Self and Form: The Radicalization of American Poetry from Emily Dickinson to Charles Bernstein

Tracing the development of non-lyric traditions in American poetry, the author investigates ways the poet disappears from the poem while poetic form is seriously destabilized. Two fundamental “alternatives to the egoposition,” as Charles Olson writes in Mayan Letters (83), are identified: the poetics of attention on the one hand, and concrete poetry and language writing on the other. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetries of attention, the ego becomes an organ responding to experience, turning the creative self into an attentive mind that opens itself unto the world. Twentieth-century concrete poetry eliminates the self-expressive firstperson subject while allowing the language material to take the place of the subject. The radicalization of American poetry culminates in language writing, which places the creative process under the control of language, thereby doing away with the self that formerly gave cohesion to the text, and allowing language, as opposed to meter and prosody, to perform a central structuring function. Conducting close prosodic and grammetrical readings, the author demonstrates that in all these poetries—whether attention is directed to the world or to the word—the elimination of the lyrical self goes hand in hand with the disruption of regular poetic form. (EB)