Universit~1 of Nottingham Hallward Library ABSTRACT of THESIS

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

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 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.
Recommended publications
  • The New Sentence 22
    THE NEW SENTENCE 22 I, ! 1,1 ' I Ill. II I,I' , I To please a young man there should be I sentences. What are sentences. Like what are sentences. In the part of sentences it for him is happily all. They will name sentences for him. Sentences are called ",I sentences. , Gertrude Stein The sale precedent I can find for the new sentence is Kara In !{ell: Improvisations and that one far-fetched. I am going to make an argument, that there is such a rhing as a new sentence and that it occurs thus far more or less exclusively in rhe prose of the Bay Area. Therefore this talk is aimed ar the 'luestion of rhe prose poem. I say aimed because, in order to undersrand why so little is in fact understood about sentences and prose poems, a certain amount of background material is needed. The proposition of a new sentence suggests a general understanding of sentences per se, against which an evolution or .. hift can be contrasted. This poses a first problem. There is, in the domain of Iinguistics, philosophy and literary criticism, no adequate consensus .It to the definition of a sentence. Odd as that seems, thete ate I reasons for it. Milka lvii:, in Trends in Linguistics, noted that linguists, by the 1930's, had proposed and were using mote than 160 diffetent definitions of "the sentence." The word sentence is itself of relatively recent origin, 63 according to the OED, deriving from 12th Century French. As a until gradually the intonation contours of normal speec~ are noun, the OED proposes 9 definitions.
    [Show full text]
  • Lyn Hejinian “The Inanimate Are Rocks, Desks, Bubble,” 50 from My Life 51 from Writing Is an Aid to Memory 54 the Green 57 “The Erosion of Rocks Blooms
    in the american tree Silliman in the american tree Second Edition, with a new Afterword by Ron Silliman The “Language Poets” have extended the Pound-Williams (or perhaps the Pound-Williams- in the americanlanguage tree realism poetry Zukofsky-Stein) tradition in American writing into new and unexpected territories. In the process, these poets have established themselves as the most rigorous and the most radically experi- mental avant-garde on the current literary scene. This anthology offers the most substantial col- lection of work by the Language Poets now available, along with 130 pages of theoretic statements by poets included in the anthology. As such, In the American Tree does for a new generation of American poets what Don Allen’s The New American Poetry did for an earlier generation. The poets represented include Robert Grenier, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Michael Palmer, Michael Davidson, Clark Coolidge, Charles Bernstein, Hannah Weiner, Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe, Fanny Howe, Bernadette Mayer, Ray DiPalma, and many others. “For millennia, poets have had to make their own way and the world that goes with it. The genius of these various writers and the consummate clartiy with which they are presented here make very clear again that not only is this the road now crucial for all poetry, it’s literally where we are going.” –Robert Creeley “This historic anthology brings into long-needed focus the only serious and concerted movement in American literature of the past two decades. It will be indispensible to anyone with interest in writ- ing’s present and hope for writing’s future.” –Peter Schjeldahl “Provocative in its critique and antidote, this collection invites the curious writer/reader to question all assumptions regarding generally agreed upon values of poetic language practices.
    [Show full text]
  • Women and Ecopoetics: an Introduction in Context
    Harriet Tarlo Women and ecopoetics: an introduction in context This introduction contextualises and introduces the material within the special feature on women and ecopoetics as well as exploring the contributors’ and, on occasion, my own thoughts on the subject. I shall identify some common creative practices and ideological threads whilst respecting the sheer diversity of practitioners and practice presented here. After all, this issue features essays, statements, images, open form poetry, performance pieces, prose poetry, site specific work and found poetry from writers with experience as poets, critics, artists, educators, librarians and media workers. I have organised this work into sections as follows: Poems (selections of work from seven women poets); Recycles (selections of work making use of found text from eight women poets); Essays (seven essays on women poets from an eco-poetical perspective) and Working Notes/Ecopoetical statements. In addition to the working notes from featured poets which take the form traditional in How2, this section contains a number of short statements from writers made in response to the women and ecopoetics theme. Those that stand well alone also appear as “postcards” which has had the added advantage of their acting as a provocative “trail” for the special feature, as well as being a part of it of course. Generic segregation and classification of contents is, in some ways, contrary to the spirit of How2 and perhaps to ecopoetics too, yet it is I think helpful to reading work online to have some method of navigating our way around it. However, I should like to draw attention to the particularly hybrid nature of many of the contributions here.
