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Echoes and Polyphonies: the Choral Poetics of Dan Beachy-Quick ______3

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Echoes and Polyphonies: the Choral Poetics of Dan Beachy-Quick ______3 Echoes and Polyphonies: The Choral Poetics of Dan Beachy-Quick and Passage: New Poems Kate Middleton PhD Thesis Western Sydney University 2016 Statement of Authentication The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. .............................................................. Acknowledgements This thesis was completed with the generous support of many people. First and foremost has been the assistance and support of Professor Hazel Smith. Her guidance throughout the process of research and writing has been invaluable: she has always challenged me to think the next step, and the step after. Dr Chris Andrews’s counsel has helped me through every step of this process. Dr Kate Fagan’s sharp observations have made me a better thinker. The questions asked by this panel have never failed to lead me to vital discoveries as I searched for their answers. Thanks are due to the many colleagues who offered encouragement and love. Chief among these, Fiona Wright, Lindsay Tuggle and Claire Nashar offered thoughtful feedback on my writing. Jessica Wilkinson, Natalie Day, Gretchen Shirm, Toby Fitch, Jen Craig, Elizabeth Allen and Emily Stewart all provided a sounding board at vital moments. Ivor Indyk’s continued support of my creative work has always helped me keep my head above water. Melinda Jewell and Suzanne Gapps have always assisted me in navigating the practical side of this work. Zacha Rosen arrived in time to make the final phase of writing an adventure. Special thanks to Audra Puchalski, who is the first person I remember mentioning the name “Dan Beachy-Quick” to me. I did not know it at the time, but this conversation altered the course of my life. None of this work would have been possible without my family. Contents of Thesis Abstract________________________________________________________ 1 Part One: Echoes and Polyphonies: The Choral Poetics of Dan Beachy-Quick _________ 3 Part Two: Passage: New Poems ______________________________________________ 249 Abstract Echoes and Polyphonies is a thesis in two parts, consisting of a critical study of the contemporary American poet Dan Beachy-Quick, and a manuscript of new poems, titled “Passage”. Both portions of this thesis explore citational poetics and the multiplicity of the choral voice: as such the critical and creative works exist in conversation in a two-part work of practice-led research, and research-led practice. The critical thesis posits that throughout his writing Dan Beachy-Quick investigates the nature of lyric and lyric subjectivity, questioning the singularity of the lyric speaker. Beachy-Quick’s poetry, largely published since the turn of the millennium, is concerned with the plural experience of the writer as one who is also a reader. I argue that Beachy-Quick addresses the nature of the lyric voice by linking the lyric speaker to the ancient Greek chorus, reading the written voice as necessarily plural. This thesis demonstrates that Beachy-Quick examines the nature of poetic speech through direct interrogation of echoic literary influence. Through an examination of Beachy-Quick’s verse, I read the lyric voice as polyphonic in nature and consider the formal hybridities of contemporary American poetics. In doing so I draw on a range of critical approaches while offering close readings of Beachy-Quick’s body of work. Goldsmith’s and Perloff’s writings provide a framework for reading “unoriginality” as part of the plural lyric voice. Carr and Robinson’s Active Romanticism assists my reading of Beachy-Quick’s destabilisation of the lyric voice as a continuation of the major shift in the understanding of literary subjectivity represented by Romanticism. These works assist my demonstration that Beachy-Quick’s poetry participates in what I call an active lyric, a lyric that makes explicit its own polyphonic nature through citational poetics. I posit that Beachy-Quick’s poetry is exemplary of the way in which a hybrid poetics allows contemporary poets to combine influences from multiple traditions and historical periods in order to both use and at the same time destabilise the lyric voice. As such, I argue that Beachy-Quick’s poetry takes the investigation of the poetic speaker as its subject to an unusual degree, enabling his poetry to both embody and directly discuss his own poetic practice as a writer-reader. Following an introduction that includes a chronological overview of Beachy-Quick’s career thus far, this thesis takes the shape of an ‘inventory’ that, in thirty interlinked short essays, examines Beachy-Quick’s use of genre, poetic form, recurrent image, lyric