timothy Yu calls “postmodern orientalism.”9 This “appreciation” for

Asian languages and cultures within the avant-garde tradition doubly marginalizes Asian

American writers by fetishizing cultural appropriation, while simultaneously denying these authors venues in which to publish their work or comment on their historical and cultural heritages. Asian American poetry, then, functions as a “limit case” in which to study the relationship between the avant-garde and race because Asian Americans and their cultural heritages exist on the cusp between what is and is not assimilable in American literature. While

Asia has arguably produced the most desirable and influential ethnic minority culture for avant- garde writers historically, Asian American poets continue to be occluded in their artistic contributions.

The liminality parsing Asian American and avant-garde poetries is the product of a colonial legacy that continues to subjugate international populations through the machinations of

Western cultural hegemony. After an overview of Desert Creole and strategies for translating its phonetics and idioms, I demonstrate how Hong incorporates magnetic tape recording into her narrative structure as a method for resisting the customs of lyric poetry that situate the speaking subject as the text’s primary index of ethnicity and race. Attending to the process of linguistic creolization in colonial and postcolonial contexts then suggests language’s potential as a site of subversion and collective resistance. Turning to questions of decoloniality and the Guide’s role as a revolutionary in the Kwangju Uprising, I highlight the roles of additional sound technologies in DDR, contrasting them to tape recording to illuminate tactics for linguistic revolution.

9. Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde, 10. 90

“…OPAL O OPUS”: DESERT CREOLE, WITNESS, AND THE TAPE RECORDER Given its aberrational appearance and sustained usage, Hong’s invented language, Desert

Creole, is the most prominent and distinguishing feature of the poems in DDR. Presented as the language spoken by the Desert’s indigenous population, it most clearly frames the poems’ concerns with the history of Western colonization while simultaneously positioning the collection to resist the ethnographic principles of racialized reading. Of particular importance is the language’s ability to function as a tactical device for negotiating questions of geography, power, and culture. Although Hong describes Desert Creole as a combination of approximately

300 languages and dialects, the veracity of her claim is difficult to prove given the Historian’s note in the Foreword that she “translated” some portions of the Guide’s stories, “preserving her diction in certain sections while translating her words to proper English when I felt some clarification was needed.”10 For the purpose of a pragmatic and systemic approach to reading

Desert Creole, only a handful of distinct vocabularies and linguistic rules require explication in order to comprehend the majority of the text. While loan words from foreign languages may require the occasional reference to external sources, the text’s alienating appearance in fact shows only a few linguistic principles at work, most of which are likely familiar to readers.

Desert Creole adopts the properties of English syntax in its basic structure. The language follows English’s subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, which is the second most common linguistic structure among human languages but the most common structure among creoles.

Notably, this linguistic structure differs from subject-object-verb word order (SOV, the most common word order structure among languages globally), which is the structure of the Guide’s native language, Korean. In most cases, Desert Creole’s seemingly bizarre appearance results

10. Hong, Dance, 20. 91

from displacements in pronunciation that are rendered phonetically, with the addition of loan words occasionally substituting for English counterparts. The following stanza demonstrates the comingling of these features:

…Many ‘Merriken dumplings unhinge dim talk holes y ejaculate oooh y hot-diggity, dis is de shee-it…but gut ripping done to erect Polis, we expoit gaggle o aborigini to back county… Bannitus! But betta to scrape dat fact unda history rug, so shh…11

While the inclusion of the conjunctions “but” and “so” create run-on sentences by compounding unrelated clauses, the basic principles of English syntax are clearly present in the stanza. Words such as “dim,” “dis,” and “dat” are phonetic variations of the English words “them,” “this,” and

“that”; given that substituting the fricative th- for the d- stop is common among English language learners, these permutations are easily recognizable. Similar linguistic substitutions occur in the easily decoded “expoit” (export), “betta” (better), and “unda” (under). Particles are also frequently dropped, as in “unda [the] history rug.” The “y” in the second line is the Spanish word for “and,” while “Bannitus” is a loan word from Latin that was used as a legal term to describe a banished person. “Polis” brings Classical Greek into the mix of languages, although as the etymological root of words such as “metropolis,” it is more readily familiar to English readers than “Bannitus.” Meanwhile, “aborigini” demonstrates that Latin’s rules for suffix pluralization are in effect, despite the word’s lack of the “-us” suffix that typically governs its usage.12 It is worth noting, though, that Latinate pluralization does not follow fixed rules in Desert Creole, and it can be applied arbitrarily according to the speaker’s whims.

Comprehending Desert Creole is complicated by the inclusion of idiomatic constructions

11. Ibid., 26. Emphasis in original. 12. “Aborigine” is etymologically Latin; “ab origine” means “from the beginning.” However, even in Latin the word does not have a “-us” suffix. 92

whose euphemistic references can demand increased attention and decoding. In some cases, these idioms are simple metonymies, as in the reference to a mouth as a “talk hole.” Other idiomatic constructions invoke onomatopoeic gestures, such as the substitution of “shh” for an imperative command not to speak. But in other instances, these idioms suggest multiple translations. While “‘Merriken” elides the “a-” from “American” in its phonetic representation, it also embeds the word “merry” in its doubling of the “r.” “‘Merriken” then modifies the term

“dumpling,” which is used as invented slang for a person, presumably someone soft and rotund like the food. However, dumpling could also refer to a person who unceremoniously disposes of their waste by using the suffix –ling as a diminutive identifier for a person who “dumps.” The same construction could also invoke the verb “dump” in its romantic context, suggesting an influx of lonely American tourists traveling abroad to take advantage of lax prostitution laws.

Describing these “dumplings” as “‘Merrikan,” then, critiques American tourists for the gleeful attitudes they assume in their overconsumption of resources, their lack of awareness for the environment and pollution, and their participation in human sex trafficking. That is, Desert

Creole’s idioms directly engage with the histories of colonialism and imperialism as extensions of American cultural hegemony in the 21st century. This stance is confirmed by what the Guide explicitly states in the stanza: American tourists vocalize their amazement at the Desert and the opportunities for recreation it offers them while ignoring the fact that the city’s construction was made possible through the murder of indigenous people, whose surviving population was relocated to the barren outskirts of the city.

In his reading of Desert Creole in DDR, Timothy Yu focuses on its parallels with the

Asian American relationship to language as an alienating experience. He argues that Desert

Creole allegorizes this relationship for readers:

the guide’s lively, freewheeling speech forces our attention to the texture of language, refuting any conception of linguistic transparency. Without engaging an Asian language directly, Hong creates a sense of linguistic foreignness that powerfully allegorizes the Asian American perspective on language...We might say that the invented dialect of Dance Dance Revolution forces the reader into an Asian American reading position, in which the reader approaches her “native” language from an angle, guided by a distinctive history.13

Yu’s reading is provocative in its suturing of language and ethnicity, but even at an apogee his argument orbits the practices of racialized reading. Desert Creole does not engage with Asian languages “directly,” but this premise is only important if one expects to assume an ethnographic strategy of racialized reading beforehand, given Hong’s ethnic heritage. Moreover, his description of the language’s ability to “force” the reader into a position reflecting the Asian

American experience reproduces the hierarchized principles often ascribed to lyric poetry, in which the poet transmits a state of mind to readers via the expressions of a central speaking subject.

Insofar as the utility of the poetic subject’s inclusion derives from its ability to voice the experience of living as an ethnic minority in American society by documenting representative thoughts, feelings, and actions, such an approach runs the risk of reasserting the ethnographic principle of racialized reading as a dominant practice. Hong recognizes as much in her essay

“Against Witness,” where she declares, “I cannot sit in your chair, eat at your table. I cannot open your dresser and touch your shirts that will trigger eidetic memories of a dance or late night walk. The proximity between you and me is infinite.”14 Discussing art’s ability to “bear witness” through the poetry of Paul Celan and the visual art of Doris Salcedo, Hong argues that the act of bearing witness in poetry risks narrativizing tragedy and collective trauma, which makes the

13. Timothy Yu, “Asian American Poetry in the First Decade of the 2000s,” Contemporary Literature 52, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 835-6. 14. Cathy Park Hong, “Against Witness,” Poetry, May 1, 2015, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70218/against-witness. 94

poem “commemorative…all pious gesture and drained of meaning.”15 That is, witness and documentation, as extensions of the poetic subject, ironically undercut the poem’s efficacy for positing the significance of trauma and violence by potentially turning the text into a poetic object. While Hong observes the continuing presence of the lyric subject’s affects in order to hedge against the commemorative reader’s power to totally annihilate the poet’s influence,16 her argument against the poem’s capacity for the unmediated transfer of subjective experience suggests that her engagement with race and her own ethnic identity in DDR extends beyond Yu’s focus on the Asian American subject’s alterity to the English language as a position that she can directly communicate to readers.

Perhaps for this reason, Hong blends epic and lyric principles together in DDR. The opening stanza of the book’s first poem shows a number of epic conventions at work:

…Opal o opus, behole, neon hibiscus bloom beacons! “Tan Lotion Tanya” billboard…she your lucent Virgil, den I’s taka ova as talky Virgil…want some tea? Some pelehuu?17

This stanza begins in medias res as the Guide and the Historian arrive in the Desert from the airport, with the ellipsis standing it for an earlier section of the damaged cassette tape; the figure of “Tan Lotion Tanya,” a model pictured on a billboard amid the hotels’ neon lights, invokes the

Muse; and the reference to both Tanya and the Guide as “Virgil” alludes to Dante’s epic sequence La Commedia Divina (as does its incorporation of vernacular verse). While a detailed account of epic’s influence in avant-garde poetry is well outside the scope of this project, I raise this point because reading these poems from an epic perspective suggests that the poetic subject

15. Ibid. 16. “I can never metabolize what you went through yet I cannot escape your disquieting sadness, the burden of your solitude.” Ibid. 17. Hong, DDR, 25. 95

does not have the influence one might otherwise expect. The act of documenting the witnessed feats and labors of the epic hero is paramount in the genre, although in this case it is the hero herself—the Guide—who rehearses these events as an intradiegetic narrator.

Epic’s ability to mediate lyric principles, particularly within the context of who narrates the poems, suggests the role of the tape recorder in the book’s narrative frame. From its outset, the public perception of technology for sound recording and reproduction viewed these devices as inherently archival in their ability to preserve artifacts of absent persons. As Jonathan Sterne states, “If there was a defining figure in early accounts of sound recording, it was the possibility of preserving the voice beyond the death of the speaker.”18 In tracing the provenance of this figure through Victorian mourning practices, Sterne notes three underlying premises that continue to inform cultural assumptions about sound recording today that the fantasy of preserving the voices of the dead nonetheless sublimates: 1) because it is mediated by the studio setting, especially in the early twentieth-century, sound recording is not an impartial documentarian; 2) “the fantasy [of preserving the voices of the dead] is as much about speaking to the not yet born as it is about hearing the voices of the dead,”19 which suggests reproducibility is a future-oriented process within the archive; and 3) because the materiality of the recording medium is prone to degradation over time, sound recording technology cannot follow through on its assumed potential to preserve voices indefinitely.

In tape recording, “materiality” refers to a length of plastic called a base, on the surface of which exists a thin coating of iron oxide. Because iron is a ferromagnetic metal, the principles of electromagnetism allow information about the sound wave to be inscribed on the base by arranging iron particles on its surface. The base, meanwhile, functions as a medium for

18. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke UP, 2003), 287. 19. Ibid., 307. 96

controlling the speed of the tape’s movement during both recording and playback. An early manual instructing users in this new technology describes the magnetic recording process within the device:

Signal currents to be recorded are passed through a magnetic coil wound on an iron core. A magnetic tape…is drawn past the poles of the magnet, and the varying currents are recorded as varying degrees of magnetization. To reproduce the signal, the tape is drawn over the poles of a similar structure, and the magnetic impulses generate a varying voltage in the coil. The signal voltage is then passed through an amplifier…to raise it to a usable level.20

The magnetized particles on the surface of the tape are just barely visible to the naked eye. Many users of magnetic tapes are unaware, however, of the degree to which the base and its magnetic coating are prone to degradation. The base is susceptible to changes in temperature and humidity, while the coating’s arrangement of iron particles can be changed by the presence of nearby magnets. In addition, the magnetic force holding the arrangement of iron particles naturally diminishes over time, meaning that there is no such thing as a cassette tape that can hold its recording forever. Given that the ideal storage condition for magnetic tape is a room with 40-

60% humidity and a temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit,21 as well as the presence of increasingly strong magnets in a range of now-common household objects such as computers and smartphones, the material precarity of cassette tapes makes them unsuitable for the long- term preservation of sonic data.

Sterne interprets these failings as evidence of a “faith in the machine” that animates the cultural knowledge and practices of sound recording since its earliest days. That is, there is a general belief in the recording’s ability to continue existing that informs the moment of

20. C.J. LeBel, Fundamentals of Magnetic Recording (New York: Audio Devices, Inc., 1951), 7. 21. Charles D. Westcott and Richard F. Dubbe, Tape Recorders—How They Work, Revised by Norman H. Crowhurst (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc., 1975), 198. My condolences to readers who, upon reading this information, have become overwhelmed with memories of favorite cassettes left inside hot cars over the years. 97

recording. When Hong introduces static into her poems via ellipses that represent a damaged cassette tape, she acts contrary to this faith by effectively committing an act of sonic techno- heresy. These ellipses are not accidental—in DDR there are a total of 371 ellipses spread across

40 poems, making the ellipsis more common than any single word in the poems. It is not an understatement to say that the compromised materiality of the cassette tapes ought to be crucial in any reading of the poems, especially given that any narrative generated across the poetic sequence is couched in their unreliable documentation.

Therefore, the poems encourage a reading practice that goes beyond the ethnographic principles of racialized reading. Through a host of poetic tactics, including the alienating experience of reading Desert Creole, epic invocations and allusions mitigating lyric assumptions, and a framing device that interrupts the subject’s speech and acknowledges its own unreliability in documentation, Hong positions her poems to resist interpretations founded on the norms of racialized reading practices. While narrative subjects exist in DDR, race manifests as one of the book’s central concerns without exclusively relying on the shared Korean heritage that connects the Guide and the Historian to Hong herself. Instead, the ubiquity of race and ethnic identity in the poems manifest as extensions of ongoing colonial practices, thereby turning away from the speaking subject as the poems’ primary index of ethnic and social location.

