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CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty APPARATUS POETICA: THE QUESTION OF TECHNOLOGY IN MID-TWENTIETH- CENTURY AMERICAN 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 Avery Slater August 2014 © 2014 Avery Slater APPARATUS POETICA: THE QUESTION OF TECHNOLOGY IN MID-TWENTIETH- CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY Avery Slater, Ph.D. Cornell University 2014 “Apparatus Poetica” considers how four poets in the late modernist tradition reconceive the potentials of poetic language in order to address the question of advanced technology. Outlining challenges posed to language by communications industries, information theory, computation, and the threat of nuclear war, I show how four poets—James Merrill, Muriel Rukeyser, H.D., and Jack Spicer—explore affinities and crucial distinctions between poetry and technology. Through their experiments in what I call “apparatus poetics,” these poets denaturalize culturally embedded assumptions surrounding technology’s “neutrality” and poetry’s expressive “purity.” They do so through procedural innovations in the genre of the poetic epic, that form not coincidentally deemed by modernist anthropologists as the earliest human memory-technology. I begin with a discussion of how the montage apparatus of testimonial poetry in Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead works to indict industrial capital’s technological tactics of historical effacement. I next discuss how Jack Spicer, working as a structural linguist in the age of IBM, uses a late modernist method, the “serial lyric,” to set up a confrontation between poetic consciousness and language. Spicer casts the old predicament of thought’s alienation from language in a new light defined by contemporary forms of technological emergence (especially computational intelligence). In the historical moment where databases begin to supplant cultural archives, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt meditates on translation and disintegration at the virtual horizon of memory and myth. I attend to how H.D.’s late-career epic revives an earlier, modernist moment of inquiry into the “machine mind” and “mnemic technology” through her collaboration with Sigmund Freud. I conclude with an exploration of how James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover engages language’s aleatory powers to situate inspiration’s accidents amid uncertain historical and technological horizons. This dissertation explores how these late modernists use language’s technē to rethink mid-century historical forces catalyzed by technology. Insisting on language’s poetic ability to exceed instrumentalized capture, these poets share an interest in theorizing new ethical relations for reconnecting “subject” and “process” in an age when forms of collectivity are undergoing rapid technological redefinition. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Avery Slater was an Andrew W. Mellon graduate fellow at the Society for the Humanities during the focal research theme “Occupation” (2013-2014), and she is the recipient of a two year postdoctoral fellowship in English at the University of Texas at Austin (2014-2016). She holds an M.F.A. in poetry (2006, University of Washington) and an M.Phil. in Culture and Criticism (2007, University of Cambridge) where she specialized in the History and Philosophy of Science. Her work in the fields of comparative poetics, technology studies, and film theory has appeared in or is forthcoming from Cultural Critique, American Literature, and Thinking Verse. Her poetry has been published most recently in Raritan, Poetry London, Literary Imagination, Parnassus, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. She is the 2014 recipient of Cornell’s Corson Browning poetry prize, and she recently finished a translation of Paul Celan’s 1963 poetry collection The No-One’s Rose. Currently completing a book manuscript based on her dissertation, she is also beginning work on a second project in comparative ecopoetics and translation theory. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am profoundly grateful to the Society for the Humanities for the research fellowship they extended to me during my final year at Cornell University. Many thanks are owed to all the Society fellows during this year (focal theme: “Occupation”), especially to Jodi Dean, Jasbir Puar, Diana Allen, Jason Smith, Jordana Rosenberg, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown. The weekly seminars, the impromptu conversations, and the truly nonstop intellectual engagement contributed incalculably to my education at Cornell. I will always hold that year as a paradigm for what academic conversation can achieve. I would like to give special thanks to those faculty members at Cornell who, while not on my committee, have still given their time to help me in my work: Tracy McNulty, Ishion Hutchinson, Amanda Jo Goldstein, Camille Robcis, and Peter Gilgen. I also want to thank the friends who have helped me the most through this difficult and highly unforeseeable process of research, writing, and thinking: Lynne Stahl, Jacob Brogan, and Lindsay Hutton, as well as Kevin Duong, whose generosity, rigor, and brilliance have been a great gift to my academic life. Most especially I am indebted to the friendship and collegiality of Corinna Lee, whose intellectual enthusiasm has never ceased, over so many years (and so many winters) to enliven, refine, challenge, and elevate my thinking. A very sincere thank you to my past teachers at the University of Washington who inspired me to find and pursue this path that could bring together poetry and theory: Brian Reed, Carolyn Allen, and Gillian Harkins, and with undying gratitude to Chandan Reddy for his brilliance, patience, and passion for thought, as well as for his indelible intellectual example. Last but not least, I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to my committee members, Jonathan Culler, Cathy Caruth, and Mary Jacobus. Their intellectual influence has guided me steadfastly for many years, and their generosity toward me has been unparalleled. It has been the greatest honor of my life to be able to study with them, to think through the problems of this and other research with them, and to be challenged by them to explore the ideas this dissertation contains. I thank them for the freedom they have given me in my research combined with the high standards to which they have held me accountable. Words will never be able to express my gratitude. For such amazing conversation over the years—to these, and to all the above—I hope it is only just beginning. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter One: Technology, Testimony, and Specters of Redemption 26 in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead Chapter Two: Deus, Res, Machina: Alien Language, Linguistic Technology, 85 and the Case of the Serial Lyric in Jack Spicer’s Poetry Chapter Three: Unresearchable Memory: H.D. and Freud 136 in the Epoch of Machine Translation Chapter Four James Merrill’s Apparatus Poetics: Poetic Form 193 and Epic Technology in The Changing Light at Sandover Works Cited 252 v INTRODUCTION As the aesthetic legacy of modernism entered the period of Cold War militarization, late- modernist poetics found itself often demarcated by factions, schools, and competing ideologies. Yet while postwar poetics offer critiques of subjectively and nationally unified perspectives alike, of traditional language as well as the language of the avant-garde, in hindsight it may seem strange that no corresponding poetic faction arose to address one of this period’s most pervasively destabilizing coefficients: the problem of advanced technology. Exponential growth in computation, information, and communication technologies precariously set the terms of “progress” for these decades while global politics pursued security through perpetually escalating technologies of war. This historical moment raised, for its poets, an urgent question: how to conjoin or elaborate poetic theories of language together with the nascent mathematics of communication, computation, cryptography, and, in a much larger sense, the technological threat of nuclear war? In what follows, I will discuss the work of four late modernist poets whom I see as poetically allied with respect to these unique and indeed unprecedented questions of technological modernity. Experimenting with process-based variations on the tradition of the modernist epic, poised between poetic inspiration and technological product, the epics of James Merrill, H.D., Jack Spicer, and Muriel Rukeyser theorize and practice what I call “apparatus poetics.” The value of these poets’ contributions lies in their innovations at the level of practice: they foster an orientation to language that accentuates poetry’s inherent relation to technē. At the same time, their poetics opposes technocratic regimes that would instrumentalize language as mere technology. Highlighting historic affinities between poetry and technology, as well as their crucial 1 differences. I argue that within these differences resides language’s philosophical, political meaning as an open, intersubjective system. Hoping to recover through language an ethics for technology, these poets commit their work not to reversing technology’s historical development but rather to questioning its cultural hegemony. Resisting language’s capture in logics of calculability, these experiments with apparatus poetics help manifest and think through the cultural history of issues raised by technological advance. Amid global convergences of threat, innovation, and ever more
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