Excuses for Emotion A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences January 2013 by Joe DeLong M.A., University of Cincinnati, 2006 B.A., The Ohio State University, 2004 Committee Chair: Lisa Hogeland, Ph.D. Abstract: Excuses for Emotion analyzes representations of emotion in recent American poetry on the subject of parents and gay and lesbian icons. Much of this poetry demonstrates affection for and attachment to those figures, but those positive emotions are seldom without complications, whether ambivalence, resentment, doubt, or self- questioning. Moreover, even poems with a primarily negative emotional register tend to have similar complications. The standard explanation for these complications would be that human emotions are indeed complex, and that the engagement with complexity gives poetry its value as a genre. In practice, though, this complication has become less an achievement than a requirement. If it is to be taken seriously from an institutional perspective, contemporary American poetry requires what I call an excuse for emotion, a rhetorical cue that makes emotional “acceptable” by complicating it, calling its authenticity or accuracy into question, or allying it with a political cause taken more seriously than the emotion itself. My major argument is that one should not unquestioningly accept these conventions constraining the emotional content of poetry, which arise from a set of relatively unexamined assumptions about quality and significance, both in the field of literary scholarship and in the community of American poetry. I see this project as related to a recent interest in emotion within literary studies that has been called emotion theory, which considers the ways in which expressions of emotion and emotional norms carry cultural meaning. Chapter One, “Sympathetic Sons,” looks at the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Hass. Both poets write about mothers suffering from significant mental illness, which creates distance between them and their sons, even as the sons retain a strong sense of affection for them. Chapter Two, “Incomplete Daughters,” looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds. Both poets write about parents whom the speaker admires and desires affection from but who ultimately deny them that affection, which sends them looking for it elsewhere. Chapter Three, “Displaced Children,” looks at the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye, Rafael Campo, and Li-Young Lee. They write about parents whose experience as immigrants influences the ways in which their children understand, relate to, and interact with them, with the relationship both complicated and enriched by cultural difference. Chapter Four, “Women of Power,” looks at the poetry of lesbian feminist poets Adrienne Rich, Judy Grahn, and June Jordan. Focusing on building optimism and determination while preventing complacency, they write about women throughout history who have had forms of power, but who also, for various reasons, have experienced failures of that power. Chapter Five, “The Promise of Whitman,” looks at the poetry of gay poets Allen Ginsberg, Richard Howard, Timothy Liu, and Mark Doty. They express attachment to Walt Whitman’s idealistic vision, even as they call it into question, especially insofar as it contrasts with the actual experiences of gay life. ii iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Professors Lisa Hogeland, Jon Kamholtz, and John Drury for their insight and encouragement during my time at the University of Cincinnati. I want to thank my mother Rebecca and my sister Lisa for their love and support. iv CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. Sympathetic Sons 30 Allen Ginsberg 34 Robert Hass 58 Conclusion 81 2. Incomplete Daughters 87 Sylvia Plath 93 Sharon Olds 114 Conclusion 148 3. Displaced Children 156 Naomi Shihab Nye 161 Rafael Campo 173 Li-Young Lee 189 Conclusion 201 4. Women of Power 209 Adrienne Rich 213 Judy Grahn 226 June Jordan 233 Conclusion 243 5. The Promise of Whitman 250 Allen Ginsberg 255 Richard Howard 262 Timothy Liu 280 Mark Doty 285 Conclusion 292 Conclusion 297 Works Cited 308 v INTRODUCTION In American poetry from roughly the 1960s onward, parents have become one of the foremost subjects. For many people, the relationship with their parents forms a cornerstone of their life experiences and their own sense of self. Certainly that is the cultural narrative, and it is quite possibly a fundamental part of human experience. Many commentators, particularly on the right, have lamented the breakdown of the “traditional” family, by which they mean a heterosexual couple who have produced biological children in the context of legally recognized marriage. Of course, that family structure, never having been entirely the norm, is now even less so, and the stigma of alternative family structures has decreased. On the other hand, numerous factors such as increased life expectancy, smaller family size, longer periods of education, later marriage and childbirth, increased housing costs, and increasing connectedness through technology have led to new and, in some ways, stronger bonds between many parents and their adult children.1 Now, even in good circumstances the relationship between parent and child can be fraught with guilt, blame, differences in expectations, and differences in worldview. In other situations, the relationship can be non-existent or pathological. Still, to the consternation of cultural commentators who lament the rise of “helicopter parents” and other forms of perceived excess in closeness between parent and adult child, this shift has occurred, and it has been embraced by many. 1 As for the time parents spend with their younger children, Garey and Valerie Ramey write, “After three decades of decline, the amount of time spent by parents on childcare in the United States began to rise dramatically in the mid- 1990s” (129). I would speculate that this increased involvement would persist through at least early adulthood, which, anecdotally, is supported by the frequent mention in major news outlets of “helicopter parents” heavily involved in their children’s extracurricular activities in preparation for college and their actual lives in college. Interestingly, Ramey and Ramey add, “Finding no empirical support for standard explanations, such as selection or income effects, we argue instead that increased competition for college admissions may be an important factor” (129). This college-related focus suggests that this increased level of parent involvement has class-related dimensions. That said, it is precisely class strata containing a high proportion of college-educated individuals from which poets, tied as they are to the academy, tend to emerge. 1 Other factors—aesthetic, intellectual, and academic—have also played a role in the proliferation of poetry about parents. One has been a reaction against the New Critical2 privileging of “impersonality,” a dubious concept advocated by T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”3 This change brought a general expansion of subject matter, with an increase in emphasis on personal experience as exemplified most famously by the so-called Confessional poets,4 but also by the Beat poets, Black Arts poets, feminist poets, and others. These writers challenged assumptions about what was appropriate subject matter and tone, which was part of a broader challenge to assumptions about whose experiences mattered and were worthy of attention from “serious” people. In its simplest terms, this shift reflected awareness that the personal was political, and vice versa.5 So-called domestic concerns, long associated with female experience, began to be taken more seriously, and their reflexive dismissal began to become more suspect. When I spoke to Rita Dove during a question and answer session in 2010, she said that she saw another factor being the mid-century rise of the writing workshop, along with the 2 Samuel Maio writes, “The New Criticism, of which [James E. B.] Breslin and [Ralph J.] Mills wrote, espoused the view that ‘a work of art is an object in itself,’ and some of the criteria of this ‘objective poem’ theory were the autonomy of every poem, verbal ingenuity and wit, sustained objectivity, complex strains of irony, and aesthetic distance. The revolt against such New Critical ideas of verse—including also regular meter counts and rhymed stanzas, allusions to literature or other arts, subjects of ideation and philosophy (but not of one’s subjective experience, which resulted in the poem being considered ‘a neutral object’)—informed the basis of contemporary personal poetry and its voices. This ‘revolution in poetic taste’ (to borrow a phrase of Louis Simpson) manifests itself in verse that is markedly different in subject and style from New Critical poetry, but which retains some remnants of the modernists’ personae” (8-9). 3 Eliot writes, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (10-11). 4 I understand the “Confessional poets” to be Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman. This term refers to their at-times taboo and sensational subject matter—such as depression, substance abuse, tempestuous relationships, and sexuality—described from the perspective of a speaker whom one might read as the poet him or herself, despite stylized language and the occasional use of persona. 5 Even the Confessional poets, less explicitly political than feminists and Black Arts poets, challenged social norms, especially gender norms, in politically significant ways; as Diane Middlebrook puts it, “Confessional poetry was not overtly political, but it participated in the protest against Impersonality as a poetic value by reinstating an insistently autobiographical first person engaged in resistance to the pressure to conform.