“SO LEARN THEM ALL”: DESERT CREOLE AND DECOLONIZING LANGUAGE Hong’s use of the word “creole” in describing her invented language is an especially salient insight into the poems’ approach to colonization and its legacies. Although some scholars argue that the term “creole” exclusively refers to languages developed in the Caribbean as a result of colonization, Hong insists on identifying her language as a creole, rather than using common synonyms such as “pidgin” or “patois.” As she explains in an interview, “I was reading

a lot of linguistic theory at the time, particularly on this idea of Creole as a language that is in transition. French, for instance, was a Creole of Latin before it became the ‘official’ language.”22

Hong’s reference to French as a creole is striking for two reasons. First, she acknowledges that creolization is not limited to describing early waves of modern coloniality through the expansion of mercantile capitalism in the New World. Instead, creole’s applicability to the study of linguistic evolution extends back towards the colonial efforts of the Roman Empire, as well as forward into the present (and in the case of DDR, the near future). Such an approach to creolization reflects the scholarly contention that the process “be seen as a ‘master metaphor’ for comparable historical experiences in other societies and a prefiguring of what was taking place in the contemporary world, where mass migration, increased connectivity, tourism and other aspects of what we can loosely call cultural globalization have breached prior frontiers of identity.”23 That is, Hong’s expansive approach to creoles engages the ongoing experiences of colonized people connected by the same transnational and transhistoric logics of economic, geographic, and cultural power.

Second, Hong notes that French was originally a creole before becoming a global standard. The text’s ellipses, then, not only represent the magnetic tape’s compromised materiality, but also function as a performative extension of the theory of creolization that Hong advances in her poems. Insofar as a creole can be described as “deforming” the standardized language from which it derives, the elisions in speech represented by the ellipses suggest both the loss of recorded sound on the tape and the “loss” of linguistic rules during a creole’s development. With its aspirated vocalizations and dropped particles, Desert Creole could be

22. Cathy Park Hong, “An Interview With Poet Cathy Park Hong,” interview by Joshua Kryah, Poets & Writers, July 11, 2017, https://www.pw.org/content/interview_poet_cathy_park_hong. 23. Robin Cohen and Paola Toninato, The Creolization Reader (London: Routledge, 2010), 5. 99

described as a form of English with sonic “static” obscuring portions of its articulation. It is worth noting, however, that describing this language’s “deformation” does not hierarchize Desert

Creole as secondary to or “worse” than English. Given that French was originally a creole of

Latin, the loss signified by the ellipses indicates that these gaps contain some cultural fecundity.

Therefore, while creoles historically developed under the auspices of colonial rule, Hong’s approach assumes that they are not dilutions of already existing languages. Instead, they constitute distinct languages with the potential to exceed their utility as a means of communication between colonial occupiers and indigenous populations.

In addition to facilitating economic exchange, creoles at first glance appear to develop historically as an indigenous population’s direct response to the threat of violence from invading colonial forces. In “The Importance of Being English,” the Guide recounts a story her father told her about his village’s destruction by American troops during the Korean War. Unable to speak

English, the American soldiers prepare to execute him as a Communist spy when he suddenly recognizes the soldiers’ translator as a former schoolmate. When the translator intervenes and saves his life, he commits to learning English. In recounting this story to his daughter, which the

Guide describes as a “poily bromide in me crania,”24 the lesson he chooses to impart is this:

You can be the best talker but no point if you can’t speak the other man’s tongue. You can’t chisel, con, plead, seduce, beg for your life, you can’t do anything, because you know not their language. So learn them all.25

While the Guide’s description of her father’s advice to learn every language as a bromide (a trite or cliché remark intended to placate the listener) disputes its overall import as a useful aphorism, this stanza includes formal variance whereby Hong renders the text in italics in order to denote

24. Hong, DDR, 45. This phrase translates to “a silky sedative in my skull.” 25. Ibid., 46. 100

the father’s speech. While it contains some grammatical errors according to the rules of Standard

English, it is not written in Desert Creole. The Guide’s code-switching in telling this story suggests that to some extent she has the ability to speak Standard English. Yet she chooses to speak Desert Creole instead. The italics therefore suggest a tactical consideration in the Guide’s choice to speak Desert Creole that is in direct contention with her father’s assumption that presenting oneself as subservient by speaking the colonizer’s language is a necessary survival strategy.

Within the context of contemporary globalization, the influence of the tourist industry on the development and usage of creoles initially appears to confirm her father’s approach. In a nation largely dependent on tourism, the economic structure mandates that indigenous people assume the language of their colonizers in order to fulfill the demands of tourists and thereby generate domestic revenue. However, the sheer number of languages and dialects that constitute

Desert Creole suggests that it appeals to the Guide because it takes her father’s advice to its extreme. Rather than “learn them all” individually, the Guide speaks “them all” as a single language. The result is a language that, while apparently comprehensible to the Desert’s tourists, is complex enough in its idiomatic constructions that it becomes a site from which to mobilize direct resistance to institutions of Western coloniality.

In order to frame the process of creolization as a potential site of resistance, Hong presents the legacy of colonialism at a visceral extreme in DDR. New Town, the village adjacent to the Desert, serves as the chief figure for the effects of coloniality in its collaging of international violence. According to the chronology that begins the book, the Desert was already an international tourist destination when native residents began the Dance Dance Revolution in

1988. When their revolution was quelled, the natives were exiled to New Town, which is located

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at the Desert’s borders. Surrounded by a series of rivers whose banks contain undetonated landmines leftover from an unnamed war, the only safe avenue for traveling to and from New

Town is a massive steel bridge. A gestapo-like police force, described as “Guardsmen in long black coats,”26 patrols the entrance to the bridge in order to prevent tourists from entering and residents from leaving. Because of the officials’ strict control over the bridge, landmines explode regularly as tourists and residents alike attempt to transverse the riverbeds. Lost limbs are common in New Town, so much so that “They adapted, created a caste system: / the fully limbed down to the fully limbless.”27 The town’s architecture mostly consists of “high-rise apartments made of poured concrete,”28 with façades adorned by narrow windows “allowing only a fleck of light.”29 Economic and social lives in New Town are organized around the bazaar, which contains merchant booths and numerous DJ-manned stalls serving as makeshift dance halls. Near the entrance to the bazaar is a stadium, where a massive hula-hoop contest with thousands of competitors takes place. On the side opposite the bazaar’s entrance is New Town’s red light district. Little information is given about New Town’s past, with an abandoned carp cannery suggesting an industrial epoch in its history. The locale’s population continuously grows “each time Desert officials exile natives to New Town,”30 while its border “moves a quarter of an inch east everyday, and so imperceptibly, that natives do not notice until suddenly a clothesline is over so that they must retie the clothesline.”31

Hong portrays New Town as an oddly familiar but utterly improbable locale. Its uncanny description collages motifs from historical autocracies and colonial legacies that accrete into a

26. Ibid., 97. 27. Ibid., 73. 28. Ibid., 80. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 102

mosaic of well-known injustices whose effects continue to manifest even today. The relocation of exiled natives draws on the narratives of innumerable forced migrations across the globe, although the historical treatment of Native Americans in the United States resonates with particular strength given that New Town is effectively a reservation whose borders constantly shift on the whims of the state. The manned checkpoint on the bridge monitoring movement in and out of New Town mirrors checkpoints in the West Bank, particularly those dividing the

Palestinian capital of East Jerusalem from Israeli occupied territory. The presence of undetonated landmines remains a significant danger to many countries around the world, especially in Africa and Southeast Asia, where they were placed as part of proxy fights between colonies during

World War II. The design of New Town’s housing developments recalls the principles of Soviet architecture, which had widespread implementation in member states of the former Iron Curtain.

The nomenclature of the bazaar suggests the influence of the Middle East, while the DJs imply a

Caribbean dimension to the town. India’s caste system, which was entrenched under the British

Raj, informs New Town’s grotesque social hierarchy. And the hula hoop competition, perhaps the most stylistically incongruous aspect of life in New Town, centers on an American toy that nominally appropriates a style of Hawaiian dance to which it has no direct relation. In this manner, New Town serves as a mirror image to the Desert where the accumulation of international colonial violence in a single location has a direct relation to the cosmopolitan collection of excesses that require colonization in order to exist in the first place. That is, New

Town is the highly visible horror that makes the Desert possible.

Hong’s collage of the many manifestations of colonial violence constructs an explicit link between global experiences of colonialism’s legacy in the 21st century and forms of Western imperialism. In establishing such a connection, her figuration of New Town is not reducible to

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the specific experience of any single ethnic identity or racially distinct group. In fact, New

Town’s population is rarely described physically. One of the few statements the Guide makes about the town’s residents is that they have a “bountiful gene pool”32 that produces a “beige population.”33 Their only defining racial characteristic, then, is that they are not “white” according to the discourse of contemporary Eurocentric racialization.

Instead of using physical manifestations of race as the primary site through which to distinguish colonizer from colonized, Hong instead draws attention to the importance of language as an extension of colonial power. In “The Auctioneer’s Woo,” the Historian passes a stall in New Town’s bazaar where the phrase “May I have this dance”34 is introduced as the item up for sale. In a note below the poem, the Historian includes a rare addendum explaining the scene: “We were at the auctioneer’s tent where trademarks are auctioned off every week. In the

Desert, so many words have become trademarked that it is impossible to even speak without stumbling upon someone’s trademark.”35 In this dystopian vignette, where words can be considered private property and used to extort payments, trademarks on language introduce a distinct tactical function for Desert Creole. Rather than serve the economic interests of the colonial power through its language, Desert Creole becomes a way to subvert the pecuniary demands of using English by moving communication outside of its tightly monitored control.

The text’s ellipses, then, take on a new function in representing language. Previously, I claimed that the ellipses denoted gaps in the tape’s recordings, where the presence of static rendered the Guide’s speech unintelligible and thus impossible to transcribe. This premise was then extended into a description of creoles as representations of standard languages where the

32. Ibid., 92. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 90. 35. Ibid. 104

gaps noted verbal difference with fecund potential. Now, that fecundity becomes clear—in her poems, Hong presents Desert Creole as a method for decolonizing language. The ellipses, therefore, situate the damaged cassette tape as a structural metaphor for decoloniality at large.

Desert Creole, and by extension all creoles, might at first appear to be damaged and loss-prone derivations of a standardized language—like damaged tapes left out in the rain. Such an approach relies on a “faith in the machine” of language where the parent language is an unchanging source of archived knowledge. But like the magnetic tape, languages are dynamic— they are prone to gaps, reconstructions, and reconfigurations. Rather than representing a permanent “loss,” the propensity of languages to fade over time indicates a process of transition where language, as both an extension of and figure for colonial and imperial power, can be directly interrogated, subverted, and replaced.

“CHATTABOX”: VOICE, RACE, AND DECOLONIALITY The term decolonization is most commonly understood as a process in which a colonizing nation withdraws its economic and political control over a territory in favor of local popular sovereignty in a newly formed nation-state.36 This connotation’s application often begins with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and extends through the dissolution of the Iron

Curtain to the presumably postcolonial present. Through this narrative, predominately Western citizens tend to imagine coloniality as a nearly-extinct relic of the past. However, such an approach abnegates the effects that ripple outwards from the colonial past to the imperial present.

Globalization’s entrenchment of Western hegemony through the informal control of politics, economics, and culture extends the myriad violence committed during the period of overt

36. For example, the definition of “decolonization” in the Oxford English Dictionary states, “The withdrawal from its former colonies of a colonial power; the acquisition of political or economic independence by such colonies.” Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “decolonization,” accessed November 14, 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/48333. 105

colonization. Over the past several decades, scholars in postcolonial and indigenous studies have advocated reinterpreting the term decolonization as an active and ongoing process oriented toward mitigating the effects of what they call “epistemic colonization.” As Aníbal Quinjano describes this continuing colonial control, “the relationship between the Europeans—also called

‘Western’—culture, and the other, continues to be one of colonial domination…This relationship consists, in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination, of the dominated; that is, it acts in the interior of that imagination, in a sense, it is a part of it.”37 According to Quinjano and other scholars, decolonization requires more than the nominal secession of colonial power. The violence of colonization continues to inflict damage, particularly through the structures of

Western philosophies that are used to subjugate people in the name of logic and rationality.

Walter Mignolo claims that a key concept and challenge for implementing decolonial strategies is “delinking” from the combination of epistemic, ontological, and material influences that constitute what he calls the “colonial matrix of power.”38 Delinking from this matrix “means to change the terms and not just the content of the conversation.”39 In other words, colonization introduced profound shifts in the lives of indigenous people that extend from the material conditions of existence to the act of thinking itself. Decolonization, then, must “change the terms” by finding alternative modes of knowledge in order to work through the legacies of colonialism that Western epistemological traditions are unable (and unwilling) to confront.

Notably, Mignolo describes delinking neither as a total separation from the Western tradition nor as a return to originary modes of thinking based on native cultures and histories. While many

37. Aníbal Quinjano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Globalization and the Decolonial Option, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (London: Routledge, 2010): 23. 38. Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De- coloniality,” Globalization and the Decolonial Option, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (London: Routledge, 2010): 310. 39. Ibid., 313. 106

decolonizing efforts undertaken by indigenous activists incorporate such strategies, Mignolo contends that colonization has made a wholesale return to such conditions impossible. Instead, local forms of knowledge are meant to complement Western modes in order to imagine the possibilities of radical alternatives to the present.40

Hong’s representation of the Guide’s experience during the 1980 Kwangju Uprising in

South Korea speaks to the necessity of epistemic decolonization as a strategy for political activists by invoking additional sound technologies that, like the damaged cassette tapes, allegorize methods of resistance. Following occupation by Japanese forces between 1910 and

1945, Korea was partitioned by the United States and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World

War II. Soon after, the Korean War led to the collapse of the South’s provisional government, and General Park Chung-hee assumed the presidency in a military coup. Park’s government industrialized in a Western mode through projects such as the construction of national railways and the adoption of the metric system while also receiving American support for its autocratic anti-communist stance. Park was assassinated in 1979, and popular demonstrations began to unfold, with universities serving as hubs for the protests. General Chun Doo-hwan, also backed by the United States for his anti-communist stance, assumed the presidency by instituting martial law and closing universities across the country. Between the 18th and 21st of May, student protests in the city of Kwangju grew from 200 to 10,000 participants. These demonstrators were met with extreme force, and the conflict escalated as soldiers fired upon crowds, which led to the formation of armed civilian militias. The South Korean military eventually defeated these militias and regained control of the city. The official death toll for the Kwangju Uprising

40. For example, Gibagadinamaagoom, an NEH-funded digital archive of Ojibwe history, language, and culture, allows some public access to its holdings. However, in accordance with traditional customs, many holdings are available only to tribal members of certain statuses, who must be verified by archive administrators. 107

numbers in the hundreds, although some claim the actual number was in the thousands.