    [Show full text]
  • 235-Newsletter.Pdf
    The Poetry Project Newsletter Editor: Paul Foster Johnson Design: Lewis Rawlings Distribution: Small Press Distribution, 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 The Poetry Project, Ltd. Staff Artistic Director: Stacy Szymaszek Program Coordinator: Arlo Quint Program Assistant: Nicole Wallace Monday Night Coordinator: Simone White Monday Night Talk Series Coordinator: Corrine Fitzpatrick Wednesday Night Coordinator: Stacy Szymaszek Friday Night Coordinator: Matt Longabucco Sound Technician: David Vogen Videographer: Andrea Cruz Bookkeeper: Lezlie Hall Archivist: Will Edmiston Box Office: Aria Boutet, Courtney Frederick, Gabriella Mattis Interns/Volunteers: Mel Elberg, Phoebe Lifton, Jasmine An, Davy Knittle, Olivia Grayson, Catherine Vail, Kate Nichols, Jim Behrle, Douglas Rothschild Volunteer Development Committee Members: Stephanie Gray, Susan Landers Board of Directors: Gillian McCain (President), John S. Hall (Vice-President), Jonathan Morrill (Treasurer), Jo Ann Wasserman (Secretary), Carol Overby, Camille Rankine, Kimberly Lyons, Todd Colby, Ted Greenwald, Erica Hunt, Elinor Nauen, Evelyn Reilly and Edwin Torres Friends Committee: Brooke Alexander, Dianne Benson, Will Creeley, Raymond Foye, Michael Friedman, Steve Hamilton, Bob Holman, Viki Hudspith, Siri Hustvedt, Yvonne Jacquette, Patricia Spears Jones, Eileen Myles, Greg Masters, Ron Padgett, Paul Slovak, Michel de Konkoly Thege, Anne Waldman, Hal Willner, John Yau Funders: The Poetry Project’s programs and publications are made possible, in part, with public funds from The National Endowment for the Arts. The Poetry Project’s programming is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. The Poetry Project’s programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
    [Show full text]
  • American Book Awards 2004
    BEFORE COLUMBUS FOUNDATION PRESENTS THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS 2004 America was intended to be a place where freedom from discrimination was the means by which equality was achieved. Today, American culture THE is the most diverse ever on the face of this earth. Recognizing literary excel- lence demands a panoramic perspective. A narrow view strictly to the mainstream ignores all the tributaries that feed it. American literature is AMERICAN not one tradition but all traditions. From those who have been here for thousands of years to the most recent immigrants, we are all contributing to American culture. We are all being translated into a new language. BOOK Everyone should know by now that Columbus did not “discover” America. Rather, we are all still discovering America—and we must continue to do AWARDS so. The Before Columbus Foundation was founded in 1976 as a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature. The goals of BCF are to provide recognition and a wider audience for the wealth of cultural and ethnic diversity that constitutes American writing. BCF has always employed the term “multicultural” not as a description of an aspect of American literature, but as a definition of all American litera- ture. BCF believes that the ingredients of America’s so-called “melting pot” are not only distinct, but integral to the unique constitution of American Culture—the whole comprises the parts. In 1978, the Board of Directors of BCF (authors, editors, and publishers representing the multicultural diversity of American Literature) decided that one of its programs should be a book award that would, for the first time, respect and honor excellence in American literature without restric- tion or bias with regard to race, sex, creed, cultural origin, size of press or ad budget, or even genre.
