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Radical Democracy, Materiality, and the Poetic Subject in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

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Radical Democracy, Materiality, and the Poetic Subject in Twentieth-Century American Poetry Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations January 2019 The Center Of All Beauty: Radical Democracy, Materiality, And The Poetic Subject In Twentieth-Century American Poetry Marcus Merritt Wayne State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Merritt, Marcus, "The Center Of All Beauty: Radical Democracy, Materiality, And The Poetic Subject In Twentieth-Century American Poetry" (2019). Wayne State University Dissertations. 2177. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/2177 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. THE CENTER OF ALL BEAUTY: RADICAL DEMOCRACY, MATERIALITY, AND THE POETIC SUBJECT IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY by MARCUS MERRITT DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2018 MAJOR: ENGLISH Approved By: _____________________________________ Advisor Date _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members, Barrett Watten, Jonathan Flatley, renèe hoogland, and Lytle Shaw, for their input, feedback, and intellectual guidance as I have worked my way through this project. A great deal of the foundational framework for this project would not have come together in this way were it not for the opportunities presented by the seminars I took from Barrett, Jonathan, and renèe. I especially have to thank Barrett for the serious commitment he has demonstrated over the years to helping me see this project through to completion and for the serious intellectual rigor he consistently expected from me. i PREFACE Epigraph: Autobiographia Literaria When I was a child I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds flew away. If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out “I am an orphan.” And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine! (Frank O’Hara Collected Poems 11) ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments i Preface ii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 “Everyone should know EVERYTHING”: Spring and All’s Poetics of Deauthorization 49 Chapter 2 “Only one of many responses”: Dissensual Collaboration in Frank O’Hara’s Poetics 102 Chapter 3 “But he says I misunderstood”: Alice Notley’s Everyday Life Poetry and Mystified Domestic Relations 150 Chapter 4 “Gradually we become history”: Amiri Baraka and the Cultivation of the Revolutionary Poetic Subject 207 Works Cited 256 Abstract 267 Autobiographical Statement 269 iii 1 INTRODUCTION William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum “no ideas but in things” appears three times in the short 1927 version of his poem “Paterson.” There, it is an exhortation: “Say it! No ideas but in things” (Williams Collected 264). While the phrase has often been taken up as a stylistic or philosophical directive about how writers should aim for objective description of objects as a way to purify writing of romantic excess, that really only captures a way the statement can be taken to be synonymous with something like the ethos of Imagism, or with Ezra Pound’s own rule, “direct treatment of the thing.” In “Paterson,” though, the concern is not how the writer should treat the things, but how ideas are in them. And while some of the things in “Paterson” are “snow and grass,” the things are more precisely “in the pause between / snow and grass in the parks and at the street ends,” they are a river that “comes pouring in above the city / and crashes from the edge of the gorge / in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists…and factories crystallized from its force” (263-64). These are things, in other words, whose ideas are in the way they exist at the meeting of natural and constructed, natural and social. Immediately after the third ringing of the theme, the speaker of the poem asks, “Who are these people (how complex / this mathematic) among whom I see myself / in the regularly ordered plateglass of / his thoughts,” where “his” refers to “Mr. Paterson.” The city, perhaps. Perhaps the poem. The speaker situates himself among the people who compose the thoughts of Paterson, who themselves are their own complex mathematic, in order to see himself. He sees himself as part of that thought, an instance of “the divisions and imbalances / of his whole concept” (265-66). Within the poem, “no ideas but in things” is an argument that the “I” of the poem can only really be seen when 2 understood as an expression of the material conditions that compose the social world within which the “I” is situated. To “say it” is to make this fact perceptible. A casual reading of Frank O’Hara’s “Autobiographia Literaria,” the epigraph to this dissertation, might read the poem as having an opposite movement from that of “Paterson.” O’Hara’s speaker isolates himself from the material and social world around him, and in arriving at that point of isolation, begins “writing these poems” (O’Hara Collected 11). However, such a reading would render the poem inconsistent with the rest of O’Hara’s work, which is often most notable for how thoroughly aware it is of itself as being socially embedded, and especially embedded within an urban landscape. O’Hara is not a poet of isolation, which suggests that we should look for something else in “Autobiographia Literaria.” In removing himself from the material of his childhood, O’Hara’s speaker doesn’t free himself from a world around him that he had previously understood to be hostile. Instead, he changes his orientation within that system from a passive shielding of himself to a creative projection of himself. In “writing these poems,” he becomes “the / center of all beauty!” I would argue that the poem is an argument about how, through a process of creative subjectivization, the poetic subject’s situation within a set of material conditions becomes the perceptible subject of a poetics. The poet makes use of poetry as a way of training their self into an active stance toward the conditions of their existence. It is in the pause between these two poems that this dissertation its point of inquiry. Between Williams’s “Say it! No ideas but in things,” as a procedure for making visible the ways in which the poetic subject is constructed by the material and social conditions of the world in which it finds itself, and O’Hara’s poetic subject’s declaration to be “the / center of 3 all beauty!” I argue we find the founding of a poetics based in making use of the activity of poetry as a way for the poetic subject to investigate the material conditions of their own existence. This investigation allows poetry to become a process for developing critical knowledge of the poetic subject’s material and social world, and in doing so, opens up the possibility of the poetic subject enacting a creative orientation toward those conditions. Poetry, according to this poetics, becomes a self-pedagogical tool. Poetry becomes part of a process for training the poetic subject to function as an active site for the production of critical knowledge about the material conditions of the poet’s existence, both as an individual self and as a part of an ongoing social world. In the following pages, I make the case for a strain of poetics in twentieth-century American poetry that has made use of poetry as a tool for the self-pedagogy of the poetic subject toward a critical knowledge of life as a set of material conditions. This poetics entails a radically democratic project insofar as, in order to make poetry available as a tool any subject can avail themselves of for critical knowledge, it consistently aims to strip away or invalidate whatever qualifications are supposed to exist for an individual to have access to poetry as a practice. It is also materialist in that it understands poetry as a practice for engaging a subject in a materially situated investigation of the conditions of their own existence, a process that renders those conditions perceptible and therefore subject to critique, rather than aiming at any kind of transcendental or totalizing awareness through which a subject arrives at an elevated or ideal positive knowledge. Chapter 1 outlines how this radically democratic and materialist project takes shape in the poetics of Williams. Chapter 2 moves into the ways O’Hara’s poetics renders social relations visible as part of 4 this project’s materialism, in his case as material for the critical investigation and creative articulation of an oppositional social formation. The poetics I outline holds poetry’s value to lie in its use for generating a critical knowledge that arises from within the grounds of its own investigation, which makes poetry a site for developing critique that also functions very differently from a critique which begins by imagining the remove of an outside, potentially objective, critical position. In calling attention to the way this poetics is self-pedagogical, I mean to suggest that it understands poetry as part of a process through which an individual sets themselves in a particular relation to the material world they encounter such that the conditions for production of the self and the social become visible and thereby available for interrogation or critique. In chapter 3, this aspect of the poetics becomes especially pronounced in the 1970s poetry of Alice Notley, as she elaborates a poetry constructed with the relations that compose the domestic situation of her poetic subject, making visible the mystified demands for labor the situation insistently places her under.
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