LANDSCAPE AS LANGUAGE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SELECTED WORKS BY SUSAN HOWE AND DAPHNE MARLATT Rhiannon Imms Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2006 Universit~1 of Nottingham Hallward Library ABSTRACT OF THESIS Landscape as Language: A Comparative Study of Selected Works by Susan Howe and Daphne Marlatt. Rhiannon Imms This thesis explores the work of two contemporary women poets, one American, the other Canadian, looking particularly at questions of subjectivity and embodiment in relation to place and to history. Their work is considered in the contexts of American modernist poetry, for instance that of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson, and in the light of critical theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. Modernist concerns with the materiality of the text, both as product of a capitalist economy and as visual object, are considered alongside postmodern aspects of language as processional and reflexive. The early work of each writer is discussed separately in Chapters One and Two, with selected later work in more direct comparison in Chapters Three and Four. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham for granting me a studentship to fund my first year of doctoral research, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding the two subsequent years. I am grateful to my supervisors at Nottingham, Professor David Murray and Doctor Susan Billingham, for their expert help, and for their unreasonable patience. Thanks also to fellow research students who were kind enough to assist, either with technical problems, in the case of Peter Hammond, or with perceptive readings of, and responses to, various pieces of work in progress: Lisa Rull, Bronagh Clarke and Yan Ying. I appreciate the assistance of members of staff at the British Library; and at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, archivists Lynda Claasen and Alexandra Rosen Gagne. Michael Davidson was a wonderful contact at San Diego and I am grateful for the interest he showed in the project and the helpful comments he made. Thank you to my family for bearing with me. Finally, I remember Gustaf Sobin who is the inspiration for my love of American poetry. CONTENTS Introduction: Comparative Contexts 1 Chapter One: Mapping a Way Out: Marlatt's What Matters 57 Chapter Two: Breaking into Genesis: Howe's Frame Stuctures 118 Chapter Three: The Wood for the Trees; The River and Sea: Howe's Articulation a/Sound Forms in Time and Marlatt's Steveston 176 Chapter Four: Old World Horizons, New World Shores: Howe's Thorow and The Liberties, Marlatt's How Hug a Stone 246 Bibliography 311 INTRODUCTION Comparative Contexts I This is a comparative study of the work of two contemporary North American poets, Susan Howe who lives, writes and teaches in New England, and Daphne Marlatt whose base is on the West Coast of Canada. My study focuses on their engagements with place, with history and with language, and more particularly with issues of embodiment in relation to these. The thesis will situate these poets initially in relation to a strand of late twentieth century poetry which emerged as a deliberately marginal, intellectually difficult interrogation of the structures and uses of language in the United States and which, as a literary development, includes writers from Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia. As Jerome McGann implies in his editorial of Verse, Vol. 7, No.1, a radical, challenging poetry emerged in the United States in the 1960s as part of the widespread spirit of protest and revolt, particularly in response to the Vietnam War. At the same time, this oppositional writing was attempting a break from a "degenerative [literary] history," what McGann calls '"the degeneration of the romantic eye," so that the work attempts a relinquishment of the ego to the medium of language where it becomes 1 "not an authority, ... instead a witness, for and against." This "dec entering of the 'I'" takes place on a formal level so that disorientation is a condition of comprehension, and the reader must negotiate possibilities of meaning within "a wholesale derangement of the sentences."l This radical, difficult, oppositional writing is an element of postmodern culture, a phenomenon Frederic Jameson defines as an historical development of western capitalism arising in the late 1950s and 1960s. The term "postmodernism" for Jameson is interchangeable with "the multinational," a latter phase of capitalism coming after "the earlier expansions of the national market and older imperialist system, which each had their own cultural specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their dynamics." Jameson argues that the expansion of multinational capital has encroached upon, suffused, and colonised all areas of "post-industrial" society and subjectivity so that even the most radical, experimental and controversial gestures made by writers and artists are vulnerable to its reifications? The opacity of the language of the new, initially American west coast writing was resistant to the imperatives of contemporary commerce, defining a strategic space between the language of poetry and the language of advertisement. McGann cites Peter Seaton's poem "An Ethics of Anxiety,,3 as an exemplary postmodern title, and continues to make the observation that I Jerome McGann, "Postmodem Poetries," Verse 7, no. 1 (1990): 6-8. 