    [Show full text]
  • LANGUAGE POETRY Entry for the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry (2005)
    Craig Dworkin: LANGUAGE POETRY Entry for The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry (2005) The discrepancy between the number of people who hold an opinion about Language Poetry and those who have actually read Language Poetry is perhaps greater than for any other literary phenomenon of the later twentieth century. For just one concrete indicator of this gap, a primer on "The Poetry Pantheon" in The New York Times Magazine (19 February, 1995) listed Paul Hoover, Ann Lauterbach, and Leslie Scalapino as the most representative “Language Poets” — a curious choice given that neither Hoover nor Lauterbach appears in any of the defining publications of Language Poetry, and that Scalapino, though certainly associated with Language Poetry, was hardly a central figure. Indeed, only a quarter-century after the phrase was first used, it has often come to serve as an umbrella term for any kind of self-consciously "postmodern" poetry or to mean no more than some vaguely imagined stylistic characteristics — parataxis, dryly apodictic abstractions, elliptical modes of disjunction — even when they appear in works that would actually seem to be fundamentally opposed to the radical poetics that had originally given such notoriety to the name “Language Poetry” in the first place. The term "language poetry" may have first been used by Bruce Andrews, in correspondence from the early 1970s, to distinguish poets such as Vito Hannibal Acconci, Carl Andre, Clark Coolidge, and Jackson Mac Low, whose writing challenged the vatic aspirations of “deep image” poetry. In the tradition of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofksy, such poetry found precedents in only the most anomalous contemporary writing, such as John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath, Aram Saroyan's Cofee Coffe, Joseph Ceravolo's Fits of Dawn, or Jack Kerouac's Old Angel Midnight.
    [Show full text]
  • Fall 2004 the Wallace Stevens Journal
    The Wallace Stevens Journal The Wallace The Wallace Stevens Journal Special Conference Issue, Part 1 Special Conference Vol. 28 No. 2Fall 2004 Vol. Special Conference Issue, Part 1 A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 28 Number 2 Fall 2004 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 28 Number 2 Fall 2004 Contents Special Conference Issue, Part I Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut Edited by Glen MacLeod and Charles Mahoney Introduction —Glen MacLeod and Charles Mahoney 125 POETS ON STEVENS: INQUIRY AND INFLUENCE A Postcard Concerning the Nature of the Imagination —Mark Doty 129 Furious Calm —Susan Howe 133 Line-Endings in Wallace Stevens —James Longenbach 138 On Wallace Stevens —J. D. McClatchy 141 A Lifetime of Permissions —Ellen Bryant Voigt 146 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON STEVENS Planets on Tables: Stevens, Still Life, and the World —Bonnie Costello 150 Wallace Stevens and the Curious Case of British Resistance —George Lensing 158 Cross-Dressing as Stevens Cross-Dressing —Lisa M. Steinman 166 STEVENSIAN LANGUAGE “A Book Too Mad to Read”: Verbal and Erotic Excess in Harmonium —Charles Berger 175 Place-Names in Wallace Stevens —Eleanor Cook 182 Verbs of Mere Being: A Defense of Stevens’ Style —Roger Gilbert 191 WALLACE STEVENS AND HISTORICISM: PRO AND CON Stevens’ Soldier Poems and Historical Possibility —Milton J. Bates 203 What’s Historical About Historicism? —Alan Filreis 210 Wallace Stevens and Figurative Language: Pro and Con —James Longenbach 219 THE COLLECTED POEMS: THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS Prologues to Stevens Criticism in Fifty Years —John N. Serio 226 The Collected Poems: The Next Fifty Years —Susan Howe 231 Wallace Stevens and Two Types of Vanity —Massimo Bacigalupo 235 Position Paper: Wallace Stevens —Christian Wiman 240 Stevens’ Collected Poems in 2054 —Marjorie Perloff 242 KEYNOTE ADDRESS Wallace Stevens: Memory, Dead and Alive —Helen Vendler 247 THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM Poets of Life and the Imagination: Wallace Stevens and Chick Austin —Eugene R.
