Abstraction in Contemporary Poetry: An Apprenticeship in Reading Ellen Dillon B.A., M.A., G.Dip.Ed., Dip.Ed. Thesis submitted for the award of PhD Dublin City University School of English Supervisor Dr Michael Hinds School of English January 2019 Declaration I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of PhD is entirely my own work, that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge breach any law of copyright, and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Signed: ____________ (Candidate) ID No.: 13118234 Date: 19/12/18 Acknowledgements My deepest thanks go to Dr Michael Hinds for his patience, expertise and guidance throughout the long gestation of this thesis. Without his support this project would never have evolved as it has done. His enthusiasm for the work was a great source of encouragement right from the earliest stages. Thanks also to the School of English at Dublin City University for providing funding in the form of fees and a travel grant and providing opportunities to teach and to share my research. In particular, my sincerest thanks to Dr Derek Hand for his generous support for the Peter Manson Symposium. I’d also like to thank the staff of the Mater Dei Institute where this project began, particularly Dr Kit Fryatt whose probing questions in the transfer viva contributed to shaping the direction of subsequent research. My thanks to Professor Charles Altieri for considered and encouraging responses to queries at the outset of the project. I’d also like to thank Peter Gizzi for his generosity in his readings and his company during his visit to Ireland in July 2017. Peter Manson has been more than generous throughout the course of this project, sharing his expertise and helping to track down hard-to-find copies of his own work and Mallarmé’s and being impartially supportive and positive throughout the project’s twists and turns. The ‘Soundeye’ organisers, Trevor Joyce, Fergal Gaynor, Rachel Warriner, Jimmy Cummins and Sarah Hayden, provided the opportunity to meet the poets I was writing about and created spaces where the poems came to life in small rooms in Cork, and this project would have been a completely different one without them. Dr Tom Betteridge has been a regular interlocutor on all things related to contemporary British poetry over the last few years, and his work and conversation on Peter Manson have been hugely influential on the development of this thesis. I’m immensely grateful to Jill Storey in Villiers School, Limerick, for providing financial support and the career break necessary to see this project through to completion. My parents, John and Bridget, and my siblings have been a steadfast source of practical support over the last few years. Particular thanks are due to my sister Niamh for her assistance with the bibliography, and for asking excellent and often very difficult questions at the right time. My children, Luke and Nina, have shown genuine interest, enthusiasm and pride throughout the process, and gamely tolerated my absences, both physical and mental. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the many contributions of my husband Daniel, who encouraged me to start it in the first place and to take a career break to study full time. His beautiful slideshows, expertise in art, and practical help with visual and technical problems were essential to the completion of this thesis, which is dedicated to him. Sweet or salted is an exemplary paradigm in the sense of associated poles mistaken as opposites… (Daisy Lafarge 2018) ii Contents Declaration ........................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii List of Figures ...................................................................................................................... v List of Abbreviations .......................................................................................................... vi Abstract .............................................................................................................................. vii Introduction: Thinking with Abstractions ........................................................................... 1 Modes of Abstraction: Poetic/ Visual/ Political / Heuristic .......................................... 6 Outline: Reading Abstraction ......................................................................................... 31 Chapter One: Starting from the Abstract Pole—Learning to Read with Altieri ............... 40 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 40 1.1 The Process of Abstraction: abstracting prose and hollowing terminology. ......... 44 1.1.1 Polar Prose .............................................................................................................. 44 1.1.2 Hollowing Terminology ......................................................................................... 49 1.2 ‘Far better to begin at the opposite pole’: from exemplarity to the opposite of ethics. ........................................................................................................................................... 60 1.2.1 ‘Exemplary linguistic acts’: setting an example. ................................................... 60 1.2.2 Reversing ‘ideals of ethical reading’: turning against the ethical turn.................. 64 1.2.3 What Contemporary Poetry Can Learn from Theoretical Abstraction ................. 72 Chapter Two: An Applied Poetics of the Fold .................................................................. 74 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 74 2.1: Pacing the Boundaries of Modernism ........................................................................ 75 2.1.1 Reading 1: ‘…the ultimate nothingness or absence of meaning…’ ...................... 78 2.1.2 Reading 2: ‘Round and round the confessional style goes in its narrow pound’ ... 81 2.1.3 Reading 3: ‘….small revolutions in how we imagine ourselves imagining…’ ...... 83 2.2: ‘The Opposite of Gesture’ ........................................................................................... 85 2.2.1 Disembodied Phenomenology .............................................................................. 87 2.2.2 Towards a Proprioceptive Poetics? ....................................................................... 96 2.3: ‘…what can one mean by agency, when the field becomes the fold…’ .................... 103 2.3.1 ‘What abstract machine emerges?’ ....................................................................... 107 2.3.2 Conclusion .............................................................................................................111 iii Chapter Three: ‘A resonant, intertextual practice of assemblage’—Practicing the Outside in Gizzi and Manson ........................................................................................................ 114 3.1 ‘A reopened language lets the … outside in again ...’ ............................................. 115 3.2 ‘Who will live inside the song?’: Peter Gizzi’s resonant assemblage. ..................... 117 3.4 Rewriting the Other and the Others: Collaboration and Contradiction in Gizzi and Manson .......................................................................................................................... 127 3.5 Songs and ballads at the threshold .......................................................................... 154 Chapter Four: ‘am I in meaning yet’ —Moving through Meaning in Manson’s Mallarmé and Poems of Frank Rupture ........................................................................................... 161 4.1 English in Mallarmé and Mallarmé in English ....................................................... 165 4.2 Hollow rhymes and holorimes ................................................................................ 179 4.3 ‘jubilant/ assumption of a compound sonic icon’: from reflection to echo(self)location .......................................................................................................... 183 4.4 ‘one sings for dear life’............................................................................................. 190 Conclusion: At the edge of ‘meaning’s painterly skitters’ ............................................... 201 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 207 iv List of Figures Figure 1 (Manson, 1992, p.1) ................................................................................................................ 144 Figure 2 (Manson, 1992, p.2) ................................................................................................................ 144 Figure 3 (Manson 1992, p.3) ................................................................................................................ 151 Figure 4 ‘Canzon’, p.3 ...........................................................................................................................