In DDR, we learn that at the time of the Kwangju Uprising, the Guide was a university student dating the Historian’s father, Sah. At first, she participated in the Uprising by attempting to rally a crowd of demonstrators with a passionate speech. However, the crowd began to hurl stones and boo her, an outcome the Guide attributes to her bald head. Sah then convinced her to serve the rebellion by broadcasting over a pirate radio station run out of a university basement, so that people would hear her voice and respond to her words without seeing her. The Guide subsequently became known as the “voice o Kwangju.”41 As she describes her influence:

…Hearim me voice en radio, ma che si, pot-belly war veterans sling up WWII carbine rifle gainst sifa tanks…Coal miners donated dim detonates…Housewives fed scabbard insurrectas wit hot bowls o ttok-guk….

…Streetwalkas hear me y march to hospital to donate blood…haggard doctas say no! to torn-stock streetwalkas who kem to donate she blood but dey yell, “Our blood is clean too!” while beatim dim chest…42

The Guide’s radio broadcasts serve a critical function in fomenting resistance by mobilizing the population towards collective action, which in addition to civilian armament and establishing a local militia (“pot-belly war veterans sling up / WWII carbine rifles” and “Coal miners / donated dim detonates”) notably includes non-violent options such as feeding demonstrators

(“Housewives fed scabbard insurrectas”) and donating blood for the injured (“Streetwalkas hear me y march to hospital / to donate blood”). Moreover, her broadcasts show the power of speech disconnected from the presence of the speaker’s body and other visual markers. Detached from her baldness, the Guide’s words are effective—so much so that the townspeople prioritize her

41. Hong, DDR, 104. 42. Ibid., 105. 108

words above what they can see: “mine decibel swatted away dragonflies / swarmim round shredded bodies…cut tru smoke / y copsal stink, clear eyesights / sored from peppa gas.”43 Her speeches motivated people whose vision was impacted by tear gas to the point that they were willing to put their lives on the line despite the dead bodies of demonstrators that already piled up. As the Guide describes it, the sound of her voice even kept the insects swarming the bodies at bay.

But the Guide’s broadcasts are ultimately for naught. One night, paratroopers storm the building that houses her pirate radio station. The Guide loses track of Sah during her escape, and joining the mob outside, she hurls a kerosene bomb at the building, unsure if her lover remains inside as she watches the building burn. As a major figure in the Kwangju Uprising, military forces arrest her and imprison her in a labor camp. As one of the few survivors when the camp closes in 1983, she leaves South Korea for the Desert, never to return.44

As DDR draws to a close, the Guide tells the Historian with certainty that the oppression of New Town’s citizens soon will come to an end. She tells the Historian to “scat,”45 as

“sabotage is pending”46 for the Desert. New Town’s residents have been meeting in secret, working with guides who, like the Guide, are themselves exiled colonial subjects. Sneaking across the bridge by night, the guides have been planting bombs and preparing for a violent insurrection. The Guide describes this action as a “sly unrest, a sly darting dance, no delightful / marches fo mo dreadful measures.”47 From her statement, it appears that the Guide learned a lesson from her experience in Kwangju—public organized collective action has its limits in

43. Ibid., 106. 44. Ibid., 17. 45. Ibid., 118. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 109

realizing substantial and lasting political upheaval. More drastic action is required to achieve the upcoming victory that the Guide calls “a blast coronal.”48 In an immediate sense, “coronal” draws on its Latin root to describe a transfer of power between heads of state. Coupled with the interpretation of “corona” as the ring of light surrounding a star, the “blast coronal” signifies a change in government instantiated with the detonation of the planted bombs.

Despite the direct implication of violent resistance described through the figure of a bombing campaign, two less common meanings of “coronal” suggest that this violence in fact functions as a metaphor for the delinking mandated by epistemic decolonization. First, coronal is an anatomical term that in humans describes the plane dividing the dorsal (back of the body) from the ventral (front of the body). A “blasted coronal,” then, refers to the destruction of an invented barrier dividing the front from the back, dividing the colonizers in the Desert from the colonized in New Town. Second, coronal is a linguistic term describing a series of consonants pronounced by flattening the tongue and raising it to the roof of the mouth. In this case, the

“blasted coronal” becomes a subtle reference to the widespread usage of Desert Creole. The planted bombs may not be literal incendiary devices at all. Instead, Desert Creole’s transformation of standard languages becomes a means to overcome the effects of colonization by using the language to “blow up” the structures of speech and thought that actualize colonial domination.

By presenting Desert Creole as a method of political insurrection, Hong explicitly contrasts it to the Guide’s failed attempt at mobilizing overt collective action during the Kwangju

Uprising. Effectively, the Guide’s failure in 1980 was the result of fighting fire with fire—that is, she opposed the logic of colonization with a contrapuntal logic adopted from her colonizers that

48. Ibid. 110

nonetheless intended to entirely separate from the colonial state. Instead of repeating her previous approach in Kwangju, her interaction with the oncoming liberation of New Town focuses on language as an intermediary that can bridge the border between colonial and decolonial spheres. In this sense, the Guide’s approach echoes the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, who in Borderlands/La Frontera writes:

But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat…At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once.49

Anzaldúa’s use of the riverbank as a metaphor for these schisms—physical, linguistic, and epistemic—between colonizer and colonized resonates with Hong’s similar application in constructing New Town’s topography. Describing political activism with rhetoric that echoes

Newton’s third law of motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction),

Anzaldúa suggests that breaking the ongoing cycle of violence requires a new perspective that

“includes rather than excludes.”50 The Guide’s pirate radio broadcasts, then, could be described as a counterstance shouted from the opposite river bank that always was doomed to failure in achieving its emancipatory goals. Desert Creole, on the other hand, actualizes divergent thinking through linguistic practice by including hundreds of languages and dialects rather than excluding them.

In addition to the tape recorder and the pirate radio broadcasts, a third kind of sound technology in Dance Dance Revolution emphasizes the stakes of linguistic variation as a decolonial strategy. In the first excerpt from her memoirs, the Historian describes a lifelong ontological struggle that began in her childhood. “I had difficulty understanding why I—my

49. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007): 100. 50. Ibid., 101. 111

mind, my consciousness—was in one body and not another. Did others possess the same kind of command and awareness over themselves? Were they just chattering machines without the gift of inner thought?”51 While a “chattering machine” is not an actual device per se, it bears some resemblance to Burroughs’s figure of the “walking tape machine,” as well as contemporary internet chat bots and smart assistants like Siri and Alexa. The Historian’s chattering machine is a device that produces speech through mechanistic compulsion without critical awareness or reflexivity. Curiously, the Guide uses an almost identical figure at one point, describing her father as “a chattabox—hed nut’ing to say.”52 While the Guide’s description of her “chattabox” father refers to his actual silence when she introduces him to Sah for the first time, her previous references to his advice as a “poily bromide” suggests that even though he talked constantly, he never said anything of substance. He was, in effect, a machine who, lacking some amount of critical self-awareness, reproduced speech that amounted to “nut’ing.”

The three types of sound technology that appear in DDR suggest a continuum of linguistic strategies for decolonization, which range from the complicit “chattering machine” with nothing to say, to the violent counterstance promoted by pirate radio’s experience of collective listening, to the serendipitous fecundity of magnetic tape that, while lacking clear proscriptions and time frames, attempts to resist bloodshed and promote the agency of colonized subjects. Hong, then, does not engage with language as having some kind of a priori value.

Language is just as susceptible as the material conditions of coloniality to the influence of imperialist power. However, when deployed tactically in the manner of Desert Creole, which in its multilingual combinations and idiomatic subversions can be used to critique state power while appearing to serve its interests, language has the potential to blow up the epistemological control

51. Hong, DDR, 37. Emphasis in original. 52. Ibid., 64. 112

wielded throughout colonial history.

* * *

It is important to remember that DDR’s fictional spacio-temporal setting makes the book less of a programmatic “how-to manual” for decolonial strategies than an attempt to imagine the many fractures that exist at the limits of colonial domination. In this sense, Hong’s approach is not too distant from what the Language poets articulate. Language is a system invented by humans that structures our capacity to think about and interact with the world. Language can manifest materially, whether it be through the accumulation of ink on the page that we call text or the transfer of energy through the space between the electronic speaker and the human ear that we refer to as recorded sound. In poetry, drawing together previously unacknowledged connections between words and their roles in social processes has the capacity to ignite the reader’s thinking and lead to direct political action.

What differentiates Hong from the Language poets, however, is her implicit insistence throughout DDR that race is not only an important topic that deserves the rigorous attention of

American poets with politically active goals—race is a category that must be addressed if the poem is to have any political consequence at all. As Hong demonstrates throughout the book, race, even if it is approached in the most abstract terms as a nebulous human-constituted concept through which the ability to indicate biological differences between members of a species reifies ethnic difference as a mode of social organization and interaction, is inseparable from any attempt to address grievances towards existing political structures across the globe. Whether discussing the Caribbean, the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, or any other part of the world, including the United States, the history of Western hegemony was written in the blood of racial categorization, discrimination, and exploitation.

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Hong is unique in how she addresses the importance of race, however. While her ethnic heritage connects her to her poems’ personas through their shared connection to the Korean peninsula, the Guide and the Historian are not extensions of Hong’s biographical self. Hong does not “bear witness” to an “ethnographic truth” of her Korean heritage by narrating personal experience. If the Language poets’ general refusal to prioritize race in their poems was due to their characterization of racial discourse as an extension of one’s individual identity presented in an active moment of a self-articulating voice, then Hong can be described as dehiscing race from traditional figurations of the poetic subject. Race is ubiquitous in DDR as the fuel that powers the engine of the colonial thresher, but it is never addressed explicitly through the racial identities of the poems’ speakers. Instead, Hong’s poems can be described as incorporating these premises into formally experimental poems addressing political concerns that cannot be reduced to the voice of any single identity category, even the poet’s.

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Ekoustic Poetry: Writing the Masked Sounds of Blackness in Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton

“HOW YOU SOUND??” is what we recent fellows are up to. How we sound; our peculiar grasp on, say: a. Melican speech, b. Poetries of the world, c. Our Selves (which is attitudes, logics, theories, jumbles of our lives, & all that), d. And the final…The Totality of Mind: Spiritual…God?? (or you name it): Social (zeitgeist): or Heideggerian umwelt. —LeRoi Jones, “How You Sound??”

Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) was the only non-white poet to be included in Donald

Allen’s The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, the mid-century anthology that heavily influenced the Language Poets’ formation of their avant-garde lineage. In addition to his poems, the anthology included the original publication of his essay “How You Sound??,” in which

Baraka renounces “the diluted formalism of the academy” in favor of an authentic melic, a lyric meant to be sung, that reflects the poet’s speech and experience.1 While his argument bears striking similarities to Langston Hughes’s embrace of jazz in “The Negro Artist and the Racial

Mountain” as “the tom-tom revolt against weariness in a white world,”2 “How You Sound??” is notable for its consistently inconsistent use of typography in layering interpretive possibilities.

The parentheticals alternate between defining terms and speaking to readers as an aside; colons hierarchize information in lists while simultaneously recalling the structure of an analogy; the ellipsis in “the final…The Totality of Mind” pauses for dramatic effect while also stuttering and revising improvised speech on the fly; and while the first question mark marks an interrogative statement, the second question mark in “HOW YOU SOUND??” induces a sonic emphasis whose closest approximation would be an invocation of vocal timbre. In order to manifest a

1. LeRoi Jones, “How You Sound??,” The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, ed. by Donald Allen (Berkeley: U of California P, 1960), 424. 2. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. by Winston Napier (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 30. 115

voice’s authenticity and presence, Baraka engages with poetry’s audiovisual capacity through the form’s reliance on the mutually productive capabilities of sound and text, in which the materiality of typographic variation creates acoustic effects for the reader and contributes to the poem’s semantic expression.

Baraka’s experiment with verbicovisual punctuation is an example of what I call ekoustic poetry, a neologistic portmanteau combining the terms ekphrasis and acoustic that describes writing in which sonic phenomena are rendered textually, much in the same way that ekphrasis describes visual material in poetic forms. The word ekphrasis finds its etymological roots in the

Greek ἐκ (ek), meaning “out,” and ϕράζειν (phrazsin), “to speak or tell.”3 Originally a rhetorical term for the description of any inanimate object, today the definition of ekphrasis is specifically coupled with the description of the visual arts in poetry. Ekoustic plays off of the Greek roots of the words ekphrasis and acoustic to literally mean “hearing out,” in order to demarcate the incorporation of sonic, rather than visual, phenomena through poetic description. Historical examples of ekoustic writing are abundant: in addition to Allen Ginsberg’s auto poesy and Cathy

Park Hong’s Desert Creole, Alexander Pope’s performative instructions on proper prosody in An

Essay on Criticism, John Keats’s attempts to render the unheard melodies of the Grecian Urn,

Vachel Lindsay’s vaudevillian performance notes in “The Congo,” Langston Hughes’s incorporation of instructions for musical accompaniment in Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, and Ezra Pound’s musical notation in Canto LXXV are all varied attempts at representing soundscapes through the written word. Ekoustic writing is a direct engagement with the real and imagined sounds of the world, as well as a process of transduction that renders sound into the poem’s text, which is then heard once again as sound in the act of reading. In that sense, it might

3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “ekphrasis,” accessed October 10, 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/59412. 116

be thought of as the techne by which poetry functions as the world’s oldest technology for sound recording and reproduction.

My emphasis on ekoustic as a term comes from contemporary poet Douglas Kearney, the author of four books of poetry, including Fear, Some (2006), The Black Automaton (2009),

Patter (2014), and Buck Studies (2016), who expresses concern and desire for a word that encompasses the many facets of engaging sound in poetry. In his book of critical poetics, Mess

And Mess And, Kearney quotes and responds to poet-critic Fred Moten:

I listen to some music that I love and it inspires me to write a poem. My poem is not going to be that music…But if it’s an attempt to get at what is essential to that music, perhaps it will approach the secret of the music, but only by way of that secret’s poetic reproduction.

That passage above is a quote from poet and critic, Fred Moten…There it is, offering a challenge for something that isn’t strictly ekphrastic. I suspect the greatest poem written thusly would never mention the musician, the title, “saxophone” or “drum.” It would do what the song does without the song at all. I can’t call that ekphrasis. The poetry wants to claim the secrets of other arts.4

While Moten and Kearney’s preoccupation concerns music specifically, expanding this desire for an ekphrasis of music to the realm of sound in general indicates the potential of ekoustic writing.

