UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Three Very Short Poems: The Verbal Economics of Twentieth-Century American Poetry Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23q9t3c3 Author Schmidt, Jeremy Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Three Very Short Poems: The Verbal Economics of Twentieth-Century American Poetry A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Jeremy A. Schmidt 2020 © Copyright by Jeremy A. Schmidt 2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Three Very Short Poems: The Verbal Economics of Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Jeremy A. Schmidt Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2020 Professor Michael North, Chair This study examines three very short poems from three distinct moments in recent literary history in order to determine the limits of the poetic virtue of concision and to consider the social and aesthetic issues raised by extreme textual reduction. Attending to the production, circulation, and afterlives of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” (1959), and Aram Saroyan’s “lighght” (1966), I argue that such texts necessarily, and yet paradoxically, join simplicity and ease to difficulty and effort. Those tense combinations, in turn, make these poems ideal sites for examining how brevity functions as a shared resource through which writers define and redefine what constitutes poetic labor and thus negotiate their individual relationships to the poetic tradition. In tracing those negotiations, Three Very Short Poems: The Verbal Economics of Twentieth-Century American Poetry participates in the ongoing reassessment of the relationship between literary modernism and mass culture by ii foregrounding art-poems that have reached unusual levels of popularity. Each of the three central chapters combines standard literary and reception history with formal analysis in order to tease out how the origin of a specific famous poem relates to its subsequent reprintings and reworkings. Throughout, I treat textual economization as a set of formal techniques whose variable meanings are determined by how those techniques emerge from and respond to historically located discourses of brevity. Each chapter functions as a distinct case study of a particular issue—knowledge-work and efficiency at the turn of the century, racial and economic inequality in the immediate postwar era, intellectual labor and social support in the late 1960s— and this means that each makes its own independent claims, even as the chapters argue collectively that a commitment to brevity as a value in itself unifies the diverse poetic field of the twentieth century. iii The dissertation of Jeremy A. Schmidt is approved. Todd S. Presner Mark I. Seltzer Brian Kim Stefans Michael North, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2020 iv For my parents v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ....................................................................................... ii LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................................... viii VITA ............................................................................................................................................... x INTRODUCTION On Not Saying More ........................................................................................ 1 1. Two or Three Problems of Brevity ....................................................................................... 1 2. The Means of Reduction ....................................................................................................... 7 3. The Persistence of Size in Discussions of Genre ................................................................ 11 4. Sublyric Reading ................................................................................................................. 19 5. Toward a Theory of the Very Short Poem .......................................................................... 25 6. Our Minima ......................................................................................................................... 33 Metro ..................................................................................................................................37 Cool ....................................................................................................................................39 lighght ................................................................................................................................41 Coda ...................................................................................................................................43 CHAPTER 1 The Modernist Work Ethic: Cutting Cadences in the Poetry of Ezra Pound ......... 44 1. A Small Act of Modernism ................................................................................................. 44 2. Two or Three Stations of “Metro” ...................................................................................... 54 3. Office Magic ....................................................................................................................... 62 4. The Modernist Work Ethic ................................................................................................. 74 5. Labored Rhythms ................................................................................................................ 97 6. “(here represented by a blank space)” .............................................................................. 117 CHAPTER 2 Cyclic Cool: The Socialized Forms of Gwendolyn Brooks ................................. 132 1. Catchiness ......................................................................................................................... 132 2. Transparent Cool ............................................................................................................... 146 3. Technical Cool .................................................................................................................. 158 4. The Thematics of Constraint ............................................................................................. 164 5. The Social Function of Shortness ..................................................................................... 181 6. Translucent Cool ............................................................................................................... 199 CHAPTER 3 Made Possible By: Aram Saroyan and the Demands of Minimalism .................. 212 1. A Further Reduction ......................................................................................................... 212 2. Midcentury Modernist Poetics .......................................................................................... 217 3. Three Approaches to an Exemplary Error ........................................................................ 226 4. Weak Matter ...................................................................................................................... 239 5. “These Little Uglies”: Governmental Literary Criticism in the Seventies ....................... 249 6. “It Is Still a Rose”: Governmental Literary Criticism in the Nineties .............................. 264 CODA Brevity’s Wake ............................................................................................................... 278 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 286 vi LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1. “‘long poem’, ‘short poem,’” Google Books Ngram Viewer, 24 Jul. 2020. ..................... 12 Fig. 2. “Metro” in Poetry, April 1913. (Credit: The Modernist Journals Project) ........................ 54 Fig. 3. “Metro” in Lustra, 1917. ................................................................................................... 57 Fig. 4. Gentleman in profile for Pelman ad, T. P.’s Weekly, June 6, 1913. .................................. 78 Fig. 5. “Mr. Ezra Pound” in profile, The Bookman, July 1909. .................................................... 79 Fig. 6. “Drawing of Ezra Pound by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska” in Eliot, Ezra Pound, 1917. .......... 80 Fig. 7. Sketch by Gaudier-Brzeska on the cover of Personae (1926), 1990. ............................... 80 Fig. 8. Headless torso on the cover of “pirated” Cantos 110-116, 1967. ..................................... 81 Fig. 9. “Metro” on the “L” in the Loop, 2012. (Credit: Poetry Foundation) .............................. 124 Fig. 10. Brooks, “We Real Cool,” Poetry, Sept. 1959. .............................................................. 136 Fig. 11. Freedom Day Flyer, 1963. (Credit: Chicago History Museum/Getty Images) ............. 184 Fig. 12. “Kilroy Was Here” example. (Credit: Patrick A. Tillery) ............................................. 197 Fig. 13. “lighght,” Aram Saroyan, 1968. .................................................................................... 213 Fig. 14. Four-Legged “m,” 1966. ................................................................................................ 240 Fig. 15. “crickets,”