    [Show full text]
  • Susan Howe Papers
    http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf5q2nb4cj No online items Susan Howe Papers Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Copyright 2005 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla 92093-0175 [email protected] URL: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/collections/sca/index.html Susan Howe Papers MSS 0201 1 Descriptive Summary Languages: English Contributing Institution: Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla 92093-0175 Title: Susan Howe Papers Creator: Howe, Susan, 1937- Identifier/Call Number: MSS 0201 Physical Description: 29 Linear feet(69 archives boxes, 4 card file boxes, 6 oversize folders) Date (inclusive): 1942-2002 Abstract: Papers of Susan Howe, American poet. The collection consists of Howe's literary correspondence, poetry manuscripts, notes and typescripts for readings and talks, personal and working journals, recordings, research files, and art/poetry installations dating from the 1950s to 2002. Scope and Content of Collection The collection consists of Susan Howe's literary correspondence, poetry manuscripts, notes and typescripts for readings and talks, personal and working journals, recordings, research files, and art/poetry installations dating from the 1950s to 2002. The collection is arranged in three accessions: an accession processed in 1991, an accession processed in 2003, and a small additional accession of manuscripts for Coracle Press Publications acquired in 2009. Accession Processed in 1991: Correspondence, poetry manuscripts, typescripts and notes for readings and talks, personal and working journals, art/poetry installations and over 100 tape recordings from Howe's WBAI Radio program, "Poetry." Most of the material dates from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s.
    [Show full text]
  • Charles Bernstein Papers
    http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt896nd20f No online items Charles Bernstein Papers Mandeville Special Collections Library Mandeville Special Collections Library The UCSD Libraries 9500 Gilman Drive University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093-0175 Phone: (858) 534-2533 Fax: (858) 534-5950 URL: http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/ Copyright 2005 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Charles Bernstein Papers MSS 0519 1 Descriptive Summary Creator: Bernstein, Charles, 1950- Title: Charles Bernstein Papers, Date (inclusive): 1962-2000 Extent: 50.00 linear feet(129 archives boxes, 5 card file boxes and 5 oversize folders) Abstract: Papers of Charles Bernstein, writer, editor, librettist, educator, and publisher, who is most often associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, a body of writing named for the journal (1978-1982) by this name which Bernstein co-edited with Bruce Andrews. Bernstein writes poetry, essays and librettos which foreground the materiality and sociality of language as it exists in different contexts. The papers include correspondence with writers, artists, publishers and friends; manuscript drafts and production materials for his collected works, especially CONTENT'S DREAM (1986), A POETICS (1992) and MY WAY (1998); notebooks and journals (1971-1994); and uncollected poem drafts and working papers. Also included are drafts for the multi-authored poem LEGEND written with Ray DiPalma, Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman. Bernstein's editorial work on Asylum's Press publications, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Journal, the Segue Catalog, BOUNDRY 2: 43 POETS and BOUNDRY 2: 99 POETS, as well as numerous smaller projects are well represented.
    [Show full text]
  • Vertiginous Space: Poetics of Disorientation in Charles Olson, Susan Howe, and Steve Mccaffery
    Vertiginous Space: Poetics of Disorientation in Charles Olson, Susan Howe, and Steve McCaffery by Jason Vernon Starnes M.A. (English), University of British Columbia, 2003 B.A., University of British Columbia, 2000 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences © Jason Vernon Starnes 2012 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2012 All rights reserved. However, in accordance with the Copyright Act of Canada, this work may be reproduced, without authorization, under the conditions for “Fair Dealing.” Therefore, limited reproduction of this work for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting is likely to be in accordance with the law, particularly if cited appropriately. Approval Name: Jason Vernon Starnes Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (English) Title of Thesis: Vertiginous Space: Poetics of Disorientation in Charles Olson, Susan Howe, and Steve McCaffery Examining Committee: Chair: Firstname Surname, Position Jeff Derksen Senior Supervisor Associate Professor Stephen Collis Supervisor Associate Professor Clint Burnham Supervisor Associate Professor Roxanne Panchasi Internal Examiner Associate Professor Department of History Lytle Shaw External Examiner Associate Professor, Department of English New York University Date Defended/Approved: November 26, 2012 ii Partial Copyright Licence iii Abstract This dissertation is a critical study of how representations of space in selected post-war North American avant-garde poetry produce a poetics of disorientation. Reading space as a characteristic of postmodern experience and a medium of subjectivity in the globalizing stage of late capitalism, this study analyzes spatial poetry and the theory of the spatial turn as forms of knowledge that disclose the changing perceived spatiality of the globe and of the subject.