It is not merely onomatopoeia or references to musical forms that make writing ekoustic, but rather an attempt to get inside of sound’s social and cultural power—that is, inside its “secret”— which is then reproduced in the poem. Just as ekphrasis renders new meanings and insights into visual objects through the textual incorporation of poetry’s figurative and imagist powers, ekoustic writing similarly transforms acoustic phenomena by allowing insights into sonic objects beyond their linguistic limits.

Given the academic tendency that considers poetry written by black men and women in

America and black musical genres as co-constitutive artistic forms with mutual roots in the black

4. Douglas Kearney, Mess And Mess And (Las Cruces, New Mexico: Noemi Press, 2015), 50. 117

oral tradition,5 approaching works that explicitly engage with music and orality as examples of ekoustic writing can function as an especially promising hermeneutic for investigating sound’s functions within the twentieth and twenty-first century black literary tradition. As Alexander

Weheliye observes, “The sonic remains an important zone from and through which to theorize the fundamentality of Afro-diasporic formations to the currents of Western modernity, since this field remains, to put it bluntly, the principal modality in which Afro-diasporic cultures have been articulated.”6 Douglas Kearney independently describes a similar premise in a poem entitled

“Radio”: “the first black you ever met was on the radio / this is true even if you lived with blacks.”7 Here Kearney, like Weheliye, nods towards sound technology’s ability to record and play back expressions of black subjectivity through popular music; the commercialization and mass consumption of music performed by black artists in the twentieth century subsequently carved out a space for the accepted public articulation of Afro-diasporic concerns. An investigation into the “secret” that animates ekoustic writing produced by black poets, then, is also an interrogation of “how blackness sounds.” This phrase approaches blackness not as a definable category but as a performance whose methods of producing sound are themselves the object of inquiry. That is, reading certain poems as engaging in an ekoustic process that transduces sonic phenomena into textual forms allows for an investigation into the ways in which sounds produced by black bodies are subsequently heard and responded to as external stimuli by

5. A list of examples of such work could be endless. In addition to several works cited elsewhere in this chapter, these texts include poetry-focused studies of experimental work such as Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism and Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation, as well as Lorenzo Thomas’s Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music in the Black Intellectual Tradition; performance based inquiries such as Fahamisha Patricia Brown’s Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture; music-centered works such as Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America; and single-author examinations such as Steven Tracy’s Langston Hughes and the Blues. 6. Alexander G. Weheliye, in Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 5. 7. Douglas Kearney, “Radio,” The Black Automaton (New York: Fence Books, 2009), 14. 118

raced listeners.

Given the contemporary publishing industry’s ongoing demand for poetry written by people of color that can be categorized and marketed according to ethnicity, I begin by considering historical debates over dialect and its ability to inform authentic representations of

“how blackness sounds” in poems. Of particular import is the psychoacoustic phenomenon of auditory masking, whereby some sounds are not heard by listeners due to conflicts in frequency and volume. Describing the cultural influence of masking and its technological implementations,

I read Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” for its sonic textures in order to describe masking as a significant aspect in the historical sounding of blackness whereby black speech is voiced-but-unheard among white listeners. In turning to a closer examination of Douglas

Kearney’s work, his typographically distinct poems in The Black Automaton show ekoustic traits that, as listening to recordings of Kearney reading these poems demonstrates, invoke digital recording processes which are foundational for twenty-first century hip hop, including remixing, looping, and dubbing. Situating auditory masking as a digital premise for the MP3—and by extension hip hop’s more recent aesthetic practices—then allows Kearney’s poems to be read for their engagement with auditory masking, particularly for their ability to reverse the erasures white listeners enact on black speech through the ekoustic comingling of text and sound. This chapter concludes by considering the wider contours of listening as a neurological and social practice based on anticipation, which shifts the focus of discourse concerning vocal authenticity from production to reception.

“WE WEAR THE MASK”: DIALECT AND LISTENING TO HOW BLACKNESS SOUNDS The interplay between sound and text in ekoustic poetry invites consideration into the ways in which the demands of the publishing and education industries constitute a matrix that

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actively marginalizes innovative poets of color based on how they “sound.” Although poets frequently articulate the pressures these cultural forces exert, especially in relation to the avant- garde,8 their discussions rarely turn to aurality as a site of discrimination, and therefore a field of inquiry. For example, Erica Hunt addresses the avant-garde’s exclusionary logic in the context of publishing and education by writing,

So while attention to experimental practices may be welcome it tends to render that art into teachable, digestible bits; convenient (but ultimately skeletonized) assemblages: the Anthology, sprinkled with “minority” poets as singularities of literary (often white) “genius.” The preference for the teachable and the categorizable simplifies what is difficult about art that plays with surface andopacity [sic], lifts the edge of the curtain and dances blind with what is minimally registered behind.9

Hunt’s account is laden with visual figures: “surface and opacity,” “lifts the edge of the curtain,” and “dances blind” all rely on sight as the field in which this discourse takes place. John Yau similarly invokes visibility as the dominant metaphor for racial exclusion when he contends,

“The choice for writers of color seems to be to write within prescribed notions of acceptable experimentation (a choice that exists not so far from the nostalgic wish to return to a racially unmarked domain known as ‘Great Literature’), or be invisible.”10 Yet within everyday conversation, these concerns also frequently manifest at a sonic level. To treat the title of

Baraka’s essay “How You Sound??” as an actual question, the taxonomic (or to use Hunt’s gourmandizing figure, digestible) preferences influencing institutional reception might manifest in responses such as, “You sound too black,” or, “You don’t sound black enough.” Such

8. For recent discussions concerning this marginalization within the context of the contemporary avant-garde in American poetry, see Boston Review’s collection of responses to Hong’s “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant- Garde”: Stefania Heim, ed., “Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” Boston Review, March 10, 2015, accessed March 13, 2018, http://bostonreview.net/blog/boston-review-race-and-poetic-avant-garde. 9. Erica Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” Boston Review, March 10, 2015, accessed March 13, 2018, http://bostonreview.net/poetry/erica-hunt-forum-response-race-avant-garde. I believe “andopacity” is a typo, and the intended phrase is “and opacity.” 10. John Yau, “‘Purity’ and the ‘Avant-Garde,” Boston Review, March 10, 2015, accessed March 13, 2018, http://bostonreview.net/poetry/john-yau-purity-avant-garde. 120

statements suggest that the implicit biases undergirding publishing and pedagogical norms, including the habits that inform racialized reading practices, can manifest as acoustic metaphors by assuming a link between vocal expressions and “authentic” representations of ethnic minority identities.

Dialect poetry, in which poets attempt to represent black vernacular speech textually through phonetic mimesis, historically served as the major site for debates about voice and its capacity to authentically represent black expression in literary forms. James Weldon Johnson, in the preface to the 1922 anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry, celebrated the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar by writing that “Dunbar was the first to use it [dialect] as a medium for the true interpretation of Negro character and psychology.”11 By vaunting dialect’s mimetic capacity and, later in the preface, likening Dunbar’s dialect verse to the vernacular of

Scottish poet Robert Burns,12 Johnson characterized dialect as a black nationalist project that promotes authentic representations of black men and women. However, as Fahamisha Patricia

Brown notes, “The concern with cultural authenticity and issues of representation reflected in

Johnson’s words [about Dunbar’s use of dialect] would dominate African American critical discourse through much of the twentieth century.”13

While a full account of over a century’s worth of African American critical discourse exceeds my scope here, the early contours of these debates reflect several of its key premises. In his 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes diverged with

Johnson by claiming that dialect is apt to be misunderstood in its capacity to represent actual

11. James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1922), xxxiii. 12. Ibid., xxxv. 13. Fahamisha Patricia Brown, Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999), 10. 121

patterns of ordinary speech. “The quaint charm and humor of Dunbar’s dialect verse brought to him, in his day, largely the same kind of encouragement one would give a sideshow freak (A colored man writing poetry! How odd!) or a clown (How amusing!)”14 Here, Hughes observes a double standard of American poetry in the transition from the verse of Whitman to Modernist experiments. Despite breaking with traditional linguistic representation in order to reproduce the

“ordinary” speech of a population, dialect is unjustly marginalized by white readers as an ornamental attraction, rather than a serious attempt to work through representations of language’s practical use and evolutions. James Weldon Johnson, meanwhile, more forcefully probes the limits of dialect in poetry, in spite of his praise of Dunbar:

The Negro in the United States has achieved or been placed in a certain artistic niche. When he is thought of artistically, it as a happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo- picking being or as a more or less pathetic figure. The picture of him is in a log cabin amid fields of cotton or along the levees. Negro dialect is naturally and by long association the exact instrument for voicing this phase of Negro life.15

Note the blend of the visual and sonic in this description, whereby dialect’s sounds conjure a

“picture” in the imagination. According to Johnson, dialect’s popularity with white readers relies on reproducing the voices of Southern plantation culture through its “happy-go-lucky” speakers, in turn reifying an account of blackness that, despite its inaccurate representation, assumes widespread cultural authority, especially through its use in the practice of minstrelsy. In the preface to his 1927 anthology of black verse, Caroling Dawn, Countee Cullen states that he excluded dialect poetry from the collection on similar grounds. Given that the “majority of present-day poems in dialect are the efforts of white poets,”16 Cullen’s exclusion of dialect responds to the style’s proximity to blackface. Later critics note the possibility of subversively

14. Hughes, “Racial Mountain,” 29. 15. Johnson, xl. 16. Countee Cullen, “Foreword,” Caroling Dusk (New York: Citadel Press, 1927), xiv. 122

performing dialect, however. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, in writing about the use of dialect by

Charles Chesnutt, observes that dialect “is certainly not a vehicle of some essential anthropological or biological truth about black speech.”17 Instead, dialect can also function as a political tactic—one that performs a version of blackness in white spaces in ways that can critique white supremacist assumptions without opening the black artist to the acts of physical violence that might otherwise accompany intellectual and poetic supersession.

These early twentieth century debates over the use of dialect in poetry focus on dialect’s ability to accurately represent the speech (and therefore the minds and lives) of black Americans, with a particular emphasis on how the style is received by predominately white audiences. Fred

Moten, however, breaks from the discourse of “authentic” representation through his use of the jazz “ensemble” as a figure for describing black avant-garde practice and its ability to exceed the representational capacity of traditional signification in Standard English. In his reading of

Frederick Douglass’s 1845 memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American

Slave, Moten focuses on the sonic peculiarity of “Aunt Hester’s Scream” in the book’s first chapter. When Douglass recounts an incident in which his aunt was brutally beaten by her owner, his description references the existence of her screams but does not describe them in detail; this choice contrasts with his decision to describe the spectacle of her torture with visceral specificity. Moten makes two arguments regarding this scene (and scream). First, blackness is in part defined by “its irreducible relation to the structuring force of…the graphic, montagic configurings of tradition.”18 That is, an ensemble of personal and literary citation

(personal/familial for Douglass, literary for Moten in choosing to cite Douglas) is a critical

17. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race & The Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 166. 18. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 255. 123

method for publicly performing one’s blackness. Second, Aunt Hester’s unrendered scream characterizes that ensemble as a performance that extends beyond what the text can meaningfully convey. In other words, by drawing on a citational tradition, black expression communicates that which cannot be contained in language alone. Instead of focusing on how blackness sounds as a form of “hi-fi” mimetic representation, Moten’s arguments suggest that questions about black speech ought to be concerned with how raced audiences listen to blackness’s extrasignificatory sounds.

Given the synesthetic blending of color and sonic apprehension necessitated by the aurality of blackness, sound may not be readily apparent as a major site of the American racial economy. However, as Stoever argues, “Americans come of age within a racialized soundscape that enables segregation and racism through sonic cues that vibrate under the radar of visually based discrimination laws and affects.”19 That is, the rhetoric of colorblindness that continues to dominate racial discourse in America took hold following the Civil Rights Act and the nominal end of segregatory statutes enforced in the Jim Crow South because the “Golden Age of Radio,” by effectively codifying the sounds of blackness for national audiences, had already trained white ears to discriminate against black voices. Because audiences could not see a voice’s source, most black characters, such as the eponymous stars of Amos ‘n’ Andy, were portrayed by white actors performing minstrel tropes. When a black actor was cast, “white booking agents, casting directors, and executives often required black radio performers to speak in scripted dialect…White producers and scriptwriters exaggerated black voices with ‘poor grammar, poor diction, and certain voice qualities’…no matter the character’s regional location or education.”20

Stoever therefore describes radio culture in the first half of the twentieth century as an “echo

19. Stoever, 278. 20. Ibid., 242. 124

chamber” for whiteness.21

The ear’s social function as a discriminatory and segregatory tool was not limited to radio either. Aural discrimination resulted in the institution of public policies such as noise ordinances, which originated in the 1960s and 1970s (just as colorblind discourse affected numerous legal advancements following the Civil Rights Movement). Noise ordinances included the development of zoning laws that racially segregated residents through economic differences priced by the noise pollution from nearby industrial areas; additionally, noise ordinances participated in the process of redlining whereby spaces are legally segregated by race through the association of black speech and music with noise in the white imaginary (monetary fines for excessive noise follow a similar logic and ostensibly provide a legal justification for increased policing in black neighborhoods). These sonic policies and attendant policing are examples of tactics (though certainly not the only ones) through which race-based discrimination continues to manifest in American politics and culture. Popular examples of discrimination through the sound of blackness abound—for example, the New York Times bestseller Freakonomics famously provided empirical evidence that employers discriminate against “black sounding” names when given two otherwise identical resumes.22

Approaching the sound of blackness in its reception among listeners assumes the methods of psychoacoustics, a branch of sound studies that examines sound from the perspective of human perception, rather than as a natural phenomenon. Because the range of sounds that people can hear is restricted by the biological limits of the human ear, psychoacoustics was central to a

21. Ibid., 257. 22. “Over the years, a series of ‘audit studies’ have tried to measure how people perceive different names. In a typical audit study, a researcher would send two identical (and fake) résumés, one with a traditionally white name and the other with an immigrant or minority-sounding name, to potential employers. The ‘white’ résumés have always gleaned more job interviews.” Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 189. 125

shift in the study of sound and the development of sound technologies. This shift is described by

Jonathan Sterne as “paradigmatic”23 in that scientists began to study sound not as it physically manifests in the world, but in how humans hear it. One result of the psychoacoustic shift was the discovery of auditory masking. As Jonathan Sterne explains:

The most important psychoacoustic concepts for perceptual coding were the theories of masking and critical bands. Masking proposed that a louder sound could “hide” a quieter sound of similar frequency content from the ear. The theory of critical bands proposed that masking effects could be conceived in terms of frequency regions somewhat like highways in the ear. With knowledge of critical bands, masking response could be predicted.24

Masking subsequently became one of the central topics of psychoacoustic study, with immediate applications in a number of fields, including architecture and the design of corporate work environments.25

Auditory masking has immense import in the history of technology for sound recording and reproduction, particularly for its role in the commercial and cultural dominance of the MP3.

