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This dissertation explores how the evolution of twentieth-century U.S. literature was shaped by the reception of Spanish and Latin American poetry. I argue that midcentury poets embraced the diverse structures of poetic address they encountered in the Latin American anthology in order to remake the unit of the poem and the linguistic and structural boundaries of the single book-length volume. Poets such as Jack Spicer, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, and Kenneth Koch adopted the anthology as a creative model that foregrounded the circulation and mutation of discursive contexts, and underscored a pointed indifference to the integrity of the book. From the Outside thus assembles an unusual cast of major and lesser-known poets whose address to various publics belies conventional affiliations of coterie and community as well as narratives that organize postwar American poetry under the master signs of lyric, nation, institution, or Cold War cultural politics.
Anthologies and translations, and especially anthologies of translations, remain understudied today. Literary scholarship tends to regard these objects as derivative, staid documents of canon, movement, ideology, or period. Yet midcentury translation anthologies were neither politically conservative nor formally stable; as objects of study, they reveal a field of multiplicity involved in the complex process of re-organizing itself. While they granted a measure of access to the multilingual poetry of the Americas, anthologies of translations also staged a confrontation with the limits of monolingual address. This confrontation exposed a persistent tension between two competing models of poetry’s communicability: one premised on circulation within communities; the other, on circulation beyond them. This tension surfaces as a dialectical push-and-pull between lyric communication and its primary modality, direct address, and non-lyric modes of address oriented to a more heterogeneous range of publics.
This drama unfolds at an historical moment when the proliferation of poetry anthologies contributed to the widespread perception among poets that poetry had never been more infiltrated, nor more marked by, publicity. As scholars of the new lyric studies have shown, this perception did nothing to diminish the tendency in this period to read all poetry as lyric. Lyric reading obscured the ways in which midcentury poetry embraced publicity and addressed multiple publics. In fact, because publicity was assumed to have a uniformly negative influence, lyric became one of the master signs of poetry’s capacity to resist the threats of mass culture, the administered world, and the encroachments of capital. By cementing the association between poetry and lyric, mainstream anthologization helped to lend this allegory its force. By contrast, the anthology of Spanish and Latin American poetry—published by small presses situated on the margins of the literary field—existed in an antagonistic relationship with the canon-defining textbook and popular anthologies that disseminated the norms of lyric culture.
The poets I study repurposed the modes of address and poetic genres they encountered in translation anthologies in order to rethink these norms. As they wrote in the somewhat fantastical, Latinized light of the “Spanish” and “Latin American,” they reconsidered what and how “American” poetry—as a media form and as public discourse—communicates. Individual chapters show the San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer bemoaning the New York publishing industry’s anthologization of “crap,” while simultaneously turning to anthologies of Federico García Lorca’s poetry to develop a poetics of serial address; Langston Hughes drawing on his prolific work as an anthologist to bring the address of global decolonization to mainstream white and black U.S. readerships; Elizabeth Bishop cannibalizing Latin American genres to make poetry out of the gendered interplay of recognition and misrecognition that constitutes the landmark anthology of Brazilian poetry she co-edited with Emanuel Brasil; and the first-generation New York School poet Kenneth Koch noticing the popularity of the mid-sixties Latin American poetry anthology, and turning the form and its stylization into objects of parody.

ETD_10106

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-n72f-jr50

ETD doctoral

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