The Book As Object and Concept in American Poetry After Modernism
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The Book as Object and Concept in American Poetry after Modernism Chelsea Jennings A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Jessica Burstein, Chair Thomas Lockwood Brian Reed Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of English © Copyright 2014 Chelsea Jennings University of Washington Abstract The Book as Object and Concept in American Poetry after Modernism Chelsea Jennings Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Jessica Burstein Department of English This dissertation argues that the printed book—as a unit of meaning, a sculptural and visual object, and a consumer good—has been important to American poetry after modernism, and in particular to writers who directly engage the materiality of language in their poetry. In postwar poetry criticism, the “material text” is much discussed but often remains abstract: an emphasis on language as a medium tends to eclipse the literal sense in which texts are made of matter. This dissertation contends that in American poetry a self-consciousness about the materiality of language has been intimately related to experiments with the physical features of the book. It focuses on the work of four poets—Ezra Pound, Jack Spicer, Susan Howe, and Anne Carson— who exemplify this dual interest in materiality, and who, because they move beyond the isolated lyric toward book-length compositions, also implicate the conceptual force of “the book” in their poetry. The dissertation’s first section, “Production,” is situated in the small press printing revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Its chapters on Pound and Spicer demonstrate how the material features of book-objects (including paper, binding, typography, and images) point to production and distribution contexts and, in so doing, to larger systems of literary and economic value that become an interpretive framework for reading the poetry these books contain. The second section, “Reproduction,” turns to recent texts by Howe and Carson that exploit for aesthetic purposes the slippage between the reproducible visual features of the page and the non-transferrable material features of the book. As such, these texts challenge conventional definitions of textuality and highlight the visual and haptic potential of the printed book in the digital age. Together these sections suggest that the printed book has been, and continues to be, a key site for extending the available conditions of possibility for American poetry. The Book as Object and Concept in American Poetry after Modernism Introduction: Reading Matter 1 I. Production 1. Pirating Pound: Drafts & Fragments in 1960s Mimeograph Culture 25 2. The “Small Scruffly Editions” of Jack Spicer 65 II. Reproduction 3. Susan Howe’s Facsimile Aesthetic 107 4. Handcraft and Handle in Anne Carson’s Visual-Haptic Trade Editions 161 Bibliography 205 Acknowledgements Throughout this project Jessica Burstein has provided guidance of the highest order, helping me to see my ideas more clearly and challenging me to take greater risks. Her insight and energy—including an indefatigable capacity for reading drafts—have been crucial. Under her direction I have come to better appreciate the pleasures of divergent thinking, the advantages of revision, and the rigors of a well-written sentence. I am equally grateful for all she has done to improve this dissertation and my experience of producing it. Brian Reed’s wide-ranging enthusiasm for poetry has been inspiring and his expertise invaluable. He is a generous and perceptive reader, and I am fortunate to have learned from his model as well as from his thoughtful responses to my work. Tom Lockwood’s wisdom and wit made even the most technical aspects of bibliography engaging. From my earliest encounter with textual studies he has asked the kinds of large-scale questions that have given me new perspective on my work. I have benefited immensely from the knowledge, assistance, and contagious excitement of the University of Washington Libraries’s Book Arts and Rare Books Curator Sandra Kroupa. Her ongoing efforts to build and share the Book Arts Collection have been instrumental to my research and teaching alike. I am also thankful to Tony Power and the staff of the Simon Fraser University Library’s Special Collections for their help and hospitality during my visits to the Contemporary Literature Collection. I continue to value my time in Cincinnati’s ArtWorks program, where Pam Sussman introduced me to book arts. It was there that the question “what is a book?” was first posed to me, and over fifteen years later I am still intrigued by that question and still binding books. Many colleagues and friends have been enthusiastic interlocutors—particularly Sarah Cohen, Annie Dwyer, Nadine Maestas, Andy Meyer, Danny Nelson, Alice Pedersen, Lindsay Rose Russell, and Jennie Allen. They have regularly reminded me why it is worth studying literature and provided much-needed fun in both literary and extra-literary forms. I cherish their kindness and camaraderie. My