LYRIC IGNORANCE: TECHNOLOGIES OF 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 Seth Michael Perlow January 2013 © 2013 Seth Michael Perlow LYRIC IGNORANCE: TECHNOLOGIES OF AMERICAN POETRY Seth Michael Perlow, Ph.D. Cornell University 2013 This study argues that the rhetoric of ignorance has helped to define the lyric genre in US poetry and its criticism. It examines how differentiations between poetic thought and knowledge have informed recent responses to Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Frank O’Hara—altering both their reputations as lyric poets and the material histories of their texts. Whereas new media scholars often link technology with rationality and information, “Lyric Ignorance” challenges critiques of the lyric by showing how textual equipment enables lyrical claims against knowledge. It thereby explores how the language of ignorance has informed the social and historical values of US lyric poetry in the postwar and contemporary periods. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Seth Michael Perlow was raised in Atlanta, GA and attended college at Brown University, where he concentrated in Comparative Literature, earning an AB (2005) with Highest Honors and departmental honors. His undergraduate thesis, a translation of work by the Argentine poet Karina Macció, won the Rosalie Colie Prize in Comparative Literature. He then enrolled in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities a the University of Chicago, earning an MA in Humanities (2006). A revision of his master’s thesis on Wallace Stevens’ early poetry, “The Other Harmonium: Toward a Minor Stevens,” appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal 33.2 (Fall 2009). After working for several months as a copy editor in New York City, he moved to Paris and enrolled in the Cours de la Langue et Civilisation Française, la Sorbonne (Paris IV). In fall 2007 he returned to the United States and began the doctoral program in English at Cornell University. His poetry, scholarship, and literary translations have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. iii To my family, David, Joan, and Dara Perlow, Marjorie Stevens, and Caetlin Benson-Allott iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first gratitude is to my parents, David and Joan Perlow, for instilling in me a love of ideas and a perseverance without which I could not have completed this work. Their tireless encouragement and faith in my abilities has provided a sustenance beyond thanks or accounting. This project owes is strengths to my special committee and its weaknesses to me. Jonathan Culler, my committee chair, has provided incredibly generous and helpful guidance at every stage of this study’s development; his responses and suggestions have been both meticulously attentive and imbued with the intellectual poise and perspective for which he is known. I am grateful to Roger Gilbert for asking questions whose generosity could be measured by their difficulty. I hope that my efforts to answer them have made this dissertation more robust and responsible. His knowledge of the history of American poetry is truly encyclopedic, and without it the project would not have developed as it has. Amy Villarejo, perhaps the most talented seminar leader I know, has been a valuable guide not only in the shaping of technology’s place in this study but also in my own development as a new media scholar. She has helped me to keep in touch with the pleasures of poetry and of critical writing. Finally, although Christopher Nealon has sometimes referred to himself as my “outside” committee member, he has often provided the sense of an insider audience that helps a dissertation find its voice. His keen eye for what matters in contemporary poetry and scholarship has nurtured both this project and my self-conception as a critic. Together the members of my committee have contributed a great deal to the development of this project and this scholar. I owe them individually and collectively a deep gratitude. v I am also indebted to a number of individuals and groups, at Cornell and beyond, who have contributed in less formal ways to the development of this study. The members of my doctoral cohort in the Department of English at Cornell have made a convivial, mutually supportive, and intellectually lively community of which I am proud to be a member. I am especially grateful to the members of the Theory Reading Group at Cornell, for a few important friendships and for innumerable important conversations. Several professors at Cornell and elsewhere have provided feedback and helpful conversations about my dissertation work; for this kind of support I owe thanks to Amanda Anderson, Kevin Attell, Susan Buck-Morss, Timothy Murray, Martha Nell Smith, Masha Raskolnikov, Nick Salvato, and surely to others. I am also grateful to the Society for the Humanities at Cornell; the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory; and the Emily Dickinson International Society, which provided grants in support of this research. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank two creatures whose contributions to this dissertation have reached well beyond the bounds of intellectual life and scholarship. Caetlin Benson-Allott, my partner in life and in thinking about life, has helped me and this project through the difficult moments that anyone writing a dissertation must face. Every day I am amazed and delighted by her patience, care, and generosity; I am grateful and proud to think that the mark of her intellect is visible throughout this study. I thank her for the support and companionship—personal, professional, intellectual—that she has provided during my time as a doctoral student. And finally, my cat Baker, who has remained blissfully ignorant of this entire undertaking and even of these Acknowledgements, must be thanked for reminding me that sometimes the most prudent course of action is to slow down a bit, stretch, and curl up for a nap. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. Weak Ignorance and the Afterlives of the Lyric………………………………. 1 Chapter 1. The Possessions of Emily Dickinson: Affect and Lyric Ignorance……………… 30 Chapter 2. Language Writing as Historical Reading: Gertrude Stein, Jackson Mac Low, and A Million Random Digits………………………………………………………... 99 Chapter 3. Making Strangers with Friends: The Anonymous Lyricism of Frank O’Hara…... 160 Conclusion. The Lyricism of Queer Ignorance………………………………………………. 226 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………….. 236 vii Perlow 1 Introduction. Weak Ignorance and the Afterlives of the Lyric may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living whatever they sing is better than to know and if men should not hear them men are old –E.E. Cummings “53,” (1954) You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it. –Wallace Stevens “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1947) Cummings and Stevens offer these lyrical prescriptions at a transitional moment in the development of American poetry, but the links they draw between poetry and ignorance are far from new. Indeed, since antiquity people have affiliated poetry with modes of thought that are distinguished from knowledge. This view goes back at least to Plato, whose attacks on imitative poetry in Ion and Republic assign a dangerous ignorance to the poet.1 Poets in the modern era, for their part, have often celebrated this linkage between poetry and not-knowing. At least since Thomas Gray’s famous 1742 declaration that “where ignorance is bliss / `Tis folly to be wise,” poetic discourse has offered a way to revalue ignorance as something other than the stubborn scourge of rational knowing (99-100). The romantic poets may have shared little with Gray, but in solidifying the coordinates of the modern lyric genre they made an axiom of his judgment on ignorance.2 Since then, lyric poetry has been strongly affiliated with modes of thought whose 1 “A poetic imitator uses words…to paint colored pictures of each of the crafts. He himself knows nothing about them, but…others, as ignorant as he, who judge by words, will think he speaks extremely well” (Republic X.601.a). 2 In “Intimations of Immortality” and elsewhere, Wordsworth continues Gray’s affiliation of a nostalgically valued ignorance with a return to childhood: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting… / Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy, / But he beholds the light, and whence it flows … / At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day” (59-77). This affiliation of lyric poetry with an impossible return Perlow 2 distinctness from knowledge makes them attractive, and with increasing intensity the habitual marking of this difference from knowledge has helped to define the lyric genre per se. “Lyric Ignorance” examines how a set of relatively recent technical and aesthetic developments has altered this longstanding affiliation between lyric poetry and not-knowing. The amplification of uncertainties about the lyric genre and its future has made newly visible the lyric’s longstanding ties to ignorance and, simultaneously, has magnified the importance of claims against knowledge in current approaches to the lyric. These recent changes make it possible to describe the rhetorical function of what I call “weak ignorance” as it has shaped ideas about lyric poetry. Many theories of ignorance view it as an absolute, irrecoverable other of knowledge. Weak ignorance, by contrast, refers to claims against knowledge that nonetheless involve themselves actively in epistemic systems, often sustaining alternative forms of certainty. For example, when a courtroom witness responds to every question with “I do not recall” or “I do not know,” his studied avowal of ignorance may support the jury’s suspicions that he has something to hide; here the rhetoric of not-knowing in fact sustains an adjoint way to know.