    [Show full text]
  • P. Seaton – Selected Bibliography*​1
    P. Seaton – Selected bibliography*1 ​ *Compiled and edited by Christian Roess (C.R.) ​ ​ Primary Sources I. – Seaton’s Works (by year) ​ [the symbol † before the (year) indicates that currently I have a copy — C.R. ] ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ [ the symbol § indicates available on-line via the Web/internet access] ​ ​ 2 [ bold print indicates a full-length collection, book, or chapbook. Individual works--- poems, prose ​ --- are indicated ​ ​ ​ in italics by “quotation marks”; journals and magazines are underlined] ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ● † (1977a) Interstices in Slit Wrist [Volume 3/4: Double Issue / Spring-1977] edited by ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Terry Swanson (New York, NY) 188 pp. Interstices (p 33-52) consists of the following ​ ​ works: 1) "Reserves" (p. 35) 2) "U​ nder a ​Microscope" (p. 36) ​ ​ 1 As of 19 September 2010. This “Bibliography” is missing quite a bit apparently. I know that it is missing a reference to Primary Writing (edited by Phyllis Rosenzweig & Diane Ward)--- the sixth issue of which (April 1996) ​ ​ was a broadside featuring work by Jessica Grimm and Peter Seaton. Also missing is reference to the issue of M. Champion’s Tongue to Boot that placed work by Seaton. A web search has C. Bernstein, in an email to Craig ​ ​ Dworkin (Nov. 14, 2000) writing: “I have only seen a few poems from the early 90s, probably, that were in Big Allis”. Did Big ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Allis publish any of Seaton’s work? ​ I have been unsuccessful tracking down any leads on “Imaginary Ship”, supposedly published by Beaumont Press. Also, a search on the “Google Books” site lists collaboration between Seaton and N. Piombino called Interstices, ​ ​ with a publication date of 1974.
    [Show full text]
  • AK Ramanujan
    ®ÜNGTIO|ß JSBkES, ffifflß, W IMS The newest addition to Pantheon s “splendid folklore series.’’ — The Washington Post FOLKTALES FROM INDIA A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-two Languages Edited and With an Introduction hy A.K. Ramanujan These 110 tales from India’s magnificent oral tradition — ranging from Bengali to Kashmiri — provide a richly diverse glimpse of Indian culture through the ages. Illustrated throughout with original line drawings. Edited hy a master storyteller... Marvelous... a provocative world a marvelous collection of wit, wisdom of wily and witty grandmothers, and humor in folktales from twenty- wives, pandits, fools and beasts. two languages and as many —Barbara Stoler Miller, different regions. Milbanh Professor of Asian — Milton B. Singer, Cultures, Barnard College Paul Klapper Professor of the Unparalleled in its scope of Social Sciences, sources...infused with the University of author s unique sense of Chicago and sense of beauty.” Erdman —Wendy Doniger, author of Women, Joan of Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts courtesy scroll, storyteller's Rajasthani from Details Illustration: Contemporary American and European Painting and Sculpture HIRSCHL& ADLER MODERN 851 Madison New York 10021 212 744-6700 Fax 212 737-2614 CONJUNCTIONS Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing Edited by Bradford Morrow Contributing Editors Walter Abish John Ashbery Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Guy Davenport Elizabeth Frank William H. Gass Susan Howe Kenneth Irby Robert Kelly Ann Lauterbach Patrick McGrath Nathaniel Tarn Quincy Troupe John Edgar Wideman Bard College distributed by Random House, Inc. EDITOR: Bradford Morrow MANAGING EDITOR: Dale Cotton SENIOR EDITORS: Susan Bell, Martine Bellen, Karen Kelly, Kate Norment ART EDITOR: Anthony McCall ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Eric Darton, Marlene Hennessy, Yannick Murphy EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Patrick Doud, Jonathan Miller, Cathleen Shattuck CONJUNCTIONS is published in the Spring and Fall of each year by Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504.
    [Show full text]