parents, Mo and Bob Jennings, cultivated my curiosity, creativity, and love of books from an early age and have encouraged me to keep these qualities alive in adulthood. Rather than recommending more practical alternatives, they have lent their unwavering support to making my aspirations possible. Their belief in me is sustaining, and their presence in my life a source of real joy. I am grateful, too, for the similarly constant support and affection of my grandparents, Norb and Mary Ranz. Brett Jennings, Chaz Jennings, and Angela Williams somehow manage to appreciate my idiosyncrasies (book-related and otherwise) without letting me go off the deep end. They have kept me company from afar and have kept me laughing, which is a serious gift. Mike and Linda Ranz ensured I was housed, well-fed, and thoroughly entertained in my first year of graduate school, and this generosity made my move to Seattle possible. Donna, Wayne, Vince, Cristina, Cora, and Marin Arvidson have been superlative companions along the way. I am more than lucky to have such a rowdy cheering section. I have innumerable reasons to be thankful to Heather Arvidson, but where the writing of this dissertation is concerned, I am especially thankful for her ability to make day-to-day life more possible, more enjoyable, and more imaginative. It is a privilege to be in such close proximity to her exciting and unusual mind. Figure 1. Clockwise from top left: Su Blackwell, Pandora Opening Box (2009) Brian Dettmer, Key Monuments 1 (2009) Jonathan Callan, Seven Volumes (2009) Matej Krén, Book Cell (2006) Lisa Kokin, Room for Improvement (2008) Introduction: Reading Matter The book’s status as object and concept is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in contemporary “bookworks”: sculptures and installations made by carving, stacking, dismantling, deforming, and otherwise altering the codex. The range of bookworks is wide, encompassing Su Blackwell’s enchanted scenes emerging from the page spread, Brian Dettmer’s surgical excavations of imagery and text, Jonathan Callan’s circular cross-sections of tightly wound pages, Matej Krén’s architectural spaces that use books as bricks, and Lisa Kokin’s stones shaped from pulped books (fig. 1). Each of these works draws attention to the codex as a technology by interfering with its function. When the act of reading is thwarted by the book’s disfiguration or by the “Do Not Touch” advisory of the gallery, the codex appears simultaneously as iconic object and mere matter. As Garrett Stewart describes, “the book-work—as material object— once denied its mediating purpose as verbal text, can only be studied for the bookwork—as conceptual labor—it performs.”1 The “conceptual labor” of the book includes conjuring deeply ingrained associations with knowledge and authority and an almost talismanic power. Although these associations derive from eras when books were exceedingly rare, valuable, and laborious to produce, bookworks help to show the degree to which they persist in more subtle form in even the most ordinary mass-produced paperbacks. At the same time, bookworks remind us that for all of this conceptual force, books are resolutely physical. This dissertation considers how aspects of the book that are made vividly apparent by sculptures and installations impact literary works that remain available to reading and handling. More specifically, “The Book as Object and Concept” argues for the significance of the book 1 Garrett Stewart, Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), xiii. 1 as both a unit of meaning and a material object to American poetry after modernism. The authors in this dissertation—Ezra Pound, Jack Spicer, Susan Howe, and Anne Carson—make the materiality of written language an explicit subject of their poetry and a crucial element of their poetics, thereby calling attention to the physical form in which this language appears. Too, they share an interest in moving beyond the lyric as the primary unit for poetry, and as such the idea of the book becomes especially potent in their work. This dissertation proposes that these poets’ investments in the materiality of language and the conceptual parameters of the book are crucially bound to the book-objects in which their work appears. “The Book as Object and Concept” therefore joins an ongoing dialogue between textual studies and literary criticism that aims to account for the complex relationship between textuality and literary meaning. It takes as axiomatic the fact that texts are physical, tangible objects and the book is not simply a passive container for the work. Instead, the specific non-linguistic features of a given book, such as typeface, printing method, paper quality, size, or binding structure—what Jerome McGann terms a text’s “bibliographic code”—help to shape the meaning of the work.2 Textual scholarship’s attentiveness to the material potential of the book spans a wide range of locations, genres, and time periods, but this dissertation follows a specific set of investments in the book, rooted in modernist verse experiments, as they develop in the United States after World War II.