Round Song: Narrative Bibliography and the Living Archive Arendt Oak Speser A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Leroy Searle, Chair Raimonda Modiano Paul Remley Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of English Speser 2 ©Copyright 2013 Arendt Oak Speser Speser 3 University of Washington Abstract Round Song: Narrative Bibliography and the Living Archive Arendt Oak Speser Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Leroy Searle Department of English Working with literary archives, “Round Song” seeks to establish a critical methodology of narrative bibliography. The critic as bibliographer is able to witness the production of literature as a communal process, represented by materials pertaining to all stages of composition and execution. In the pursuit of both textual meaning and literary argument, the narrative bibliographer is in a unique position to tell the stories of how books enter the world. Through this practice the archive becomes a poetic space of cultural memory, expanding the possibilities of criticism to make arguments not just about texts, but also about the readers of texts. In three chapters, each focusing on a specific American text, “Round Song” engages the archives of Stephen Vincent Benét, Thomas McGrath, and Walt Whitman. An introduction outlines the stakes of the methodology and also the significance of American poetry for democracy. Speser 4 Acknowledgements When Herb Blau passed away in May, I knew there was no choice but to finish this dissertation in honor of his memory. Without any false apprehensions of living up to his expectations, I humbly submit the following work. While the focus of my project is on the archive, the motivation comes from a deep desire to live in a world where relationships are the true mark of a good life. In light of that “fervid and tremendous IDEA,” to use the words of Whitman, I am grateful to have worked with the members of my committee throughout my graduate program. Professor Leroy Searle, Professor Mona Modiano, and Professor Paul Remley were not only instrumental to this dissertation, they confirmed that criticism and care are still alive and well in the academic profession. I would also like to thank Professor Gordana Crnkovic, who served as both a witness and confidant in my graduate studies. Along with the faculty and staff of the English Department and the Textual Studies Program, special thanks to Sandra Kroupa, Curator extraordinaire. For my family, who despite moments of exasperation that I was not yet finished, never once revoked their love and support. For my wife, Anna, you made me understand what it meant to be happy, and gave me the strength I needed to believe it could happen. For my friends, who despite a diversity of occupations, from scholar to carpenter, all wanted me to pursue what mattered most. Speser 5 Introduction: The Life of the Archive Where is the stranger, the reader, in the half-light of the buried life? – Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry In framing the following chapters as a project of Textual Studies, I wish to suggest a method of archival research, a method that uses an expanded idea of the archive to situate a practice of narrative bibliography. The fundamental premise of this method is that the research is of more value as a PROCESS than the resolved content of whatever argument might emerge from the evidence. I will attempt to demonstrate the poetic nature of this process, and to connect this poetics of the archive to a new way of thinking about the imaginative possibilities of literary criticism outside of the traditional uses of “secondary source” material. In all of the examples assembled here, Rukeyser’s metaphor of the life of poetry is embraced, first by the poets and then, as I will show, by readers who may reside in the obscurity or “half-light” of a “buried life,’ to the editors, scholars and critics who may bring it into a fuller and expanding daylight. Before establishing the critical enterprise through this introduction, which will use two primary texts to do so (Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, and Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days), I would like to acknowledge a system of academic authority that I have often resisted and on occasion disparaged, since it has also provided examples of my main themes pertaining to the vitality and endurance of poetic life that includes sharp and focused critical debate and disagreement. Inherent in my idea of narrative bibliography is the demonstrable, if sometimes fragile evidence that reading, particularly reading poetry, institutes and encourages communities, more broadly, to borrow a term taken from Tom McGrath and others, communitas, which can supplant throw-away clichés we may associate with sound-bite progressive politics. Speser 6 My own background, growing up in a small town of 7,000 people, and then leaving to attend a small liberal arts college of 1,200 students only confirms the poverty of slogans. Sustaining communities, bringing together exemplary poetic lives, mentors and fellow students, can show us the sting of sincere criticism, which at its core initiates the promise of real progress, as well as the support of open-ended and expanding projects like those explored in this dissertation. This is what I have also found in the expanded model of the archive, whether from friends, editors, publishers, or simply the athletic readers of a democratic public. And like Whitman, I believe the future is dependent on that ideal. As Whitman seeks to qualify his athletic readers, so does Rukeyser. She presents the triad of poet-poem-reader, only to offer an enhanced conception of the audience as witness, “which includes the act of seeing or knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence” (LP 187). In explaining the activity of a poem, moving from the consciousness of the poet, through the medium of the poem, to the experience of the witness, she presents a process (the poem is not an object; “the poem is a process”) that signals what Joseph Grigely, who calls the textual event. The poem on the page is merely one event in the process; for Rukeyser, and Grigely’s conception opens the same door, each reading of the poem by the witness can be a separate event in the life of the poem, since the witness is not a static observer, but an agent of change for the poem, while also being changed by the poem. From here, it is not a stretch to understand the archive in the same light (or half-light): the archive is at once the medium of change for the witness, while the witness, through her experiences and acts of “giving evidence,” changes the archive. More will be said in the ensuing chapters about the role of personal experience in the archive; but it is important here to stop and ask what is meant by “the act of giving evidence.” If Speser 7 I am interested in the bibliographic history of Rukeyser’s poetry, and I travel to a particular archive to look at versions of a manuscript, what am I after? Surely, I can find textual edits and revisions, perhaps even notes pertaining to the composition and some intriguing marginalia. But what if I find a notebook with this story jotted down, a story which she tells in The Life of Poetry, as it