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UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Finding Themselves by Two UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Finding Themselves by Two: Serial Poetics in Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English by Nicholas Aaron Joseph Dissertation Committee: Virginia Jackson, Chair Martin Harries Oren Izenberg 2020 © 2020 Nicholas Aaron Joseph DEDICATION For Corinna “whose words are entangled inextricably among my own” We must travel in the direction of our fear - JB ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iv Vita v Abstract of the Dissertation vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 - Seriality and the Misrecognition of American Poetry: Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Serial Poetics and the Discontinuity of American Poetry 13 “The Proof of a Poet”: Text, Paratext, and Formal Discontinuity in the 1855 Leaves 25 The 1856 Leaves: Revising, Clustering, and Cataloging 42 “Let It Stand”: Sexuality, Self-Censorship and Recognition in the Calamus Poems 50 Chapter 2 - “He Finds Himself by Two”: George Oppen and the Serial Deferral of Genre Oppen’s Serial Disclosures: The Deferral of Genre, the Genre of Deferral 64 Sonnets, Haikus, and Blasons: Deferring Genre in Discrete Series 74 Filling in the Blanks: Silence and The Materials 95 Conversation and Collaboration: Oppen and Language Poetry 107 Chapter 3 - “Endless Series of Selves”: Amiri Baraka’s Serial Poetics Against Passing When I Say It Is Roi Who Is Dead: Baraka or Jones? 116 “I pass”: Situating Passing in Literary and Critical Race Theory 124 White Black Negroes: Passing Against Beat Poetics 139 Bibliography 168 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Some of the teachers, friends, and family members I want to thank will never read a word of this dissertation. I couldn't have finished it without any of them. At the University of California, Irvine, thanks are due to the brilliant members of my committee: Virgnia Jackson has been a fierce thinker and ally throughout this process, and much of what I understand about the history of poetics has been informed by her work; Martin Harries has been a generous and ingenious reader whose vast expertise never fails to energize my work and crystallize my thoughts; Oren Izenberg’s clear and cutting intellect has offered a level of clarity and complexity that I continue to aspire to. Before graduate school, I was lucky to have had teachers who showed me how to work, write, and think – at times, almost without my realizing I was learning to do so. I’m grateful to Drew Daniels, Christopher Rice, and the late Kate Ritchie for introducing me to what a love of literature and writing could look like. I was incredibly privileged throughout this process to have had not only the support of my family, but the insight of family members who had completed doctorates themselves. Even when they were on the other side of the country or the world, my parents have always been there for me, as have my aunts and uncles, whose encouragement and accomplishments helped me believe I could finish what I started. Last and most, I’d like to thank Corinna and Maryum Rosendahl. Thank you both, for everything you’ve given and for everything it’s meant. iv VITA Nicholas Aaron Joseph 2013 B.A. in English, Wesleyan University 2013-14 Regents Fellowship, University of California 2014-18 Teaching Assistant, University of California, Irvine 2016 M.A. in English, University of California, Irvine 2020 Ph.D. in English, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Poetry and Poetics, Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century American Literature v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Finding Themselves by Two: Serial Poetics in Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka by Nicholas Aaron Joseph Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Irvine, 2020 Professor Virginia Jackson, Chair This dissertation focuses on the work of three American poets – Walt Whitman, George Oppen, and Amiri Baraka – whose writing exemplifies the persistence of “seriality” in Modern poetry and poetics. Though “serial poetics” has long been invoked to make sense of a wide range of poetry and poets, there is little consensus on what, exactly, a “serial poem” is. I examine this oversight as a problem within the history of poetic formalism, and I connect the lack of recognition that serial poems are given within literary discourse to larger questions about the construction of identity within poetics and critical theory. In different yet always historically- situated ways, Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka all challenge critical commonplaces about the poet and the poem by adopting not so much a recognizable poetics as a contingent serial “stance.” This approach provides these poets with a powerful yet flexible resource for developing distinctive practices of artistic and social self-making – to find themselves, as Oppen puts it, by two. Each of my chapters examines one of these poets’ strategies of serial self-making, or “autopoetics,” as