Since its debut as a digital audio standard in the early 90s, MP3 has become the de facto global format for audio playback. This cultural dominance is in large part due to their relatively small file size, which in the 90s and 00s made them the format of choice for consumers limited by lower internet speeds and smaller hard drives. MP3s were also highly favored for their interoperability, allowing users to play them on different hardware and software configurations, an advantage over competing proprietary formats at the time. PennSound, in its 2003 founding manifesto, states that its files “must be MP3 or better,” reasoning that, “RealAudio is a

23. Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham: Duke UP, 2012), 63. 24. Ibid., 96. 25. “Noise from ventilating systems, from a uniform flow of traffic, or from general office activities contributes to artificial masking noise. In designing landscaped offices the provision of a relatively high but acceptable degree of background noise (from the ventilating or air-conditioning system) is essential in order to mask undesirable office noises created by typewriters, telephones, office machines, or loud conversation and to provide a reasonable amount of privacy.” Leslie Doell, Environmental Acoustics (1972), quoted in Sterne, MP3, 120. 126

proprietary format with sound quality that will not stand the test of time. We need to use open formats that reproduce reasonably high quality sound, for a listenership that is used to astoundingly good sound quality from commercial sources.”26 With a primary focus on making its poetry recordings “free and downloadable,”27 PennSound’s adoption of the MP3 attempts to ensure access to global users regardless of their limitations on hardware and internet speed.

However, MP3 is not the preferred standard for audio professionals and archivists. The

Library of Congress lists WAVE (.wav) as its mandatory standard for the preservation of digital audio works in its current statement on recommended formats, the goal of which is “maximizing the chances for survival and continued accessibility of this creative content well into the future.”28 Ironically, the reason for the MP3’s exclusion from the Library of Congress’s recommended formats is also the reason for its global dominance. The relatively small file size of the MP3 is due to its audio compression codec, which uses auditory masking in order to decrease the amount of data required to reproduce an audio recording. At each sample point of the recording (which for MP3s typically occurs at a rate of 128,000 samples per second of audio) the codec uses critical bands to predict which parts of the recording will be masked by other sounds within the same sample. The data corresponding to sounds that will not be heard is then eliminated by the codec over the course of the compression process, which necessarily leads to a smaller file size. The result is a file that has a higher “loss” than other digital audio standards, but for which the average listener will not perceive a drastic difference from the original recording.

Hence the difference in preferred standards for PennSound and the Library of Congress—while

26. Charles Bernstein, “PennSound Manifesto,” PennSound, 2003, http://writing/upenn.edu/pennsound/manifesto.php. 27. Ibid. 28 “Recommended Formats Statement,” Library of Congress, 2017, https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/RFS%202017-2018.pdf. 127

PennSound’s archive focuses primarily on expanding access to recordings to the greatest possible degree, the Library of Congress prefers larger files that limit audio loss in order to ensure the continued preservation of high quality audio recordings.

I will return to the MP3 and its relation to ekoustic poetry, but I want first to conclude the present section by considering masking alongside the question of “how blackness sounds.” Paul

Laurence Dunbar’s seminal poem “We Wear the Mask,” written in Standard English rather than dialect, highlights the process whereby black sounds are voiced but unperceived through the figure of masking:

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!29

Dunbar’s poem at first appears highly visual rather than sonic. The conceit of the mask is marked by its presentation of static facial expressions (“grins” and “smile”) that overlay unseen and directly contradictory emotional states for its speaker. The juxtaposition of these oppositional affects depicts the abject status of black persons in America, who are included in the poem through the speaker’s use of the first-person plural, indicating a collective experience voiced by

29. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. by Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville: U of Virginia Press, 1993), 71. 128

an individual representative. However, the image of the eponymous mask belies the act of wearing in both the title and the first line of the poem, as well as the mask’s import to theater.

Dunbar therefore uses the mask not to delineate scopic difference via skin color, but to describe blackness as a constant performance. The public performance of blackness is meant to appease white audiences by disguising the horrifying and tragic realities of black life.

The reception of performed blackness by white audiences is only indirectly described, highlighting the immense import of perception as an active process in the poem. Dunbar commands his black peers, “Nay, let them only see us, while / We wear the mask,” marking the white audience with exclusively visual powers of apprehension (“only” functions two ways as a modifier in this line, translating to either: “let the only time they see us be while we are in the act of wearing the mask,” or, more importantly, “let them see us to the exclusion of all other senses while we wear the mask”). The sonic textures of the poem, however, directly interrogate the reception of the sound of blackness, given that these sounds are produced by black bodies but unheard by the white “them.” The first instance of blackness being voiced-but-unheard occurs at the end of the first stanza, as the masked bodies “mouth with myriad subtleties.” Mouthing, or the act of moving one’s lips without creating a sound, allows for the expression of black experience while simultaneously acknowledging its continuing status as unheard speech.

Similarly, the speaker notes the “sighs,” “cries,” and the fact that “We sing,” all of which are acoustic outpourings occluded by the lack of white auditory perception in the poem. While auditory masking was not a defined phenomenon until well after his death, Dunbar’s application of the term “mask,” with which he describes a larger cultural effect whereby black voices speak and are subsequently unheard rather than being directly silenced, anticipates the later application of the term.

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Auditory masking is the function of two physical aspects of sound—frequency and volume. Louder sounds will always mask quieter ones of a similar frequency. Because volume can be increased or diminished according to the distance between the producer and receiver of sound, masking is notable in that it “spatializes hearing.”30 How blackness sounds, then, also considers the ways in which black and white physical bodies are arranged spatially and temporally in order to be heard. “We Wear the Mask” therefore implies a social array in which segregation is the product of the relationship between sound and physical space, which are mutually constitutive of one another. The mask, not unlike W.E.B. DuBois’s figure of the veil, rhetorically functions in Dunbar’s poem as a liminal barrier marking the sonic lines that physically segregate raced bodies.

“HEY, YOU: WHAT’S THAT SOUND”: TYPOGRAPHY AS AUDIOVISUAL REMIX Douglas Kearney’s attempts to write an ekphrasis of sound can describe a number of his poems, particularly those that use typographical experimentation to produce disjunction across visual and auditory boundaries. Given their sheer inscrutability, Kearney’s typographical experiments at first may appear to be “noisy” or a “mess” to readers. Crafted by hand and then digitally constructed for print using Adobe Illustrator, these poems splay across the page, visually invoking the work of the Italian Futurists while challenging the limits of Charles Olson’s composition by field and its affordance of space in the allowance of kinetics and poetic breath.

Yet as Kearney describes his poetics, “I make my poems to make a way through what I often perceive as a mess…There is a shitload of codes, a mess of messages, yet the din of it isn’t necessarily noise—that is, it is a signal to be understood.”31 Signal, a term which in audio

30. Sterne, MP3, 99. 31. Kearney, Mess And, 29. 130

processing refers to a representation of sound that is not stored on media, is specifically contrasted to noise, inferring a spatialized directionality to the communication. In other words, the noisy mess Kearney confronts is American culture and its byproducts; his poems may appear to mimic that disorganized chaos, but there are clear decipherable signals pulsing through his work.

One of the most apparent ways that Kearney breaks through the noise with his signals is by reappropriating hip hop lyrics in his poems. These lyrics are systematically rendered in an italicized font at a larger size than the rest of the text and are spatially arrayed on the page so that they comment on one another as well as on Kearney’s original writing. Given that he self- evaluates his own work by in an interview by stating, “Fear, Some is a pop album, The Black

Automaton is hip hop, and Patter is soul music,”32 Kearney should be thought of as actively engaging in the act of remixing in his Black Automaton poems. The remix is one of hip hop’s fundamental compositional processes, which loops sampled portions of other songs into a “back beat” that serves as the skeleton of a new song’s musical arrangement. This practice aligns with

Moten’s figure of the ensemble as a citational performance, not only in terms of sampling and remixing as citational methods in the hip hop genre but also in the context of Kearney’s decision to include these techniques in his poems. “The Black Automaton in What It Is #2: Hypertension in Effizect” (Figure 3) shows this technological techne at work; through its incorporation of sampled lyrics and typographic variation this poem offers a clear example of the remix and its aesthetic effects at play in Kearney’s work, which are especially clear when listening to Kearney read the poem.

32. Douglas Kearney, interview by Karla Cordero, Spit Journal, July 27, 2014. 131

Figure 3. “The Black Automaton in What It Is #2: Hypertension in Effizzect,” by Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton (New York: Fence Books, 2009), 26. “The Black Automaton in What It Is #2: Hypertension in Effizect” contains eight samples—lyrics from these songs are rendered in italics and a larger font and are arrayed in a circle around the central stanza. The sources for these songs, beginning with “hey, you: what’s that sound?” and proceeding clockwise are: “I Wish” by Skee-Lo (1995), “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate” by Ice Cube (1990), “Got” by Mos Def (1999), “Nowhere to Hide” by DJ Pooh (sung by Threat) (1997), “The Corner” by Common (2005), “NY State of Mind” by Nas (1994), “My

Mind Playin Tricks on Me” by Scarface (member of Geto Boys) (1994), and “Deeper” by Boss

(1993). The lyric “hey, you: what’s that sound” may be the most obvious example of sampling’s importance to hip hop, as the phrase and musical accompaniment in Skee-Lo’s song are

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themselves sampled from Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (1966). In the center of the text, a stanza framed by braces literally functions as the center of the rest of the poem. The lines of verse in this stanza, arranged by consonantal alliteration, gesture in a number of directions of import to black Americans, especially those in urban areas. The economic conditions of debt and lost income (“repo” and “demotion”) are tied to substandard living conditions with vermin infestations (“roaches or rodents”); drugs take center stage

(“crackhead”), especially in conjunction with high levels of crime (“jack”) and the presence of hostile law enforcement (“raid,” a word which is also the name of a popular insect poison, effectively invoking multiple categories of concern at once); the federal government enters the picture in the form of the military (“C.O.,” or Commanding Officer) and the FBI’s

COINTELPRO operations, which targeted black civil rights leaders (including Martin Luther

King Jr.), as well as more radical groups such as the Black Panthers; all of these sounds are linked to racist white America through an epithet with sonic origins (“crackers”). The stanza ends with a repeated “or or or…” whose repetition and use of ellipsis indicate that the list of grievances in the stanza could continue indefinitely.

Given that “hey, you: what’s that sound?” is the only line disconnected from the arrows emanating from the center stanza, its question frames the rest of the poem. Each item in the center stanza’s litany produces sounds at night, and each set of lyrics addresses insomnia in some way, as if these sounds are what keep the Black Automaton awake. The only exception that addresses insomnia somewhat indirectly is the citation below the stanza: “it’s/[ITS] hard to breathe nights.” This line contains two variants—the first is a contraction declaring nocturnal respiratory difficulties (it is hard to breathe nights). The second variant includes “[IT],” a pronoun surrounded by brackets employed throughout The Black Automaton to denote the

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degraded status of black men and women in America, who Kearney presents as indistinguishable from non-human machines in the white supremacist imaginary. “[ITS]” indeterminately invokes the Black Automaton’s epithet as either plural or possessive (they are hard because they breathe nights or the hardness belongs to IT because IT breathes nights). The word “hard” colloquially refers to a public demonstration of one’s toughness or fortitude, which would be especially important as a display of masculinity. The entire poem is contained within the final phrase at the bottom: “fatty foods” serves as a wry and intentionally humorous volta to the preceding lines.

Given that the title contains the word “hypertension,” it would at first appear that this excessive tension is the product of the myriad problems whose sounds keep the Black Automaton awake at night. However, given that hypertension is also a term for high blood pressure, the final line sums up the poem’s insomnia in medical terminology, which rather than negating what came before it continues the litany of troubles by returning to considerations of physical health, where racial disparities exist between the rates of obesity and its attendant medical problems, which in turn can be linked to systemic inequalities in wealth and education.

Kearney’s vocal performance of “The Black Automaton in What It Is #2: Hypertension in

Effizzect” makes the textual incorporation of the remixed lyrics and their immanence in the poem readily apparent. In a CD collection of readings of The Black Automaton poems, entitled

There are Sharks in this Poem (released in 2011), Kearney performs the poem by singing the opening “hey you: what’s that sound?” before immediately launching into a highly syncopated rendition of the center stanza.33 After he reads the final “or or or…” with breathy intonation,

Kearney transitions into back-to-back musical renditions of the three sets of lyrics on the left. He then repeats his musical performance of “hey you: what’s that sound?” before singing the three

33. Douglas Kearney, There are Sharks in this Poem: Douglas Kearney Live, Fence Books, 2011. 134

sets of lyrics on the right, followed by an additional repetition of the opening line, which effectively becomes the poem’s “chorus.” Kearney ends the poem by singing “It’s/[ITS] hard to breathe nights” without splitting it into its two variants, followed by a quick utterance of “fatty foods.” Four observations should be made about Kearney’s reading of this poem. First, the sampling of hip hop lyrics is not simply a matter of textual incorporation—the italicization and font size are linked to musical performance and volume respectively, indicating that the songs are sampled for their acoustic content as much as for their semantic content. Second, the repetitive threading of “hey you: what’s that sound?” demonstrates that without braces or an arrow, the excerpted lyric constitutes the looped back beat of the poem. Third, the refusal to split

“It’s/[ITS] hard to breathe nights” into its two component lines in his reading indicates that the finer gradations of language at play in Kearney’s palimpsest are an example of a voiced-but- unheard utterance. Finally, the poem includes Kearney’s own commentary over and throughout the lyrics, a premise emphasized by the typographic linkages in arrows and braces and his editing of the lines through the inclusion of [IT] and [ITS]. The juxtaposition of reappropriated song lyrics and Kearney’s original poetic composition recalls the practice of “dubbing,” a prominent technique in hip hop with roots in Caribbean music in which MCs sing over, or “dub,” musical tracks produced by other artists. Therefore, Kearney constructs the poem with the techno- aesthetic “secret” of hip hop by effectively enacting the genre’s techniques of sampling, remixing, and dubbing in order to create their acoustic qualities in a textual setting. That is,

Kearney’s typographic experiments are ekoustic representations of hip hop’s methods in that they poetically reproduce hip hop’s “secret” through their shared aesthetic and formal properties.

