UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ Ghost of Fashion A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2008 by Lesley Marie Jenike B.F.A., Emerson College, 2000 M.F.A. The Ohio State University, 2003 Committee Chair: Dr. Don Bogen ii Lesley Marie Jenike Dissertation Abstract My dissertation, Ghost of Fashion, consists of both a collection of original poems and a critical essay, “In an Age of Nomalcy: How Hart Crane’s The Bridge Spans a Decade.” The poetry collection is divided into five sections, the first of which explores how uniquely American art forms like musical theatre can reify American values while simultaneously subverting them. These poems are generally dramatic monologues in the tradition of Robert Browning, Ezra Pound and Richard Howard, and take as their speakers characters from popular musical productions like Guys and Dolls, and Show Boat. The middle three sections consist of a series of poems that investigates both the inherent insidiousness and freeing possibilities of the splintered self by invoking, to quote Donne, a “three person’d” speaker. The final section, as a way to synthesize the first four, depicts a family history that reveals itself in the iconic sounds and images of Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra, for example. The suggestion is that we’ve slowly and surely become a society without any real connection to our past but through popular cultural references that work as common denominators and links between the generations. The essay portion of my dissertation historicizes Hart Crane’s The Bridge in an attempt to explore the ways it exemplifies the conflicted social, cultural, and political atmosphere of America in the 1920s. I posit that The Bridge’s ultimate (and well- documented) “failure” doesn’t necessarily stem from a formal miscalculation, but rather from its inconsistent ideological stance—a problem that also plagued the 1920s as a unique moment in American history. iii iv Acknowledgements I want to thank my teachers and friends Don Bogen, John Drury, Jim Cummins, and Norma Jenckes. They’ve been extraordinary role models in that they’ve shown me how to balance writing, teaching, and living and how to do it gracefully. I want to thank Joanie Mackowski; many of the poems in Ghost of Fashion originated in her workshop. I would also like to thank Stan Corkin for his help with the critical essay portion of this dissertation. My many thanks go to past mentors and teachers Andrew Hudgins, David St. John, Molly Peacock, C.D. Wright, Jeredith Merrin, and David Citino. I appreciate, also, Blackbird, Failbetter, La Petite Zine, Court Green, POOL, Verse, Washington Square, Permafrost, Redivider, Sou’Wester, the Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Brooklyn Review for accepting several of these poems for publication, and of course WordTech Press for accepting Ghost of Fashion as a whole for publication. I’ve been blessed with an enormous amount of help and support from friends and colleagues Sophia Kartsonis, Cindy King, Kevin Oberlin, Jillian Weise, Kristi Maxwell, Michael Rerick, Joe DeLong, Jesseca Cornelson and Erica Dawson. I want to thank my family for hanging in there for my twelve years of higher education. My mother Melanie Fish and my father Tom Jenike have always stressed the importance of learning. Because of them, it’s become an integral part of who I am and I’m grateful; it’s brought me an inordinate amount of joy. I want to thank my sister Laura Rupp, my brother Tom Jenike, my stepmother Debbie Jenike and my stepfather Tom Fish. My great appreciation and love go to Virginia and John Butts. Thanks also go to my best and oldest friend Hannah Reck for making me laugh and laugh and laugh. Most of all and finally, I want to thank my husband Joshua Butts. He’s the reason for the season. v Contents I. Luck 2 Bye-Bye Birdie 3 Kismet 5 Camelot 7 Brigadoon 8 Show Boat 10 Gigi 12 The Unsinkable Molly Brown 13 Trouble in River City 15 Calamity Jane 18 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers 22 Annie Get Your Gun 25 Oklahoma! 