2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991),43-49. 3 Peter Seaton, "An Ethics of Anxiety," Verse 7, no. 1 (1990) : 18-19. 2 despite their themes and methods of fragmentation and disorientation, for these poets language reconstructs a vision that is social rather than solipsistic.4 I think that Howe and Marlatt are interesting within this area of postmodem poetics because of the ways in which their writing examines and exposes the material interconnectedness of the human body and systems of power. Language as medium of the imagining, sentient body is risked within and against language as illusory instrument of advanced capitalism. Their writing does not recoil from the territories of postmodernity but constructs sites of language in resistance to the encroachments into "those ... pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious)," by the commercial world.s The writing refuses to acquiesce but instead asserts "the imagination of those places, the ... judgement that they are what they are ... that they define one of the ways we live now.,,6 This thesis will examine selected works of Marlatt and Howe, as an enquiry into the means by which the writing finds spaces of resistance, and both attempts the possibility and confronts the impossibility of writing beyond a franchised subjectivity. I am interested in the contemporary writing of landscape partly because it is in a sense the antithesis ofpostmodemism. What does ''Nature'' mean at the millennium, in the cosmopolitan, technocratic west? It is difficult to separate a concept of landscape from traces of Romantic and conservative priorities. It belongs more to the "degenerative history" than to the restless appropriations of a global media and the oppositional responses to it that 4 McGann, "Postmodem Poetries," 7. 5 Jameson, Postmodernism, 49. 6 McGann, "Postmodem Poetries," 7. 3 radical poetry asserts. Or, again with reference to Jameson, it belongs to the substitute realm of nostalgia in the absence of the "real."7 Therefore, if "Nature" or "wilderness" is a concern of these writers it must be in the context of the material world within and against which they work. Perhaps, it has to do with composition and decomposition, the corruption of culture by nature and vice versa; the machine in the forest, the wood in the paper, the tree in the atrium, the wilderness on screen. Finally, only the electronic text can provisionally forget the forest as origin. These writers do not construct forms of poetry about loss, another theme of Romanticism, amidst such heterogeneity. Rather they acknowledge and exploit not loss so much as the condition of being lost; "lost in language" is a phrase both Howe and Marlatt variously use. The subject and the physical world increasingly share forms of estrangement and mutability, and this thesis will try to describe how Marlatt and Howe represent such forms. By what methods do they order language so that "the imagination of those places" flares within "the judgement" of these poets? If the "places" the poet writes are recognised as also prior to commercial (re)development and the flood of the "simulacrum,,,g the "judgement" and the "imagination" will create a dynamic of contradiction. For instance, a lyric thread in response to "landscape" is broken and contravened, in an act of writing material forms as a form of cultural dissent. 7 Jameson, Postmodernism, 19-21. 8 Ibid., 46. 4 In aesthetic terms, the foregrounding of the material, which Howe's work in particular demonstrates, is part of a modernist insistence on attention and specificity which comes down through Imagism, Objectivism, and the "palimtext," the name Michael Davidson gives to the accretion of palpable manuscripts deposited as archive.9 Both Davidson and McGann trace the importance of composition and materiality as content in modem and postmodem poetry, an aesthetic and political emphasis made possible by innovations in print technology. 10 The rise and proliferation of small press magazines and chapbooks between the late 1950s and the late 1980s in North America were often linked to anti-establishment, particularly anti- Vietnam War and pro-civil rights activism.ll Because it was often aligned with an oppositional stance towards mainstream corporate politics, the object-ness of poetry had an overt history of material production and an allegiance to political activism.