voice and literary tradition from multiple angles. At the same time that these essays offer close readings of individual poems, they also offer discussion and theorisation of contemporary understandings of the lyric voice, experimental lyric hybridity and the relationship of that hybridity to the literary tradition. This inventorial approach creates a set of coordinates allowing for a networked reading that reflects the constellation of approaches and voices Beachy-Quick employs in his poetry. This examination of the lyric voice is also central to the book-length manuscript of my own poems titled “Passage”. These poems share some thematic preoccupations with Beachy-Quick’s work, such as an interest in literary and historic legacy, ecology and place; at the same time they also haunt and are haunted by other traditions and landscapes, exploring lyric inhabitation of time and space. My own creative preoccupations with animals, travel and exploration, science and science fiction emerge in both citational and non-citational new work. In these poems, I move between traditional lyric modes, such as the charm and ekphrasis, into the fragmentary and echoic lyric voice of the cento and processes of erasure. The juxtaposition of citational and non-citational forms allows me to emphasise the way that both “unoriginality” and chorality underpin my own individual poetic sensibility. This verse proposes both a renewal of and radical departure from received text. 2 Part One: Echoes and Polyphonies: The Choral Poetics of Dan Beachy-Quick Kate Middleton 3 Part One: Table of Contents A Note on Style and Abbreviations ....................................................................... 4 Abstract …………………………………………………………………………. 5 “Lyric” / (Epigraph) ……………………………………………………………. 7 Introduction……………………………………………………………………… 8 Inventory Almond ………………………………………………………………………….. 39 Ancientness ……………………………………………………………………… 45 Annotation ……………………………………………………………………… 51 Backwardness …………………………………………………………………… 58 Charm ………………………………………………………………………….. 64 Child / Ghost …………………………………………………………………… 70 Chorus …………………………………………………………………………… 73 Citation ..…………………………………………………………………………. 79 Compass …………………………………………………………………………. 88 Deer ……………………………………………………………………………… 90 Echo …………………………………………………………………………….... 99 Elegy ……………………………………………………………………………… 105 Epigraph / Sub-sub-Librarian …………………………………………………… 114 Etymology ………………………………………………………………………... 118 Hybrid ……………………………………………………………………………. 123 I / I / “I” ………………………………………………………………………… 131 Impersonality …………………………………………………………………….. 137 Lullaby …………………………………………………………………………… 144 Lyric ……………………………………………………………………………… 148 Lyric “I” ………………………………………………………………………….. 163 Mouth / Eyes …………………………………………………………………….. 168 Nature / Ecology ………………………………………………………………… 173 Nest / Silk ………………………………………………………………………... 181 Page / Desk / Work ……………………………………………………………… 185 4 Repetition ………………………………………………………………………… 189 Sameness …………………………………………………………………………. 194 Song ………………………………………………………………………………. 199 Unoriginality ……………………………………………………………………… 203 Whale / Epic ……………………………………………………………………… 208 Zero ……………………………………………………………………………….. 212 Appendix: Index of Themes …………………………………………………… 216 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………... 232 5 A Note on Style and Abbreviations Throughout this work I use the following abbreviations for Dan Beachy-Quick’s works when giving in-text citations: ABC – Apology for the Book of Creatures BWB – A Brighter Word than Bright CA – Circle’s Apprentice ISPS – An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky NTSB – North True South Bright TNSP – This Nest, Swift Passerine WD – A Whaler’s Dictionary WI – Wonderful Investigations Single-word book titles—Spell, Mulberry and gentlessness—are used in full. Essay titles may be shortened to their first word in accordance with MLA 8th edition. In accordance with MLA style, I only offer author name and, if necessary, the titles of essays to indicate quotations from electronic resources. Full bibliographic details are available in the works cited. 6 Lyric /(Epigraph) —after Dan Beachy-Quick The whale by the whale’s own light The song by song’s own mesh of I of we: the zoomorph of lion, man and gentle coo of lullaby Voice—I, we—dissects this sea and whale carves history from the bone lions pace the den of sleep and explorer’s ship moors upon the whaler’s coast Voices torn, pieced, re-sewn In lion light, in whale song, in sleep that follows lullaby, in wakening of lyric night song stages history’s long speech reads whaler’s voyage, lion’s maw Opens field of ancient voice Folds its origami: Form — Kate Middleton 7 Introduction: Disruptive Passage I like how this voice performs itself inside my mouth This voice everyone speaks inside my mouth as me As I speak inside their mouths —“& Co”,
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