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“(GOIN’ BACK)”: MASKING, MP3S, AND ERASURES IN THE SOUND OF BLACKNESS Hip hop’s methods, aesthetics, and formal properties are the site where the seemingly disparate threads of how blackness sounds, masking, and the MP3 converge. It is no accident that hip hop’s widespread international success accompanied the expanded use of digital audio technologies and the increasing influence of the internet in our daily lives—two historical trajectories that meet in the rise of MP3 as the world’s most popular digital audio format. The inclusion of high-quality software for the recording and editing of digital audio in personal computers, which became a standard feature of mainstream operating system bundles following the successful release of Apple’s GarageBand in 2004, gave every user the capacity to become a musical artist. At the same time, the popularization (and relative ease) of sharing MP3 files over the internet allowed new artists to sample, remix, and dub existing songs, then subsequently share the products of their labor with newfound global audiences. This democratization of music production cemented the MP3 as a major technological influence in hip hop’s cultural dominance in the 21st century, indicating that the process of masking that is central to the format is also part of the genre’s more recent aesthetic practices. That is, contemporary hip hop not only manifests through what materials are actively incorporated through the process of sampling, but also includes the sounds that are lost in the masking process. To paraphrase Jacques Derrida, what is excluded from the archive remains part of the archive.

Kearney engages with the process of auditory masking and its attendant relationship to the sound of blackness throughout The Black Automaton. In the “The Black Automaton in What

It Is #3: Work It Out” (Figure 4), which is the final appearance of his signature typographically distinct poems in the collection, Kearney continues to sample, remix, and dub over lyrics appropriated from hip hop songs while also encountering masking as a more recent contour of hip hop aesthetics through his heavily spatialized textual arrangements. The phrases “no, no, no,

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Figure 4. “The Black Automaton in What It Is #3: Work It Out,” by Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton (New York: Fence Books, 2009), 82. no, no…” and “…yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” (both sampled from the Destiny’s Child song

“No, No, No Part 1”) are semantically oppositional and rendered in the same font, putting them in dialogue with one another. However, their justifications are also physically offset from one another, allowing them to comment on the lines in their immediate proximity when undertaking a standard right-to-left reading practice. “RwanDun moaning radio” therefore invokes a recent

African genocide, while “no, no, no, no, no…” subsequently gives voice to the victims of genocide by imagining their anguished moans as being broadcast over the punned “morning radio.”34 Moreover, the Destiny’s Child song itself critiques the act of “frontin’,” or the act of putting up appearances to hide one’s true emotional state and intentions, as a toxic aspect of

34. In his notes on the poem, Kearney writes that Rwandan Hutus used the phrase “the work” to refer to their acts of mass slaughter, an association with continued reverberations through the poem’s use of the word “work.”

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black masculinity.35 In this way, Kearney links the performance of race and gender in American black culture to an international network of racist violence. Kearney’s ability to voice this connection, which can be considered as part of an attempt to consider blackness as a global category, manifests through the spatial arrangements of words in the poem.

Additionally, the line circumscribing the top and right portions of the poem bridges two spatially disparate stanzas, while the arrows at each end allow these stanzas to enter into dialogue with one another without hierarchizing one over the other as the foundation of meaning. “IT’s”

(the Black Automaton’s) ancestry “from a long line of workers” identifies the “(O) O.G.s,” or

“(Original) Original Gangsters,” as slaves who “picked” fields “from sun-up to sun-down.”

Simultaneously, the language of “(O)O.G.s figure subtraction eradicates” and the arbitrary nature of being “picked” at the end of the stanza alludes to acts of murder and street violence, which redescribes the “long line of workers” as hustlers participating in the drug trade over the past several decades. The double-arrow line brings slavery and hustling into a mutually constituted category of historical black labor and its resultant economic prospects. At the same time, the line performs an erasure on a vocal aside: “(goin’ back),” a phrase that when following the direction of the line after reading, enacts the spatial move of “goin’ back” to previous part of the poem while also evoking the temporal displacement of “goin’ back” to the era of slavery. The erasure of the phrase performed by the line allows both meanings to be expressed alongside neither meaning, effectively “masking” the utterance, whose smaller font can be viewed as characterizing a quieter volume produced by spatial distance between the phrase and the poem.

Between these two stanzas are a series of sampled lyrics associated through their use of the word “work,” four instances of which are framed by braces consolidating them into a single

35. “Boy I know you want me / I can see it in your eyes / But you keep on frontin' / Won't you say what's on your mind.” Destiny’s Child, “No, No, No Part 1,” Destiny’s Child, Columbia Records CK67728, 1998, MP3. 138

matrix. A large X obscures the lyrics “…not work…/ludicrous,” which are sampled from Kool

Moe Dee’s “I Go to Work”: “To say rap is not work is ludicrous.” In addition to the erasure performed on the lyric itself through the ellipses’ elision of the reference to rap and the song’s advocacy of creating rap as a form of labor (resulting in a poetic line that produces a meaning opposite to Kool Moe Dee’s original lyric), the X places the entire phrase under erasure within the context of the poem. In his recording of the poem, Kearney reads the lines out loud despite their visual erasure.36 What the lines perform, then, is the process of masking as it relates to the sound of blackness. The utterance is undoubtedly voiced in the recording, but its visual obstruction in the text portrays the line as dubiously contributing the content of sounded discourse. Because the phrase attempts to contradict the relationship between the Black

Automaton and work established through the three other lines included in the matrix, the masked utterance that Kearney enacts is a demand for leisure that is voiced-but-unheard in the white supremacist imaginary, which has a continued reliance on black labor. This reliance, in the context of the poem’s many other concerns, chronologically expands to include the history of slavery and spatially encompasses acts of genocidal and racist violence on other continents. The multiple registers at which the poem invokes spatial and temporal manifestations—materially in the organization of text on the page, thematically in its political concerns, and performatively in

Kearney’s recorded recitation of the text as a script—show a process of masking at play through direct invocations of the discrepancies between what is voiced and what is heard.

The “secret” that animates Kearney’s ekoustic interpretation of hip hop, then, extends beyond the act of reappropriation through sampling by negotiating with auditory masking as an aesthetic process that is essential to the soundscape of hip hop in the twenty-first century (albeit

36. Kearney, There are Sharks. 139

largely unexplored by critics). By enacting masking within the poem, Kearney engages with a long history of American racism that continues to ignore the black voicing of grievances through acts of spatial and temporal distancing that effectively render these complaints mute. But more than that, Kearney subverts this silencing in his audiovisual ekoustic writing. By transforming voiced-but-unheard speech into visual text placed under erasure, Kearney not only highlights the process of masking as a widespread cultural phenomenon, he makes this silenced speech visually available to readers through the text in order to communicate these ideas.

* * *

A question still lingers: if Moten’s ensemble is meant to redefine the role of authenticity in black expression by shifting discourse away from the phonetic mimesis of dialect in favor of linguistically unrepresentable extrasignification, then should we consider Kearney’s poems to be

“hi-fi” (authentic and fidelitous) models of black speech? In the same vein, the frequent punning and linguistic play in these poems layer irony and sarcasm, which invite humorous readings but test the limits of authenticity as an evaluative criterion. A more recent typographically experimental poem of Kearney’s, “Pornegrophy” (Figure 5), demonstrates the need for a reading practice that views and listens to these poems from an askew position. While this poem continues the ensemblic practice of citation by sampling both the folk song “Train Is A Comin’” and the prose of Saidiya Hartman,37 readers will most likely find their attention drawn to the text embedded in the pointillist square, which incorporates a highly stylized font intended to mirror the flashy neon signs of adult movie theaters. The list of (fictional) pornographic titles and their stars within this square include names that mock and diminish major figures and events in

37. In listing these sources in his notes to the poem, Kearney states that “love has nothing to do with it; love has everything to do with it,” is quoted from Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. 140

Figure 5. “Pornegrophy,” by Douglas Kearney, Buck Studies (New York: Fence Books, 2016), 32. African American history by incorporating sexual puns: “The Cumistad,” “Nut Turner,”

“Toussaint Bend’Overture,” “Harriet Buttman,” “Madam B.J. Cock ‘Er,” “Martin Luther King-

Size Jr.,” and “Malcum XXX.” Below these names is a description of the pornographic content in these “films”: “For BDSM! ROUGH! EBONY! / MONSTER COCK! INTERRACIAL! /

LOVERS.” Sexual violence, oversized genitals, and interracial relationships between “lovers” evoke several myths and stereotypes operating in the white supremacist imaginary that continue to inform violent and discriminatory practices. While the large triple-X’s “mask” the text underneath, the combined defacement of historical figures and re-presentation of racist tropes

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suggests that something more than auditory masking might be at play in this poem.

The entirety of the pornographic signage is itself contained by a brace that redescribes its content in a tercet asking, “whose / is this?! whose / is this?!” While the interrobangs introduce another sexual pun on the word “bang,” the question itself can still be answered: this sign belongs to white America. By interpellating black men and women through the language of sexuality, commodities, and the exploitation of labor, the sign’s text stands in for a kind of black expression that is itself “authentic” within the white imaginary. While she focuses on poems in

The Black Automaton that are less visually experimental, Evie Shockley argues that Kearney frequently employs phrases that sound plausible as examples of black vernacular but do not reflect actual diction or speech patterns. She describes this technique as “a bit of ‘blackvoice’ minstrelsy that tells on itself.”38 That is, Kearney’s poems extend a tradition of performative self- minstrelization that actively resists white audiences by presenting them with the language they already anticipated. Shockley compares this strategy with tactics that strive towards direct representation in poetry, writing that Kearney:

presents us with multiple voices but not voices that are ‘representative,’ in a realist sense…Kearney produces a poem different from the majority of African American historical poems, which seek-quite understandably and admirably—to give full-throated voice to those whom history has silenced. For the poet to imaginatively reconstitute those voices is to exercise and re-present an agency that was denied to the historical figures or, alternatively, made invisible. Kearney’s poem takes another approach to honoring what has been lost; it instead underscores the irrecoverability of those voices by giving us in their place, so to speak, a series a spirited series of utterances that remind us of what is absent via the excessive strategies of postmodernist play.39

In other words, rather than attempt to give voice to the silenced and unheard by imagining or attempting to represent their speech, Kearney instead draws increased attention to their ongoing

38. Evie Shockley, “Going Overboard: African American Poetic Innovation and the Middle Passage,” Contemporary Literature 52, no. 4 (2011): 803. 39. Ibid., 805. 142

absence by substituting their irrecoverable speech with citations and “blackvoice.”

Such an approach calls upon the neurological function of anticipation in the act of listening. Listening differs from the state of passive reception referred to as hearing in that listening requires that we use the “cerebral cortex, which searches for familiar devices and patterns…Listening is led by anticipation. Even when a piece [of music] is entirely new to our ears, we make sense of it by perceiving constituent parts that we already know well.”40

Therefore, anticipation is the neurological equivalent of critical bands, the digital process by which codecs predict masked tones in order to compress files.41 By presenting black speech that reflects what the white imaginary anticipates, Kearney’s engagement with auditory masking extends beyond the aforementioned technique of making the voiced-but-unheard visually available to reader to include speech that is heard-but-unvoiced in his poems.

Given that ekoustic poetry aims to get inside the “secret” of sounds by depicting auditory complexities and their social powers in textual forms, Kearney’s typographical experiments can be described as ekoustic in that they sketch the process of auditory masking and its impact on

“how blackness sounds” to white listeners. As a literary hermeneutic, ekoustic poetry therefore demonstrates that the question of “how blackness sounds” involves not only the co-extant properties of voice’s production and reception considered together, but also includes extrasignificatory properties that may not be representable in the first place. Therefore, the role of “voice” in poetry ought not be interrogated exclusively as a form of positive representation (as in giving voice to the silenced), but also as a type of negative representation (as in giving voice

40. Robert Jourdain, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1997), 246. 41. Although this equivocation might sound like a rhetorical stretch, it in fact conforms with the history of sound recording technology and its reliance on human audition. As Jonathan Sterne demonstrates repeatedly throughout The Audible Past, the human ear was the model for a number of innovations. The most notable example is the tympanic membrane (or ear drum), which made the telephone and microphone (and well as the process of transduction) possible. 143

to what does not exist or cannot be vocalized). Voice is dynamic and contextual, whether it manifests within poetry or our everyday conversations. In their anti-lyric arguments against voice, contemporary avant-garde poets and critics dismiss lyric as a whole because they anticipate what they will hear in those poems—narrated experiences of racial oppression and discrimination that are authentic, sincere, and representative of an ethnic identity. But because they do not “hit pause” on their anticipatory assumptions, avant-garde listening habits effectively mask voice’s complexities, which includes its potential to negotiate broader social dynamics and sonic customs through textual forms.

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Coda: Hitting Pause on the Avant-Garde

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Organization for Standardization (IOS), the two leading bodies for evaluating and recommending international standards across industries, officially recognize the media control symbol ⏸ as denoting

“Pause; interruption.”1 The provenance of these now ubiquitous parallel lines, however, remains largely unknown. Apocryphal accounts of its origins litter the internet, with many claiming that it first appeared in the mid-1960s. These narratives attribute the icon, as well as other media control symbols such as record (⏺), to a Swedish engineer named Philip Olsson, who supposedly invented the symbols while working in Japan.2 Several theories attempt to explain the reason this particular graphic mark represents the pause function: parallel bars are also used in circuit diagrams to represent a fixed capacitor, which blocks (or pauses) the flow of direct current; the symbol might also stand in for parallel tape heads that hold the tape between them in a fixed position while paused; in Japanese, the hiragana character for ri (り) is written with two slightly curved but parallel strokes;3 and finally, some hypothesize that the pause symbol draws on the musical notation for a caesura, whose lines are usually represented at an angle (턓). While these accounts lack clear citation, the acoustic and commercial associations between music and

1. “Graphical Symbols for Use on Equipment,” International Electrotechnical Commission/International Organization for Standardization, June 1, 2017, accessed March 20, 2018, https://webstore.iec.ch/preview/info_iec60417_DB.pdf. 2. “Why is the ‘Record’ icon always round and usually red?,” Stack Exchange, June 27, 2013, accessed March 19, 2018, https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/41434/why-is-the-record-icon-always-round-and-usually-red. The name “Philip Olsson” forces me to “pause” for a moment. Research into the name shows no other information about him other than references to his supposed invention of these symbols and his time in Japan. The name appears to reflect the Philips company, a Dutch corporation that introduced the compact cassette tape in 1963. 3. This interpretation seems to rely heavily on the “Philip Olsson” narrative. However, Sony’s TC-100, released in 1966, was one of the earliest devices to include the now standard media control symbols. While it lacks a pause button, the possible Japanese origin of the symbol cannot be discounted. 145

sound recording make the caesura a favored explanation for the pause button’s origin.4 Of course, the use of angled lines to denote a musical caesura evolved from medieval manuscript practices, where the virgule was drawn either straight ( | ) or sloped ( / ) in the study of prosody before eventually becoming standardized as a modern technique for scansion in which the sloped virgule indicates a line break while double vertical lines ( || ) mark an internal pause within a single line.5

The idea that the pause icon originates in poetic customs may be neither surprising nor revelatory. As I demonstrate throughout this dissertation—from Edison’s proclivity for reciting poems in order to demonstrate his phonograph to the public, to William Burroughs’ cut-ups and their effects on Allen Ginsberg’s compositional process, to Cathy Park Hong’s use of the cassette tape as a metaphor for linguistic evolution in colonial contexts, to Douglas Kearney’s application of digital audio techniques and technologies in portraying the sounds of blackness (not to mention PennSound and the multitude of other projects that received little more than footnotes in the preceding pages)—poetry and sound technology share a close relationship that has continued to evolve ever since the latter’s invention over a century ago. While the pause button’s design may likely originate in the practices of poetic scholarship, I do not begin this coda with a philological inquiry into the origins of these seemingly innocuous vertical bars so that I may issue as an envoi a heartfelt encomium affirming the depth of poetry’s influence on even the most quotidian aspects of our everyday lives. Rather, I am interested in the IEC/IOS assertion that ⏸ also denotes an “interruption.”

