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Poetics of Difficulty in Postmodern Poetry A POETICS OF DIFFICULTY IN POSTMODERN POETRY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Nandini Ramesh Sankar August 2012 © 2012 Nandini Ramesh Sankar POETICS OF DIFFICULTY IN POSTMODERN POETRY Nandini Ramesh Sankar, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 ABSTRACT This dissertation explores aspects of difficulty in the work of post-1945 British and American poets. While no unified theory of difficulty is attempted, difficulty is interpreted as part of the poem’s ethical and intellectual commitment towards the socio- historical matrix that harbors it. Chapter 1 undertakes a general overview of the aesthetic and social issues involved in the practice of poetic difficulty. In chapter 2, I examine the work of the American poet John Ashbery. Through readings of The Tennis Court Oath, “The Skaters,” and “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” I argue that Ashbery’s poetry is uncertain about the ethicality of difficulty, and as a result the difficulty of his poetry performs complex involutions and self-defeating maneuvers in which irony becomes both indispensable and insufficient. In chapter 3, I discuss both the early and late poetry of J.H. Prynne with a special emphasis on the reader’s complex relationship with a late- Modernist text that demands tremendous amounts of labor. I argue that this relationship can be understood in terms of a version of love that is shaped both by Prynne’s explicit theoretical positions and by the reader’s own perceptions of loyalty and reward. Chapter 4 takes up the possibility that difficulty in poetry is an outcome of the poet’s sense that language is complicit in, and is the prime instrument of, collective acts of violence. I look at J.H. Prynne’s “Refuse Collection,” which was written in response to the torture in Abu Ghraib prison. I complement this stance towards complicity with a reading of Peter Riley’s poetry, which questions the inevitability of complicity and difficulty. In the fifth and final chapter, I take up the possibility advanced by both British and American poets as well as twentieth-century philosophers that poetry is a privileged site of thinking, and that difficulty is an effect and instrument of such thought. I conclude that poetic difficulty might indeed point to a radically different mode of employing and responding to human creativity. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Nandini Ramesh Sankar was born in the Indian state of Kerala, and completed her BA in English from Vimala College, Calicut University. She received MA and MPhil degrees in English from The Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (now The English and Foreign Languages University), Hyderabad, India. iii This dissertation is dedicated with love to my parents S.P. Ramesh and K. Hemalatha iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has been a great teacher, but its lessons were not always easy, and the limits of my own resources and ardor often prevented me from being a perfect student. I could not have completed this long and difficult journey without the goodwill of many people and institutions, whose interest in seeing my project through at least equaled mine. My first debt is to the members of my dissertation committee— Professors Roger Gilbert, Jonathan Culler, and Anette Schwarz. Special thanks to Roger Gilbert for his passion for poetry, catholicity of taste, helpful skepticism, and generous moral support. It was a privilege to watch Jonathan Culler’s meticulousness, compassion, and intellectual acuity in action, and I have learnt a lot from him. Thanks also to Anette Schwarz whose intellectual companionship and sense of humor helped me to keep in sight a sanity that has little to do with academic success. I also thank Professors Susan Buck-Morss, Debra Fried, Satya Mohanty, and Omri Moses, whose courses provided crucial momentum for my thinking and writing at Cornell. I am also very grateful to Professor Douglas Mao, who guided the initial and tentative stages of this project while he was at Cornell and continued to encourage me from Johns Hopkins. Rick Bogel and Catherine Burroughs for their heartening support and interest in my work: Rick’s appreciative remarks about my writing couldn’t have come at a better time. Warmest gratitude is due to Professor Dan Schwarz, who is a continuing source of inspiration as a teacher and scholar. TAing for his Modernism course was the most enjoyable bit of teaching I did at Cornell. My thanks to Professor A.V. Ashok, Professor T. Sriraman, Professor Alok Bhalla, Professor Javeed Alam, Professor K.P. Augustine, and Dr. Rajiv C. Krishnan for their encouragement during various stages of my academic career. Discussions with Peter Riley, R.F. Langley, Ewan Smith, Ian Patterson, Tom v Lowenstein, Anna Mendelssohn (a.k.a. Grace Lake), Martin Thom, Simon Jarvis, and Denise Riley were crucial for the developing argument of this dissertation. Special thanks to Peter and Beryl Riley for their unforgettable hospitality during my visit to Cambridge. Thanks also to Peter Riley, R.F. Langley, Ian Patterson, Kate Wheale, Rajiv C. Krishnan, and Michael Tencer for providing me with copies of rare and crucial documents. I am very grateful to J.H. Prynne for allowing me to attend the 3-day seminar for graduate students that he conducted at the University of Chicago in 2009. I thank Stephanie Anderson, Joshua Kotin, and Joshua Adams and other graduate students at the University of Chicago for making my visit to Chicago a memorable experience. I am also very grateful to Antoine Cazé, Abigail Lang, Olivier Brossard, and Vincent Broqua for organizing the ‘John Ashbery in Paris’ conference (2010), and David Nowell-Smith and Abigail Lang for organizing the ‘Legacies of Modernism’ conference (2011), both of which were very helpful to think through some of the issues I’ve discussed in this dissertation. Thanks also to Alex Papanicolopoulos for being a tremendous source of inspiration. I would like to express my affectionate gratitude to the staff of the Olin, Uris, and Kroch Libraries at Cornell for their support and friendship. I also thank the staff of the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut for their assistance during my visits to consult their manuscript and rare book resources. Special thanks to Michele Mannella, Vicki Brevetti, Darlene Flint, Marianne Marsh and the rest of the administrative staff at the Department of English at Cornell for creating a congenial environment for graduate students. My thanks also to the Cornell University Graduate School for the teaching assistantships, fellowships, and travel grants I received over the years. I remember with gratitude Claire Gleitman, Hugh Egan, and Kenesha Vick of the English Department at Ithaca College for their warmth, understanding, and helpfulness. vi Thanks also to Anne Stork and Paula Turkon of Ithaca College who gave me important moral support during the final stages of the writing of this dissertation. Thanks to Krupa Shandilya, Debarati Biswas, Corey Wronski-Meyersak, Pragyan Rath, Gautama Polanki, and Arina Rotaru for their friendship. I thank my parents, brother and sister, along with my friends and extended family, for giving me the courage and faith to see this dissertation through. I remember with love all those who contributed directly or indirectly to my work without waiting to see the final product: Anna Mendelssohn, Roger Langley, K.P. Augustine, C.K. Krishnan, Paru, Bindu, Apurva, and S.P. Ramesh. They teach me that it is the act, and not its result, that matters. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch .................................................................................................................... …iii Dedication .................................................................................................................................... …iv Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... …v Preface .......................................................................................................................................... …ix Chapter 1: Difficulty: General Considerations ............................................................................ 1 Chapter 2: Self, Ethics, and Difficulty in John Ashbery ......................................................... 53 Chapter 3: Tough Love: Reading J.H. Prynne ....................................................................... 106 Chapter 4: Difficulty and Complicity ....................................................................................... 164 Chapter 5: Thinking through Difficulty .................................................................................. 216 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 276 viii PREFACE We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. —T.S. Eliot1 It must be abstract. —Wallace Stevens2 These famous Modernist pronouncements have in common an air of inevitability: the auxiliary “must” features prominently in both. If Eliot points to a set of socio- cultural conditions as the
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