it manifests in his approach to poetic form. For instance, Whitman aspired to be both the quintessential American bard and a radical queer bohemian in a nineteenth-century America that was largely incapable of recognizing his performance of these identities. Oppen, vi who was Jewish, a Communist, and a G.I. during World War II and McCarthyism, fought throughout his life to distance himself from the White Anglo-Saxon identity of his Modernist “fathers” and the upper-class identity of his actual father. Baraka was born into the Black middle class but underwent regular ideological conversions, courting constant controversy in his commitment to social transgression and artistic transformation. The serial strategies that I identify in these three poets’ lives and work ultimately help to expose, clarify, and enrich problems of classification, continuity, and closure that have come to be inseparable from the history of Modern American poetry and poetics. vii INTRODUCTION This dissertation is about a poet who wrote the same book for over thirty years, a poet who stopped writing poems entirely for twenty-five years, and a poet who periodically reinvented himself over a fifty-year-long career. One wrote the same book over and over again, filling each version with poems that stretched for pages on end, claiming to contain as many multitudes and contradictions as America itself. Another was so awed by language’s vast power in a divisive postwar world that he wrote poems that arrived on the page broken and disjointed, whose working drafts were so pasted over they looked like paper mache. A third, who changed his name a half-dozen times over the course of his life, wrote “[a]ssassin poems, poems that kill,” poems that continually advocated a revolution whose terms he was forever redefining and refining (Baraka 2014, 149). What unites the work of Walt Whitman, George Oppen, and Amiri Baraka – other than their formidable poetic abilities, their fierce political commitments, and the fact that they are American men – is that each deploys “seriality” in his work to such a degree that it becomes difficult to talk about his distinct “works” (much less a unified “body” of work). What unites the three chapters of my dissertation is that, though “serial poetics” is often invoked in making sense of poets as different from each other as Whitman and Dickinson, Stevens and Stein, or Olson and Oppen, there is little consensus on what, exactly, a “serial poem” is. Certainly, poets have long composed and presented individual poems in a set order or “series,” as in paired poems and sonnet sequences. On the other hand, certain genres of poetry follow a sequential or “serial” logic: for instance, the turn, counter, and resolution of the classical ode, or various figures of 1 repetition such as rhyme and meter.1 However, I want to suggest that the strategies of repetition, revision, and reflexivity that these three poets so adamantly take up represent a distinct variety of seriality, a repertoire of formal resources that allows them to work through problems of classification, continuity, and closure that have come to be inseparable from the history of Modern American poetry and poetics. Each participates, that is, in what Adorno called a “paratactic revolt against synthesis”: a radical questioning of linearity that, through disjunctive and dissonant strategies, “provides a corrective to the primacy of the subject” as a singular or stable authority (Adorno 2019, 135, 137). In different yet always historically-situated ways, Whitman, Oppen, and Baraka all challenge the idea of the poet and the poem by adopting not so much a recognizable poetics as a contingent serial “stance” that allows them to produce flexible formal relationships between part and whole, same and other, poet and public – to find themselves, as Oppen puts it, by two. Outside the field of poetry and poetics, seriality rarely causes definitional difficulties. In recent decades, for instance, serial forms in a variety of media – such as serialized novels, television series, graphic novels, and podcasts – have been widely discussed and celebrated for the ways they adapt the serializing tendencies of mass culture directly into their formal strategies. Almost without exception, however, these discussions fail to consider serial poems and poets. To take a few examples from the period in which I wrote this dissertation: the Popular Seriality Research Unit, an interdisciplinary group of scholars active from 2010 to 2016, focused almost solely on narrative forms in attempting to address “questions concerning the wide 1 One common way of understanding serial poems is to frame them as a more overtly disjunctive, paratactic, and open-ended cousin to the poetic sequence. For a study of sequential forms in Modern British and American poetry see Gall, Sally M. and Rosenthal, Macha Louis. The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1983. Roland Greene offers a transhistorical and comparative approach to the poetic sequence in Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence.
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