TACTUAL POÏESIS: MATERIAL TRANSLATION IN CONTEMPORARY WOMENS 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 Julie Phillips Brown August 2011 © 2011 Julie Phillips Brown TACTUAL POÏESIS: MATERIAL TRANSLATION IN CONTEMPORARY WOMENS POETRY Julie Phillips Brown, Ph. D. Cornell University 2011 Critical studies of literature and the arts have long emphasized visual comparisons between the two-dimensional spaces of the page and the canvas, often to the exclusion of other senses, dimensions, and media. Tactual Poïesis develops an expanded vocabulary for how to read literature and the arts through attention to tactile, multi-dimensional innovations in the poetry of Susan Howe, Cecilia Vicuña, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. As contemporary poets continue to broaden the material, tactile dimensions of their writing, an equal expansion in critical discourse becomes necessary. For Howe, Vicuña, and Cha, ordinary textual conditions no longer satisfy—the poem must be seen, heard, and felt. At the heart of each poets formal innovation is the potential for tactual poïesis: a rewriting of history and a reordering of the contemporary world through poetic and readerly processes that are, literally, hands-on. I argue that it is precisely a poems tactility that makes its text, and the histories contained therein, actual, present, and physical—and therefore, subject to manipulation by both poet and reader. The histories these poets revise are numerous and far-ranging: from personal, familial narratives in Howes The Midnight and Chas Dictee, to cultural and national memories in Dictee and Vicuñas cloud-net, to linguistic and literary conventions in all three works together. My first chapter examines Howes textual and visual collage in The Midnight as an elegiac performance, whereby the poet transforms the book into a costumed extension of her own body. This transformation animates the text from within and activates an intermediate space between the living and the dead. My second chapter argues that Vicuñas cloud-net relies on bodily contact between poet, reader, and text to open the “trans”: a transitive space between the present and an earlier time prior to globalization, global warming, and species loss. From the “trans,” the poet attempts to reclaim the forces of universal genesis and heal the destruction wrought since then. My third chapter argues that Chas Dictee imagines the possibility of the material, tactile word as a means of concretizing history and exchanging the seeds of anti-colonial resistance from one body to another. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Julie Phillips Brown was born in Philadelphia, where she later earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in Fine Arts, Visual Studies, and English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Trained as a painter, poet, and graphic designer, she earned joint MFA and PhD degrees in Creative Writing and English Literature at Cornell University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, and literature of the Americas; cross-genre, multi-ethnic, and transnational approaches to literature; feminist and gender studies; and the relation of visual art and digital technology to literature. During her time at Cornell, Browns essays and poems have appeared in issues of Contemporary Womens Writing, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Webconjunctions, Kblog (Kelsey Street Press), and delirious hem. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington with her fiancé David. iii For my mother, Linda Phillips Brown iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In recent years, and in the many years preceding the writing of this dissertation, I have been the very fortunate recipient of much time and attention, for which I can offer only humble thanks. I am enormously grateful to my committee chair Roger Gilbert, who provided the careful questions and steadfast, even-keeled support to steer my project aright; to Shirley Samuels for her razor-sharp wit, her savvy, and her keen, perceptive reading of my work; and to Rayna Kalas, for all the times her questions sent my work in a new direction and enriched it, and for her enthusiasm, practicality, and inimitable wry humor. I thank Susan Stewart for her knowledge, compassion, and generosity in direction my early writing on Wallace Stevens, and for guiding me toward graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University. Many, many hanks are due to Julie Schneider, for her advocacy of my visual art, and for her continued support well beyond my years as her student. To Greg Djanikian, I will be forever grateful not only for his humor and warmth, but for his suggestion that in fact, I might just be a poet. I wish to offer my heartfelt thanks to Susan Howe for her generosity in opening her home and studio to me during our conversations, and for taking the time to relive the writing of The Midnight with me. To Cecilia Vicuña, I owe the deepest thanks as a student, colleague, and friend. Our continuing collaboration on her Kon Kon and artist websites has been an invigorating artistic challenge and an absolute pleasure. I wish to thank in particular Susan Friedman and the other editors and readers at Contemporary Womens Writing, as well as Stephanie Sacharov and Beth Schewe, for their help in v brining my writing on cloud-net to its present form and publication. I am grateful to the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, which made possible all of my conversations with Howe, Vicuña, and others, through the generous support of a Graduate Research Travel Grant. To my father, brother, mother, and David, an overabundance of love. Thank you for believing in me, keeping me laughing, and lighting the way. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vii Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: The Material Theater of Elegy in Susan Howes 20 The Midnight Chapter Three: touch in transit: Manifestation / Manifestacíon 57 in Cecilia Vicuñas cloud-net Chapter Four: Mouth to Mouth: Bare Utterance in Theresa Hak 93 Kyung Chas Dictee Chapter Five: Coda 122 Appendix A: On The Midnight: A Conversation with Susan Howe 131 Appendix B: On cloud-net: A Conversation with Cecilia Vicuña 181 Works Cited 205 vii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Poetry and the Visual Word Tactual Poïesis bears witness to a contemporary field of poetic practice that continues to become startlingly diverse and increasingly defined by its permeable borders with other intellectual disciplines. A variety of poetic schools (though perhaps they are better thought of as modes of writing rather than movements or institutions with fixed aesthetics) now populate the field of contemporary poetry, from Neo-Formalism to Language and post- Language, and at the intersections between poetry and other disciplines, old practices continue to evolve and new practices emerge, including ecopoetics, ethnopoetics, haptic poetries, and digital poetries. In contrast with this astonishing proliferation of poetic hybrids, the relationships between poetry and music, and between poetry and the visual arts, are nearly as old as poetic craft itself. Poetry and painting in particular, which have sometimes been called the sister arts1, have supplied the primary model for understanding the dialogue between the verbal and visual arts. As a result, critical studies of literature and the arts continue to emphasize visual comparisons between the two-dimensional spaces of the page and the canvas, often to the exclusion of 1 Jean Hagstrum notes in The Sister Arts that the relationship between the two arts is established as early as The Republic, the Poetics, and Ars Poetica, each of which lend credence to a special sisterhood between painting and poetry. 1 other senses, dimensions, and media. The motivations for an analogy between poetry and painting seem apparent enough: on a fundamental level, both poetry and painting make marks on two-dimensional surfaces in order to describe abstract concepts or concrete objects from the three-dimensional world. Whether this mark is alphabetic, pictographic, or pictorial, and whether it is made on the page or the canvas, appears to matter little in terms of its symbolic function: alphabetic, pictographic, and pictorial marks are more commonly considered with regard to the concepts and objects they represent within a symbolic system, rather than as actual objects, material and meaningful in and of themselves. Within poetic practice the predominance of terms like “image” and “imagery” suggests the extent to which poetry relies upon visually-inflected models of thinking and composition. “Imagery,” now a commonplace turn of phrase in poetry workshops (following the term’s development through Imagism and later, the Deep Image school), encompasses verbal evocations of all, and not merely visual, sensory data. While the monopoly of the visual in poetry is by no means total, its emphasis has come at the expense of the other senses, and tactility in particular. In his ABC of Reading (1934), Pound famously postulated three means by which a poet might “charge words with meaning”: phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia. Pound draws a restrictive circle around poetic expression, limiting its possibilities for meaning to image, sound, and the interplay of words and the intellect. His account of language remains fixed within the context of a symbolic system: either written language consists “of signs… representing various noises,” or else it is