This dissertation is an interruption of sorts. Situated between the opposing poles of an

4. Bryan Gardiner, “The Secret Histories of Those @#$%ing Computer Symbols,” Gizmodo, August 16, 2010, accessed March 20, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/5612630/the-secret-histories-of-those-ing-computer-symbols. 5. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “virgule,” accessed March 20, 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/223767. 146

ongoing debate perhaps best defined by its outstanding polemic rebukes, my intent has been to occupy the space that separates these lines in order to “break between” them.6 In arguing that the figure of voice in anti-lyric critiques more closely resembles voice’s narrower function in identity politics rather than its fluid and always-already contextual presence in poetry, my aim has never been rhetorical synthesis. Instead, like a synthesizer, I invoke technologic premises to interrupt and modulate common assumptions about the “natural” aspects of sound and its production. In purely physical terms, sounds are nothing but vibrations between particles. But humans’ interactions with sounds cannot be understood outside the social, cultural, and political codes that structure who, what, when, where, why and how we speak and listen to one another.

And as an interruption in the scholarly discourses between poetry and race, between poetry and sound technology, and between sound technology and race, this dissertation pauses ongoing conversations without pretending to bring them to a close. An interruption can never be an end; it always rests between.

* ⏸ *

It’s time to interrupt the totemic power of the poetry anthology. In 2011, former U.S.

Poet Laureate Rita Dove edited The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, a

“Sisyphean task”7 that she accepted despite knowing that it could never accurately portray an entire century of poetry and was therefore “doomed from the start.”8 In addition to describing her desire to resist organizing the anthology by facile categorizations of chronology or movement

(although she succumbs to the former), Dove acknowledges the pecuniary demands of the

6. From its Latin roots: inter (between) and rumpere (to break). Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “interrupt, v.,” accessed March 21, 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/98273. 7. Rita Dove, ed., The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), xxix. 8. Ibid., xxxi. 147

publishing industry: “Poetry has become a business, albeit a small one; the laws of supply and demand have taken on an urgency similar to the pressures in the wider world of commerce.”9 In particular, she opines her omission of Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath due to the high fees demanded by their estates, but reasons that readers can find their widely available poems elsewhere.10 Given Penguin’s status as a titan in the publishing industry, Dove’s anthology was a major publication; surprisingly (or perhaps as to be expected), stalwart defenders of lyric principles and avant-garde proponents of anti-lyric united in their vociferous criticisms of the book by questioning Dove’s inclusion of far more non-white poets than the typical anthology.

In her review for The New York Times Review of Books, Helen Vendler opines that Dove is “introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors.”11 She attributes the slim sampling of work by canonic poets such as Wallace Stevens to “multicultural inclusiveness,”12 and ponders who among the included poets will have “staying power.”13 Marjorie Perloff, meanwhile, contrasts

Dove’s anthology to a series of antecedents (including Donald Allen’s The New American

Poetry) in order to bemoan the stylistic homogeneity of the poems’ free verse. Because Dove acknowledges that the poems in anthology reflect her personal “sensibilities”14 rather than contending with questions of form and poetic canons, Perloff is skeptical of the publication’s

“validity as a textbook or a selection for the general reader.”15 In order to highlight what she perceives as the its shortcomings, Perloff contrasts the anthology with the work of conceptual

9. Ibid., l-li. 10. Ibid. 11. Helen Vendler, “Are These the Poems to Remember?,” The New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011, accessed April 4, 2018, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/11/24/are-these-poems-remember/. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Dove, l. 15. Marjorie Perloff, “Poetry on the Brink,” Boston Review, May 18, 2012, accessed April 4, 2018, http://bostonreview.net/forum/poetry-brink. 148

poets, whose attempts to “dislodge the dominant paradigm” and its culture of “political correctness”16 reflect the anti-lyric sensibilities of Language poets in previous decades.

* ⏸ *

Kenneth Goldsmith, the first MoMA Poet Laureate and unofficial spokesperson for conceptual poetry, mercurially describes the stylistic properties and goals of this avant-garde movement with an oft-repeated slogan: “My books are better thought about than read.”17 That is, in order to “read” a conceptual poem, one only needs to understand the underlying intellectual concept that led to the poem’s production in the first place. Drawing on the work of Marcel

Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, and Andy Warhol, conceptual writing emphasizes, “work that does not seek to express unique, coherent, or consistent individual psychologies and that, moreover, refuses familiar strategies of authorial control in favor of automatism, reticence, obliquity, and modes of noninterference.”18 In the majority of instances, conceptual poets reappropriate already existing (and often quite lengthy) texts, apply set constraints to guide their compositional process, and publish the result. Goldsmith’s publications include tomes such as Soliloquy (2001), for which he wore a tape recorder strapped to his chest for an entire week then transcribed every single word he spoke over that period; Traffic (2007), a collection of New York City AM radio traffic reports broadcast over the course of a holiday weekend; and Seven American Deaths and

Disasters (2013), a series of transcribed radio and television broadcasts made in the immediate aftermath of significant American tragedies such as the assassination of President John F.

Kennedy and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Goldsmith shares the Language poets’ interest

16. Ibid. 17. Kenneth Goldsmith, interview by David Mandl, The Believer, October 2011, https://www.believermag.com/issues/201110/?read=interview_goldsmith. 18. Craig Dworkin, “The Fate of Echo,” Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, ed. by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2011), xliii-iv. 149

in language’s materiality and inherent artificiality as a constructed medium for communication, as well as their desire to develop new methods for reading and writing poetry. To no surprise then, those who, like Perloff, work within the Language milieu champion Goldsmith and conceptual poetry as the avant-garde’s next big thing.19

As my description of three of his works makes apparent, Goldsmith frequently turns to technology for sound recording and reproduction to compose his poems. His process reflects the principles of Ginsberg’s auto poesy in that he intends to capture “everyday speech,” including the spontaneous um’s and ah’s that interrupt logos as an arbiter of linguistic fluency. Unlike

Ginsberg, however, he does not edit his transcripts to compose lines and stanzas. Scott Pound, in arguing that Goldsmith’s work opens up new considerations within the category of “literature,” claims, “When recorded, speech ceases to epitomize an idealist proximity to subject self- presence and comes to stand instead for ontological and epistemological estrangement, so that in

Goldsmith’s work we encounter a use of speech as cultural material that is not couched in an appeal to expressivist principles.”20 If only poets of color knew that by recording and then transcribing their poems they would distance themselves from their supposedly inherent self- expressivity, thereby finding acceptance within avant-garde circles because they based their poems on “speech” instead of voice! I do not mean to build a rhetorical straw man with this comment, but instead to draw attention to the assumptions about both sound recording and whiteness that inform Pound’s claim. As I have argued throughout this dissertation, “everyday speech” does not exist outside of the social codes that contextualize who speaks, what they say,

19. For an example of such support, as well as a longer explanation of the theoretical links between the Language and Conceptual movements within the avant-garde tradition, see Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010). For a reading of the links (and differences) between Language and Conceptual movements within the context of rejecting the “lyric I” and self-expression, see Jennifer Ashton, “Sincerity and the Second Person: Lyric After Language Poetry,” Interval(le)s II.2-III.1 (2008/2009): 94-108. 20. Scott Pound, “Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics of Information,” PMLA 130 no. 2 (2015): 322. 150

who hears, and how they listen. In this sense, Scott Pound’s rejection of “expressivist principles” sounds like a dog whistle, as straight white men appear to be the only identity group afforded the luxury of considering their speech devoid of self-expressive appeals.21

In addition, Goldsmith himself undercuts the potential of recorded sound as a tactic that works against self-expression in poetry. In Uncreative Writing, his manifesto on conceptual techniques and principles, Goldsmith in fact claims that “the suppression of self-expression is impossible. Even when we do something as seemingly ‘uncreative’ as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways.”22 That is, despite reappropriating content to compose conceptual poems, every paratextual choice—from font and formatting to the actual choice of what gets reappropriated—is a form of self-expression that structures the poem. It is for that reason that critics observe an essential contradiction in how conceptual poets frame their work within the avant-garde tradition:

these tactics have given poets license to incorporate subjective experience and emotional material without fetishizing the lyric ego, the personal “I”—in effect, they permit poets to write about personal experience while sidestepping the problems of sentimentality, narcissism, and autobiographical excess that many poets still find dogging much contemporary lyric poetry.23

When reducing the authorial influence of a poem to the point where the published text is largely the product of procedural choices, a curious paradox emerges in which the poet appears to become more important for the reader’s hermeneutic approach rather than vanishing entirely.

21. Given that I too identify as a “straight white man,” I do not exempt myself from this claim. When whiteness, heteronormativity, and masculinity are implicitly acknowledged as unmarked in everyday discourse, distancing oneself from the personal ownership of one’s speech is so easy it becomes a pervasive habit. For example, “It’s just a joke!,” a frequent retort to charges of offensive speech, is an attempt to assert that the identity positions informing one’s speech do not inform one’s ownership of the speech’s content. 22. Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Making Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia UP, 2011), 9. 23. Andrew Epstein, “Found Poetry, ‘Uncreative Writing,’ and the Art of Appropriation,” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (London: Routledge, 2012): 315. 151

* ⏸ *

More than a year after Vendler and Perloff assailed Dove’s anthology, Evie Shockley addressed the “mutual disdain”24 expressed by critics who are usually “polar opposites”25 in their scholarly contentions. Reflecting on questions of populism and canonicity as indirect reflections of race, Shockley defends both Dove’s anthology and the aesthetic diversity of ethnic minority poets in general. She argues against traditions of racialized reading that treat non-white poets “as if [they are] sounding only one note and that a jangling one.”26 Rather than lacking editorial criteria beyond racial inclusivity and personal sensibility, Shockley argues that Dove’s emphasis on including poets who published in the latter half of the twentieth century (at the time of publication, 102 of the anthology’s 175 poets were still living) allows readers to trace poetic influence between temporally distant writers in new and surprising ways. Dove’s approach thus acknowledges the anthology’s power as a genre to build and support canons while also working against the racial elisions endemic to previous efforts to anthologize American poetry.

But if the anthology’s frontier lies in the efforts of editors who strategically subvert its institutional and commercial dominion, then we ought to find new forms of collation. An ideal substitute would not depend upon shibboleths of academic credibility and prestige. It would not support institutionalized tautologies of genealogy and influence to make claims about what literature is, in the hopes that with enough syllabi adoptions revenue reports will be in the black.

Instead, it would embrace its material and epistemological limitations. It would emphasize creation and assemblage. It would acknowledge what literatures are, and more importantly, what they could become.

24. Evie Shockley, “Shifting the (Im)balance,” Boston Review, June 6, 2013, accessed April 4, 2018, http://bostonreview.net/poetry/shifting-imbalance. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 152

* ⏸ *

In the afterword to Seven American Deaths and Disasters Goldsmith describes his own experience of listening to the radio while watching the Twin Towers collapse on September 11,

2001 as a motivation for returning to news reports made during major American tragedies. As he began his project, he found that:

The slick curtain of media was torn, revealing acrobatic linguistic improvisations. There was a sense of things spinning out of control: facts blurred with speculation as the broadcasters attempted to furiously weave convincing narratives from shards of half- truths. Usually confident DJs were now riding by the seat of their pants, splaying raw emotion across the airwaves: smooth speech turned to stutter, laced with doubt and fear…Opinions—some of them terribly misinformed—inflected and infected their supposedly objective reportage. Racism and xenophobia were rampant…It was as if the essence of media was being revealed whilst its skin was in tatters.27

According to Goldsmith, the role mass media plays in narrativizing tragedy for audiences is the concept that is “better thought about” than reading the entirety of Seven American Deaths and

Disasters. While the talking heads on radio and television normally present themselves as prepared and composed, their reactions and improvisations—captured by their stutters and bewildered reactions—demonstrate the inherent artifice and biases within “objective” reporting.

This artifice and bias may be “voiced-but-unheard” when we listen in the moment, but by transcribing these broadcasts from their original context as recorded sound to a new context as published text (an ekoustic process), new insights into the language and ideological function of mass media become available for readers.

That is not to say that reading conceptual texts requires one to fall back on authorial considerations to the exclusion of other approaches. While the author retains an important role in determining the central concept that animates a conceptual poem, the reader’s hermeneutic

27. Kenneth Goldsmith, Seven American Deaths and Disasters (Brooklyn: powerHouse Books, 2013), 172. 153

importance still offers textual insights beyond their panoptic control. Following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, for example, one broadcaster describes the assassin: “Two reports...one that he was Negro, another that he was Latin American.”28 Sirhan Sirhan, who was arrested on site and was not the subject of a manhunt, is in fact Palestinian. Sirhan claimed that the assassination, which took place on the one-year anniversary of the start of the Six-Day War, was in response to Senator Kennedy’s proposal to increase military support for Israel. The broadcaster’s assumption that the assassination was linked to black radicals (Martin Luther King

Jr. was assassinated only two months previously) or the threat of communism in Cuba and other

Latin American countries shows that even by 1968 the Six-Day War was a footnote in American history. This passage suggests an early and pervasive national amnesia of widespread allegations that America directly supports the illegal occupation of Palestine. These allegations, in addition to the subsequent American military contributions to Israel of the kind Kennedy proposed, continue to hold importance in Arab countries and their relations with the United States today.

