The Lyric in the Age of the Brain The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Skillman, Nikki Marie. 2012. The Lyric in the Age of the Brain. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9876089 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2012 Nikki Skillman All rights reserved.!! ! ! Professor Helen Vendler Nikki Skillman The Lyric in the Age of the Brain Abstract This dissertation asks how the physiological conception of the mind promoted by scientific, philosophical and cultural forces since the mid-twentieth century has affected poetic accounts of mental experience. For the cohort of poets I identify here—James Merrill, Robert Creeley, A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham—recognition that fallible, biological mechanisms determine the very structure of human subjectivity causes deep anxiety about how we perceive the world, exercise reason, and produce knowledge. These poets feel caught between the brain sciences’ empirical vision of the mind, which holds the appeal of a fresh and credible vocabulary but often appears reductive, and the literary tradition’s overwhelmingly transcendental vision of the mind, which bears intuitive resonance but also appears increasingly naïve. These poets find aesthetic opportunity in confronting the nature of mind: Merrill takes up forgetting as a central subject, making elegant, entropic monuments out of the distortions and perforations of embodied memory; Ammons and Creeley become captivated by the motion of thinking, and use innovative, dynamic forms to emphasize the temporal and spatial impositions of embodiment upon the motions of thought; Ashbery luxuriates in the representational possibilities of distraction as a structural and thematic principle; Graham identifies the anatomical limits of the visual system with our limits of empathetic perspective, conceiving of her poems as prostheses that can enhance our feeble power to imagine other minds. In a host of significatory practices that reimagine lyric subjectivity in physiological terms, these poets’ ambitious and influential oeuvres reveal the convergence of “raw” and “cooked” post-war poetries in a set of fundamental suppositions about our aptitudes as observers, knowers, and interpreters; this convergence exposes the vestiges of the Romantic mind in modernism’s empowered conception of the poetic imagination. Uniquely equipped to explore meaningful iii ! correspondences between physiological and literary form, the contemporary lyric defies the novel’s preeminent position in the study of literary consciousness by demonstrating an enterprising talent for philosophical investigation of the experience of mind. iv ! TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE “Dreamy Blinkings-Out”: Embodiment and the Encroachment of Oblivion in James Merrill 26 CHAPTER TWO Physiological Thinking: Robert Creeley’s Forms of Process, A.R. Ammons’ Processing Forms 73 CHAPTER THREE Redrawing the Soul: John Ashbery, Inattention, and the Chiaroscuro of Consciousness 117 CHAPTER FOUR The “Bedrock Poverty” of Vision: Jorie Graham and the Ethics of Virtual Selfhood 146 WORKS CITED 190 v ! ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest thanks are to Helen Vendler, whose example has been a consummate gift. She has been an exacting reader and editor, a sensitive guide and a tireless advocate from this dissertation’s first stirrings. Any distinctions the project can claim were fostered by her invaluable direction, open mind and constant support; I am especially grateful to her for encouraging me to conceive of this project as an inquiry into the emotional contours of intellectual life, addressed first and foremost to the sources and stakes of metaphysical questions within the realm of feeling. Elaine Scarry’s insights expanded the horizons of this dissertation at every stage; I am in her debt for the lucid criticism and practical advice she issued in a steady stream of generosities over several years. Her passionate interest in the texture of mental experience amplified my own interest in poetic accounts of it, and I am grateful to her for demonstrating that the endeavor to draw scientific and artistic voices into conversation is enriched and ennobled by its challenges. Stephen Burt considered the rhetorical and structural dimensions of the project with special intensity and to its great benefit; it has been a privilege to have him as a thorough reader, a devoted steward of my professional growth, and an unforgettable model in his teaching of poetry. I hope that this project and future ones will bear the visible trace of his influence. In the context of completing my graduate career, Amanda Claybaugh helped me to hone the dissertation’s most redeeming nuances, enunciate its significance, and frame its presentation with greater critical precision; apart from my dedicated advisors, Professor Claybaugh was the single greatest help to me in bringing the dissertation to a confident conclusion. I am indebted to Peter Sacks for providing indispensable encouragement at the ! vi ! earliest stages of the project, when it began to emerge in his graduate seminar on postwar American poetry. Laura Farwell Blake, Mary Beth Clack, Susan Halpert and Christina Davis increased this project’s scholarly breadth and depth through their accessibility and interest; they made the Harvard libraries a second home by acquainting me with its resources and becoming cherished friends. I am very grateful to the universally kind and helpful members of the English Department’s administrative staff, especially to Kristin Lambert for her solicitude in helping me negotiate logistical concerns and to Gwen Urdang-Brown for her humane and hospitable guidance through the graduate program. My peers Odile Harter, Liz Maynes- Aminzade, Lesley Goodman, Chris Barrett, Adena Springarn, Matthew Sussman, Sam Foster, Richard Johnston, Rikita Tyson, and Yulia Ryzhik read drafts of this and related materials; I look forward to repaying their time and energy in years to come. The Cognitive Theory and the Arts seminar, sponsored by the Harvard Humanities Center and led by Elaine Scarry, Alan Richardson, and Anna Henchman, continues to be a teeming reservoir of ideas and critical feedback from diverse disciplines. In the course of writing this dissertation, Anna, Adam, and Harry Connolly, Stacey Doynow, Andrea Turpin, and Claire Grace offered patience, humor and perspective to me at times when I had none. There is no way to thank Chris Barrett for her example as a colleague and for her dearest friendship over the years that saw this project from its conception to its completion. Richard Delacy and Matt, Joe, and Cindy Skillman know all too well the sacrifices and contributions they made directly and indirectly to this enterprise, but they cannot know my gratitude. ! vii Introduction In the poem “Mechanism” (1957), A.R. Ammons describes an extraordinary encounter with a relatively ordinary bird. As he watches a goldfinch flitting from branch to branch, gobbling up a seed, flashing its plumage in a wild cherry bush, the poet realizes that what he knows about the goldfinch supervenes upon his apprehension of the bird and transforms his experience of it. What he knows—about the orchestra of its bodily parts and their harmonious cooperation, about the organism’s nuanced role in a vast ecological system, about the serendipitous course of its evolution toward such distinctive beauty—leads him to identify the finch’s singular splendor with the splendor of all kinds of “working order[s],” natural and artificial. He begins his poem by enjoining us to revere the bird as a biological system, and thus, in a sense, as a mechanism not unlike the adaptable armature of a moral code or the dynamic scheme of labor and profit within a commercial enterprise: Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree, morality: any working order, animate or inanimate: (E 34) It is not just any working order, in fact, but the sentient goldfinch that proves to be Ammons’ particular focus in the poem, and as he comes to imagine the creature as a marvelous working fulfillment of the chemical prescriptions of its DNA, his encounter evolves into a meditation on the emergence of animacy from the interaction of inanimate parts—on the origins of mind in matter. Ammons assertively connects the array of physical processes that comprise the goldfinch—“enzymic intricacies,” “gastric transformations,” “physical chemistries”—with the intangible textures of experience that characterize conscious life—“control,” “knowledge,” “instinct,” and most capaciously, “mind”: ! 1 honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics, the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies of control, the gastric transformations, seed dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge, blood compulsion, instinct: honor the unique genes, molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into sets, the nucleic grain transmitted in slow change through ages of rising and falling form, some cells set aside for the special work, mind or perception rising into orders of courtship, territorial rights, mind rising from the physical chemistries to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male and female