takes place in a café: In one corner, a man was playing a guitar, and the stranger turned to watch him. The guitar-player was good; the stop and tremble of the strings touched everyone in that room. “You know,” said the stranger, “I respect creative people, any kind; I never used to feel that way, but something happened—I know a man in the city I come from, a business associate (I’m a lawyer)—we’ve gone on fishing trips for twenty years—I know him fairly well, I’d say—big man, too: six foot four, weighs two hundred and forty pounds. Twenty years, and I just found out last month that he writes poems. I asked around; he’s written books of them; very good, too they say. I’m going to get ahold of some. But I sure feel different about creative people.” “What is the name of your friend?” “Wallace Stevens,” said the stranger. (101) Now consider the evidence I can take from this story. If I recognize it from The Life of Poetry, I can say, “Well, in looking for one thing, I have found another.”1 If I am interested in Rukeyser’s attention to music and rhythm, I can say, “Look at the descriptions she uses for the guitar playing: the stop and tremble of the strings.” If I am an admirer or perhaps a scholar of Wallace 1 For instance, in looking for a manuscript, I have found a notebook—another textual event in the life of poetry. Speser 8 Stevens, there is a host of useful information to be glossed, from his attitude toward poetic production to his imposing physical build. But this is all objective evidence—evidence pertaining to other objects of inquiry. Instead, when I read this story, I mentally put it in company with other stories of similar theme, like Ralph Ellison’s wonderful essay, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” which recognizes that what we assume often limits what we are able to see. Sitting in the archive, I have been transported from a specific bibliographic inquiry into a poetic space of cultural memory, so that when I return to my research, I am no longer the same witness. The act of giving evidence therefore becomes a poetic act, part of the process of the archive which extends backwards and forwards in time, lending authority and credibility not just for a bibliographic fact (this story became part of this book), but for the stranger who becomes a witness. The value is transferred from the static “proof” to the creation of exchange, the dance (as Rukeyser is fond of saying), or the song. It might be better to measure in terms of energy rather than argument: “Exchange is creation; and the human energy involved is consciousness, the capacity to produce change from the existing conditions" (183). She is still writing about poetry, of course, but her point applies equally to the archive. Before we get into the chapters, which deal with specific archives (or archives resisting specificity), it might be helpful to look at a text which is an archive in itself: Whitman’s Specimen Days. By his own words, “Incongruous and full of skips and jumps…”, the “huddle” of diary-jottings, war-memoranda, Nature-notes and observances, “all bundled up and tied by a big string;” it is as if he is describing an archive proper (only not tied up by a big string, rather set into cardboard boxes). Rukeyser calls Whitman a “poet of possibility,” and there is certainly something to that when holding Specimen Days in your hand, a book that in all likelihood would Speser 9 have slim chance of being published today (except perhaps posthumously). As a printer, much was possible for Whitman, but the charm of Specimen Days is not that it is “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed;” the sense of possibility is most keenly apprehended in the poet’s intimacy with the form. Whether sitting bedside for a dying man’s final comfort, or describing moon-lit walks around the White House, there is nothing extemporaneous about the huddle. At a cursory glance, that statement might seem like a contradiction. The opposite might seem more appropriate: the text is, in point of fact, entirely extemporaneous. There is no narrative arc; the only consistent structure provided by chronology. The resolution comes through Whitman’s special ability to make each section a text unto itself, while also an offering for company, a hand outstretched in recto and verso for what is around it. It is pleasurable to select an entry at random, and the experience of reading a contained unit can be achieved. But to read of his delight in bumble-bees, complete with excerpted verses from another “little volume,”2 and then to move on to cedar-apples, and after that to his observations of two kingfishers, which he eventually becomes convinced recognize him and frolic for his enjoyment—the sequence instills a continuity of thought and feeling and presence that highlights the play of the poetic imagination. This special ability is different from the craft of arranging, which good poets must do if their volumes are to have any coherence. The distinction is one of transfer, or exchange, to use Rukeyser again for analysis. In the exchange from one section to the next, a consciousness is 2 Specimen Days is also a gathering of verses, not as an anthology, but as a living integration with the form of his huddle. Speser 10 created that allows the reader to move beyond the poem, into the space of the poetic archive, where we can see for ourselves “that burning central life” from whence poems are made.3 Literary criticism can participate and share in that same exchange, if it only has the vision to see beyond the poems as merely artifacts. This is neither to say that meaning does not happen in the poems, nor to argue against the kind of disciplined, close reading that probes the most exacting conditions of the art. But it is to comment on the kind of thing a poem is, an ontological comment that refuses to isolate the poem in time and space as a static work. I share Rukeyser’s disdain for criticism that specializes in dying, pulling the poem away from the life (not just of the poet, but of the medium and the reader, as well) in favor of an authoritarian hermeneutics: We have used the term “mind” and allowed ourselves to be trapped into believing there was such a thing, such a place, such a locus of forces. We have used the word “poem” and now the people who live by division quarrel about “the poem as object.” They pull it away from their own lives, from the life of the poet, and they attempt to pull it away from its meaning, from itself; finally, in a trance of shattering, they deny qualities and forms and all significance. Then, cut off from its life, they see the dead Beauty: they know what remorse is, they begin to look for some single cause of their self-hatred and contempt. There is, of course, no single cause. We are not so mechanical as that. But there was a symptom: these specialists in dying, they were prepared to believe there was such a thing as Still Life. For all things change in time; some are made of change itself, and the poem is one of these. It is not an object; the poem is a process. (186) 3 The full passage from the end of The Life of Poetry reads: “Until the peace makes its people, its forests, and its living cities; in that burning central life, and wherever we live, there is the place for poetry” (229).