What is valuable about such a reading is not that it follows Goldsmith’s self-expressed desire to expose the deficiencies and artificiality inherent to mass media, but that the re-presentation of decades-old language excavates a moment in this country’s racial politics that is largely obscured within the national memory by the morally affirmative celebration of the Civil Rights

Movement. By presenting historical texts in new contexts, conceptual poems have the potential to redirect readerly attention towards the specific roles language plays in establishing social, political, and cultural norms, thereby interrupting their ongoing influence.

* ⏸ *

The mixtape, which revels in echoes resonating between the new and the familiar, makes

28. Ibid., 66. 154

no pretense of mastery nor authority. It is not all-encompassing. It embraces its editor’s personal sensibilities while acknowledging its listening audience. It disrupts a hierarchized model of epistemic transmission by accredited experts while democratizing the methods of production. In contemporary hip hop, the mixtape has already become a distinct genre unto itself. As opposed to albums with internal structures and commercial appeals intended to reflect traditional LPs, hip hop mixtapes contain original tracks that sample music for which the artist has no license; they are distributed for free online in order to circumvent copyright laws. As a model for populist anthologizing that has the potential to interrupt the centralized control of the publishing industry while empowering readers (and listeners) to create, the mixtape is one way we might delink from the historical logics that reinforce white supremacy in the literary arts.

* ⏸ *

On March 13, 2015, Kenneth Goldsmith become the subject of a major controversy for his “performance” of Michael Brown’s autopsy report under the title “The Body of Michael

Brown” as part of the Interrupt 3 conference at Brown University. In the piece, which lasted thirty minutes, Goldsmith read Michael Brown’s autopsy report with minimal edits, intending it to serve as an “eighth American death and disaster.”29 A widely circulated, formal photograph of

Brown at his high school graduation ceremony was projected behind Goldsmith for the duration of the performance. Accounts of the reading spread quickly, with major news organizations reporting on the performance and its subsequent backlash.30 While some poets and friends of

Goldsmith defended the piece, the public response was overwhelmingly negative. Goldsmith’s

29. Kenneth Goldsmith, “The Body of Michael Brown,” Facebook, March 15, 2015, accessed October 10, 2015, http://www.facebook.com/kenneth.goldsmith.739/posts/354492771403205. 30. See Priscilla Frank, “What Happened When a White Male Poet Read Michael Brown’s Autopsy Report as Poetry,” Huffington Post, March 17, 2015, accessed March 22, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/17/kenneth-goldsmith-michael-brown_n_6880996.html. 155

performance and the discourse that followed in its wake inflamed longstanding tensions between the predominately white avant-garde and poets of color. Poet Ken Chen noted that the major discrepancy between Seven American Deaths and Disasters and “The Body of Michael Brown” was that, “Goldsmith did not transcribe mass media responses to Michael Brown’s death…Instead, he read Michael Brown’s autopsy report. He literally performed the role of the state, the man slicing apart the fallen body of Michael Brown.”31 That is, rather than exhuming the embedded biases of media language and the role they play in nationalized narratives,

Goldsmith probed the then-recent tragedy as part of a performative spectacle.

While it is possible to describe the central concept guiding Goldsmith’s decision to reappropriate this particular text as an attempt to participate in anti-racist discourse, the piece ultimately enacts more harm than critique. By reading the text of the autopsy report, Goldsmith engages with visibility politics by attempting to render Brown’s body hypervisible and force his audience to confront the reality of a body that was destroyed by a representative of the state. In his largest revision to the source text, Goldsmith moves the description of Brown’s genitalia to the end of his reading: “The remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable.”32 Emphasizing the visibility of Brown’s genitalia is likely an attempt to critique an operative myth in the white supremacist imaginary that links the size of black men’s penises to sexual and physical aggression; this myth, in addition to being the source of countless lynchings throughout

American history, continues to prompt acts of violence in the present. However, Goldsmith’s profound short-sightedness about the importance of visibility in critiquing white supremacy goes beyond Chen’s criticism of Goldsmith’s alliance of perspective with the state. Exemplified by

31. Ken Chen, “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show,” Asian American Writers’ Workshop, June 11, 2015, accessed February 14, 2017, http://www.aaww.org/authenticity-obsession/. 32. Ibid. 156

the use of the word “system” to describe his genitalia, the medical language of the autopsy report renders Brown’s body visible with cold description that treats Brown’s body as an object.

Activists, on the other hand, focus on Brown’s life and innate humanity when protesting his murder. By projecting the photograph of Brown in graduation regalia during his performance,

Goldsmith further objectifies Brown’s body. The image was circulated by activists in order to promote Brown’s humanity and status as an educated American citizen, in contrast to media reports characterizing him as a “thug.” Goldsmith’s appropriated medical language and his use of the photograph reduces both to mere props in his theatrical performance. Objectifying Brown in a manner that emphasizes non-human qualities and subjects his non-consenting body to the probing surveillance of the white gaze ultimately promotes the same widespread biases that not only led to his murder, but the murders of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and countless others. Rather than interrupting the mechanisms of institutionalized racism, Goldsmith reified them.

* ⏸ *

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this exclusive offer. Sick of porcelain poetry anthologies full of dead guys and tokenist trimmings? Tired of those end-all-be-all five-volume anthologies that break the bank even though a new edition is just around the corner? Then it’s time sound off! Now That’s What I Call Poetry! This collection features living American poets of color whose experimental writing also engages with technology for sound recording and reproduction. Say no to occlusion with “hits” like:

• Ching In-Chen’s “Girl-not.”33 In-Chen, an Asian American transgender poet, explores the

33. Ching In-Chen, “Girl-Not,” Barzakh, Spring 2014, accessed April 22, 2018, https://www.barzakh.net/spring- 2014/2016/4/4/ching-in-chen-five-poems. 157

complex layers of gender identity in a poem “choregraphed for 3 voices.”34 Using plain,

bold, and italic text to texture each voice, this wildly disjunctive poem engages questions

of address and recognition while incorporating timbre through textual presentation.

• Brenda Shaughnessy’s So Much Synth.35 A 2016 collection reflecting on middle age,

Shaughnessy overtly structures her book to resemble a jukebox shuffling between discs.

Her work includes poetic series labeled as mix tapes, which bounce through the pop hits

of the 1980s. Fans of Duran Duran and The Breakfast Club rejoice! The idiomatic play

reflecting on youth makes this a book that says, “Don’t you forget about me.”

• Patricia Smith’s “Hip Hop Ghazal.”36 A ghazal is an Arabic poetic form that consists of

couplets intended to be sung. As a “hip hop” ghazal, this poem makes a superb

companion piece to Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton. Smith does not incorporate

hip hop aesthetics, instead using the genre as content. These couplets blur the lines

between formal inheritance and ekoustic writing, engaging the black musical tradition

from an angle while also approaching the category of “blackness” from an international

perspective.

• Morgan Parker’s “Two White Girls in the African Braid Shop on Marcy and Fulton.”37

Do you want to engage with speech and listening, but don’t want to lose the importance

of physical space and its contextual influence on these practices? Then look no further!

Presented as a series of statements captured during an interview conducted by two white

women who barge into a braid shop, this poem attends to the intersection of race and

34. Ibid. 35. Brenda Shaughnessy, So Much Synth (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press), 2016. 36. Patricia Smith, “Hip Hop Ghazal,” Poetry Foundation, July/August 2007, accessed April 20, 2018, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49642/hip-hop-ghazal. 37. Morgan Parker, “Two White Girls in the African Braid Shop on Marcy and Fulton,” PEN America, August 19, 2015, accessed April 20, 2018, https://pen.org/two-poems-by-morgan-parker/. 158

gender through the ignorant demands of white supremacy and its presumptions.

• Tyehimba Jess’s Olio.38 Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, this collection is

named after the interlude in a minstrel show. Engaging with the history of black music

and a number of its important figures (such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and Scott Joplin),

as well as late nineteenth century poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jess focuses on the

late nineteenth century and the voices of the first generation to be free from slavery in

America. Their suffering and their triumphs don’t exist solely in the past, however. They

are part of the present.

With all of these poets and many more, you’ll be left shouting, “now that’s what I call

poetry!”

* ⏸ *

Kenneth Goldsmith was not the only conceptual poet to court controversy with their work in 2015. Vanessa Place, whose three-part Tragodía series reappropriates court documents drawn from the sex offense cases that Place litigated in her career as a lawyer, came under fire for her durational tweeting of racist language in Margret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind.

She began her project with the poem “Miss Scarlett,” a dialect-laden transcription of Thelma

“Butterfly” McQueen’s dialogue from the film version of Gone With the Wind, which was published in a special issue of Poetry focused on conceptual writing in 2009.39 The poem drew little attention at first, and over the following six years Place published tweets entirely consisting of unedited lines from the novel containing dialogue spoken by black characters. At the time the project first became the subject of public controversy, Place was using an image of Hattie

38. Tyehimba Jess, Olio (Seattle: Wave Books), 2017. 39. Vanessa Place, “Miss Scarlett,” Poetry 194 no. 4 (2009): 339-42. 159

McDaniel, who was the first African American recipient of an Academy Award for her role as

“Mammy” in the film version of Gone With the Wind, as her profile picture; her account’s cover photo was an illustration of a minstrelized “Mammy” character cropped from the cover for the sheet music to the song “Jemima’s Wedding Day.”40

Her project rapidly drew widespread condemnation and was described as a form of blackface.41 In response, Place attempted to articulate the concept driving her project by publishing an artist’s statement on Facebook.42 It this statement, she claims that in addition to attempting to highlight the underlying racism in “staples of Americana,” she wanted to provoke

Margaret Mitchell’s estate to sue her for copyright infringement, which would require the estate to claim direct ownership over the novel’s racist language. While using poetry in attempt to influence the laws and precedents governing the ownership of hateful speech in digital spaces is in many ways an admirable theoretical premise, the charge of copyright infringement that would give Mitchell’s estate standing in a lawsuit requires that Place publish unadulterated text and claim it as her own. Therefore, her use of the “Jemima” cover photo is an entirely extraneous exercise that does nothing to advance her project’s stated motives beyond attempting to gain widespread attention by trading in affective shock; moreover, because hate speech draws its linguistic force through iteration,43 Place’s tweets extend the power of this racist language rather

40. John Keene, “On Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind, and the Limit Point of Certain Conceptual Aesthetics,” J’s Theater, May 18, 2015, accessed March 23, 2018, http://jstheater.blogspot.com/2015/05/on-vanessa-place-gone- with-wind-and.html. 41. Ibid. 42. At some point in the past three years Place deleted the post containing her artist’s statement. However, it has been preserved elsewhere. See Vanessa Place, “Artist’s Statement: Gone With the Wind @vanessaplace,” Genius, accessed March 23, 2018, https://genius.com/Vanessa-place-artists-statement-gone-with-the-wind-vanessaplace- annotated. 43. “The speaker who utters the racial slur is thus citing that slur, making linguistic community with a history of speakers. What this might mean, then, is that precisely the iterability by which a performative enacts its injury establishes a permanent difficulty in locating final accountability for that injury in a singular subject and its act.” Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 52. 160

than counteracting it. As opposed to Douglas Kearney’s “blackvoice” in his Black Automaton poems, through which he invents non-existent vernacular to interrupt assumptions about black speech and its reception in the white imaginary, Place directly reproduces existing racist speech that continues to inform white supremacist practices. In other words, Place’s concept in her

“Gone With the Wind” project might appear politically progressive from a distance, but the actual content of her tweets risks furthering the conditions that give racist language its power, effectively extending white supremacy and its tactics in the process.

* ⏸ *

We need to hit pause on the avant-garde in order to interrupt the voice of whiteness that clamors from within its current practices. Given the longstanding leftist political commitments of its adherents, as well as the critiques and attempts to dismantle dominant institutional ideologies and methodologies that characterize countless avant-garde poems, all poets who wish to claim the avant-garde label in contemporary American poetry have a moral and ethical obligation to address race rather than ignore it. But to accomplish this task they must turn inward by taking active steps to respond to the institutionalized whiteness that has influenced the avant-garde tradition both historically and in the present—a whiteness reinforced by the monolithic anthology. While conceptual poets like Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place indicate their desire to incorporate anti-racist discourse into their thinking and writing, their controversial poems fail to accomplish their stated goals. They attend to race by trading in tropes that dehumanize victims, reinforce the white gaze and the white ear, and reify the practices of white supremacy—and all without acknowledging the ways in which their own whiteness informs and contextualizes their poetic practice.

Of course, this story about sound, race, and the avant-garde is not the only one to tell;

161

there are many others waiting in the wings. In particular, the previous pages engage the MFA degree and the professionalization of poetry within the university from a tangent. But the transformation of how poetry is taught—as well as who is able to earn an accredited degree and teach creative writing in the classroom setting—inflect both the anti-lyric characterization of poetic voice and the demands of the publishing industry (including the monolithic status of the anthology). But given that the development of the corporate university and the appearance of accredited MFA programs occur simultaneous to the 50+ year period examined in this dissertation, there are more directions to follow. In addition, framing the discussion of the avant- garde’s racial politics through questions surrounding anti-lyric centers Language poets in this narrative. But they are not essential to examining race in contemporary poetry. My hope for these arguments is that they will allow us to leave the Language poets behind and allow us to turn our engagement towards experimental and innovative poets of color whose work includes aesthetic and political dimensions that are not reducible to the influence of older white poets.

Charles Bernstein concludes his 1990 essay “State of the Art” by writing, “When we get over this idea that we can all speak to each other, I think it will begin to be possible, as it always has been, to listen to one another, one at a time and in the various clusters that present themselves, or that we find the need to make.”44 This premise commonly manifests in contemporary anti-partisan political rhetoric that attempts to affirm the inherent value of democratic collectivity: “Both sides just need to listen to the other so that we can come to an agreement.” But in the era of President Trump, such arguments reinforce complicity with an increasingly totalitarian state that is defined by its opposition to ethnic minorities, women and transgendered people, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The problem was never

44. Charles Bernstein, “State of the Art,” A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), 8. 162

listening to each other, because listening was never a neutral process in the first place. Blaring your car radio with the windows rolled down was never a neutral act. Walking down the street with headphones in your ears was never a neutral act. Talking to your parents on the phone was never a neutral act. We need to pause the conversation on listening, because listening is not an autonomic reflex that can be assumed without effort. Listening is an active and changing process.

To actually listen to each other, we first need to listen to ourselves by interrogating the roles our own assumptions and social locations play in directing our ears. Voice is not about speaking; it’s about listening.

163

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