SOUNDING SILENCE: AMERICAN WOMEN’S EXPERIMENTAL POETICS by MEAGAN L. EVANS A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2012 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Meagan L. Evans Title: Sounding Silence: American Women’s Experimental Poetics This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Dr. Karen Ford Chairperson Dr. Paul Peppis Member Dr. Forest Pyle Member Dr. Leah Middlebrook Outside Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research and Innovation Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded December 2012 ii © 2012 Meagan L. Evans iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Meagan L. Evans Doctor of Philosophy Department of English December 2012 Title: Sounding Silence: American Women’s Experimental Poetics Traditional feminist readings have valued women’s writing that voices silenced experiences. In contrast, other twentieth-century theoretical formulations regard absences, refusals, and silences as constitutive of aesthetic practice rather than as imposed upon it. This dissertation attends carefully to how U.S. women writers approach the nonlinguistic, accounting for how they have been silenced as well as for the kinds of silencing that women poets themselves perform. It argues that U.S. women’s experimental poetry is driven by contradictory relationships to language and silence: in one strain, gendered cultural repression spurs American women poets to push language into new territory, often figured as speaking out. But in another mode, female identification with the nonrational or nonlinguistic, whether externally enforced or strategically inhabited, impels women to develop poetic silences in order to resist the impositions of language on a feminized other. Meeting these simultaneous and opposed goals—creating poetic forms capable of greater expressive range while signaling the inadequacy of linguistic expression—necessitates formal experimentation. My primary claim that an unresolved ambivalence toward the nonlinguistic drives innovation dictates an emphasis on formal technique, including syntax, rhyme and meter, sentence and stanza structure, and figuration. This attention to poetic particulars grounds my iv contextualization of the work of each poet I consider—Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, and Gwendolyn Brooks—in relation to her own life, to broader literary and cultural histories, and to poststructuralist theories of language. The first chapter of my dissertation explores the role that early American, particularly Puritan and Transcendental, attitudes toward wilderness shape poetic motivations both to extend and limit the reach of language throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In subsequent chapters, I evaluate how those motivations change in the context of Dickinson’s nineteenth-century spirituality, Niedecker’s modernist and postmodernist anxieties about the role of the poet, and Brooks’s engagement with the politics and aesthetics of black nationalism. Reading U.S. women’s poetic innovation as simultaneously breaking and cultivating silences opens a dialogue among historically feminist understandings of silence as oppressive, theories that put silence at the heart of poetic impulse, and avant-garde theoretical conceptions of linguistic experimentation as a feminist project. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Meagan L. Evans GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Texas State University, San Marcos Western Washington University, Bellingham DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2012, University of Oregon Master of Fine Arts, Poetry, 2007, Texas State University Bachelor of Arts, English/Spanish, 2004, Western Washington University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Twentieth-century U.S. Literature American Poetry Women’s Literature PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2007-2011 Teaching Assistant, Texas State University, 2004-2006 Instructional Assistant, Texas State University, 2004-2005 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Dissertation Fellowship, Oregon Humanities Center, University of Oregon, 2012 Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship, Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon 2011-2012 Luvaas Graduate Scholarship, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oregon 2011-2012 vi Summer Research Award, Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon, 2010 Graduate Research Support Fellowship, Oregon Humanities Center, University of Oregon, 2010 PUBLICATIONS: Evans, Meagan. “‘Itself is All the Like’: Selfsameness in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 20.2 (2011): 83-105. ---. “You’re Putting Me On: The Old French Fabliaux as Carnival Cross- Dressing.” New Medieval Literatures 12 (2010): 69-88. ---. “‘Broke and Entered’: Accessibility, Commitment, and the Challenge of Cliché in the Poems of Barbara Kingsolver.” Seeds of Change: Critical Essays on Barbara Kingsolver. Ed. Priscilla Leder. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2010. 129-43. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish first to thank Professor Karen Ford, whose unflagging support underpins every page of this work. I would also like to thank the Oregon Humanities Center and the Center for the Study of Women in Society for their investment in this project and for their continuing contributions to the intellectual community at the University of Oregon and beyond, particularly through funding graduate research. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: VOICE AND THE WILDERNESS ......................................... 1 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 57 II. “ITSELF IS ALL THE LIKE”: SELFSAMENESS IN THE POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON ......................... 63 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 110 III. SHACKLE AND FLOOD: LORINE NIEDECKER AND CONNECTIVE LANGUAGE .............................. 119 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 191 IV. “SOMEWHAT OF SOMETHING OTHER”: ARTIFICE IN THE POETRY OF GWENDOLYN BROOKS ............................. 202 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 280 V. CONCLUSION: SOMETHING ELSE ................................................................... 290 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 297 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 299 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: VOICE AND THE WILDERNESS At a 2003 poetry reading at Western Washington University, Li-Young Lee spoke about silence. Poetry, he said, shaped silence like a cathedral shapes empty space, making us aware of it and making it perceptible to us; poetry shapes language around great arches of silence so that we can hear it and stand in awe. To demonstrate, Lee read slowly, pausing often, and left a long silence at the end of each poem he read. The silence that Lee’s poems marked was not the absence of all sound but the absence of language; it was something other-than-language to which poetry attended. As Lee read, a restless child jogged his feet against the metal legs of his chair; two people murmured on the other side of double doors. My position here is that we can read twentieth-century American poetry as if standing in the cathedral that poetry builds around silence, but we must recognize that poetry is, also, the child’s insistent heels and the voices outside the door: it shapes our reverent silences, but it also itches to interrupt them, tear them down, to fill cathedrals with the noise of language saying a new thing, the noise of irreverent tapping and gossip.1 Thus silence, defined for my purposes as the absence of communicative language, necessarily plays an uneasy role in poetry. Silence comes before speech, and it comes after it; words are sensible only because a silence surrounds each one, separating it from the others. And yet, in our pauses and hesitations, in the places where language falters or becomes nonsense or noise, the surrounding silence threatens to do away with language, to obliterate the speech it makes possible. Poetry cannot be made in utter silence, however much its language may shape itself around it and attempt to approximate it. 1 Silence, then, serves two distinct and contradictory functions in poetry: it can be the conditions and even goal of poetic language, or it can be its limiting border, and it is often both. Poetry is shaped by the concept of silence as a generative matrix for language and meaning and by the concept of silence as a border to be crossed. The poets considered here situate themselves in a relationship to silence that is special perhaps not in kind but in degree, intensifying a fundamental ambivalence of poetry toward silence: poetry’s need to maintain and use certain silences and its simultaneous interest in pushing at language’s borders and exploring other silences, translating them into a shared language. Twentieth-century literature is especially