27 II. Three Enter the Dark Wood 30 Three Go to the Zoo 32 Three Go Confessional 34 vi Three Go Cul-de-Sac 36 Three Drifts into the Back Catalog 38 Three Goes Hollywood Babylon 40 Three Arrow Sparrow 42 Three Escapes Death (and Barely) 44 Three Enter the Maze Center 46 III. Three Go Psychic 52 Three’s Inheritance 54 Three in a Maze and a Monster (Vertigo) 56 Three Go Daedalus 58 Three Go Ingénue 60 Three Contemplate Infinity 65 Three Mythology 67 IV. Three Go Norma Desmond 71 Three Go Aquarium 73 Hold On, Three. Three, Hold On 75 Three Winter 76 Three’s Brainchild Is 78 vii Three Go to the Show 82 Three Goes Starlet 83 Three Embraces Her Darkness and, Conversely, Her Light 85 Three Are Living Proof 87 Three Go West 88 Three Reaches the Core and Is 90 Three Go Neutral Zone Orchard Fruit 93 V. Ophelia Stars as All the Women We’ve Loved Before 95 Sunset Boulevard 97 High Society 99 The Absolute Ultimate 101 Poem Beginning with a Joke, Ending with a Seriousness 103 Bell, Book and Candle 105 Andy Warhol Wants to a Machine, and So Do I 107 Refusing Sinatra 109 All Sculpture is Butter 111 Isis Talkin Blues 113 Little Women 114 viii Musical to be Performed in a Cul-de-sac 116 Ghost of Fashion 118 Gypsy 120 In an Age of Nomalcy: How Hart Crane’s The Bridge Spans a Decade” 122 ix I. “For two weeks I gambled in green pastures. The dice were my cousins and the dolls were agreeable with nice teeth and no last names.” -Guys and Dolls 1 Luck be a lady. Or be a chump and let it all ride on this horse right here, dapple grey, power-house legs long and hot as Miami beaches. Be a man. Be cruel. Be a doll and get me a sandwich. Be a soul and search yourself. Be a religion. See white everywhere, white linen, white hands, great white screens that replay Casablanca goodbye kisses. Be a good girl and turn on the lights. Be a good boy and turn them off again. Be a jewel and lose yourself so I can know what it is to search you back to me. Be a tree in Havana I’ll never rest under. Be a knife pressed into my back so my life spins by in black or red, black or red, but what number? 2 Bye-Bye Birdie The army’s got you now So the Lord came down, said, Lemme make you sovereign of Heaven and I said, Man, take me back to that long brown torso of a desert, Jordan a scar dragged through the land and I would’ve kissed him, would’ve held a sign and waited on the tarmac for his plane to land ‘cause, Lord, see if you can stand when the wind comes in playing a man playing a woman playing the guitar all hips and lips and ass. You be his bitch, his décolletage glowing star- bright symbol, his choir of teen angels singing in paradise forever. “Do you know how to twist?” Boy, do I. My little river and fruitless lake can mambo even in the middle of a horror of a winter when the sky is an eye clouded over 3 and mother comes in, just as his song pitches a fit on the radio. The phone’s tucked between my jaw and shoulder and I’m talking to God and I’m telling God I’ve loved more. More have I spent so bye-bye now to my holier-than- thou baby digging his pin into my naked chest saying, Now we’re going steady. Now we’re official. 4 Kismet We were meant to meet at the Desert’s Martini Rock, that holy of holies, that colossus. The sun burnt our backs as we turned toward Baghdad. Babylon’s swinging paradise waved goodbye. You called light light. You named the lamp, said my love is a lion-share. I aped you. No rib was so talkative. You said, Be quiet and listen. Honey’s being made. So I sat down with a good book, oldest story there is: cities burning. Masts of salt sail the Sinai away. It’s fate. I thought I had a witness but I’m all there is. We stopped by the Sahara Club, cocktail before Genesis. When I fall down 5 drunk, when I seize, stop me from swallowing… Promise me we’ll meet here, say Valentine’s of each year. Each year we’ll drag in, an unplucked splinter in your eye. A jet will buzz over. I might hold you but Baghdad’s so hot that time of year. I would rename the chasm. I would rename the thrush, but kismet tucks its fingers in my mouth. One dead root caused this. One sweet too many kills. Tear it out. I’ll suck gas, won’t feel a thing. Sleep, sleep, there, there. You’ll tell me to groove out to the soft rock, creation- lite, easy-listening, barely breathing.