In Ghostly Matters, the sociologist Avery F. Gordon suggests that we “ponder the paradox of providing a hospitable memory for ghosts out of a concern for justice.”1 The phrase she italicizes is from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, as is the concept, though, in Derrida’s original, the paradox is so elaborately convoluted as to seem unable to extricate itself from the idea at hand. In the event, he opts to glimpse no more than a glimpse.2 Fair enough. Very early on, Derrida says his text will proceed “like an essay in the night.”3 Mine, however, like its subject, will proceed in bright daylight. This essay is about a protest march that took place on a beautiful spring day, from noon to five, though it was part of something that had already taken place, and would take place again, and, perhaps, was never not taking place, namely protestation...

"Radical Matter" argues that expansive and experimental mixed mode poetic works since the American mid-century embody a language-based materiality that motivates the valuations of their symbolic economies. I focus on three works--William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Bernadette Mayer's Studying Hunger Journals, and Juliana Spahr's Well Then There Now--that each engage prose alongside verse, material from other texts and authors, or multiple discursive modes: all ways, I argue, of substantiating the desires and rhetorical strategies that orient these speakers in language and in relation to their imagined addressees. These substantiations bring forward features and consequences of language's articulations as discourse--whether lyric, narrative, epistolary, diaristic, or other--that carry out metaphoric interventions in the crises of value that drive these poetic works towards their substantial lengths, their material and modal inclusivity, and the speakers that they voice.

I read Paterson's larger strategy of textual bricolage and its local junctures between prose and verse as expressions of the portability of lyric discourse's sensory and semantic functions. The circulations and evolutions of lyric figures and phrasal units throughout the work act in opposition to the expressive and libidinal paralyses of the stagnant American economic and social body that the poem's matter documents. Against the reifications of established forms--aesthetic forms as well as the institutions and conventions that organize social life--Williams manifests language's broadest functional value through the material resources of lyric. The discursive junctions of Bernadette Mayer's Studying Hunger Journals activate the rhetorical relations of lyric, epistolary, and diaristic address as sites where speakers and addressees materialize as embodiments of the pronominal figures "I" and "you." I test these materializations against psychoanalytic and structural linguistic models of subject formation in order to read Mayer's drive towards atemporality and the indeterminacy of her interlocutors in terms of the personal history her journals document. Through the materializations and dematerializations of grammatical persons, Mayer rehearses the lack and losses that motivate her hunger and which the operations of language make manifest.

In my last chapter, I read Spahr's collection of prose, verse, and prose poetry, Well Then There Now, in terms of its orientation towards difference as the material consequence of her opaque plural pronominal lyric protagonists "we" and "they" and her transparent first person prose speaker, as well as the intertextual reading that her multi-mode collection demands. I argue that Spahr's materialization of difference and the readerly exclusions it enacts constitutes an anti-pluralist resistance to rhetorical demands of readerly identification and inclusivity with poetic speakers. The "matter" of Spahr's works--personal, political, environmental, and economic systems of interrelation and complicity--becomes "radical" by virtue of a rhetoric that manifests difference as the fundamental condition of language and the requisite term in active, self-organized reading.

On Lyric’s Minor Commons studies how minoritized writers use lyric poems to create alternative forms of collectivity. I argue that poets like Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Jack Spicer use lyric poetry’s undetermined multiplicity of voicing and reading for various social and political aims. These poems become spaces for politics: they conjure and mobilize collectives of action and feeling. My argument complicates generic and historicist critiques that associate lyric voice with the reinforcement of humanism. While lyric is often considered to be the genre of individual subjective experience, I read lyric as the genre of the collective who can voice or read it. For the minoritized poets I discuss in this dissertation, lyric’s collective is not the unmarked hegemonic universal, but another commons. The politics of difference often emphasizes the individual relative to the collective; my readings show how the “black poem” or the “queer poem” offer a commons of their own. These poems are minor in their position vis-à-vis the unmarked hegemonic universal, and also minor in their alternative prefiguring of a different form of sociality without a coercive and majoritarian impulse. By calling these invocations commons rather than particularisms, I argue that these writers figure minoritized identities as forms of collectivity rather than fixed identifications.

I begin with a reconsideration of the Romantic lyric, a primal scene for the association of lyric with the unmarked and abstract subject. Through reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals in apposition to some of William Wordsworth’s poems, I suggest a version of lyric reading that does not merely reproduce the subject, but instead exposes language to alternative reiteration through a contingent holding. Lyric’s attempt to capture experience in language, I argue, makes that experience into a commons. I then turn to more specific invocations by three mid-century U.S. poets, Amiri Baraka, Jack Spicer, and Frank O’Hara. Baraka and Spicer use lyric poems to call collective subjectivities—queerness and blackness, respectively—into being. Poems, for them, become utopian queer or black spaces par excellence: as Baraka writes, “Let the world be a black poem.” I complicate this utopian impulse by asking whether poems can offer security against despair. Across O’Hara’s bright sociality, and Spicer’s alienation, I find their poems offer various and contradictory sites of entry that account for how experiences of joy and negativity interfuse one another. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, whose commons is also internally differentiated, speculative, and without assurance. This poem, I argue, assembles a universality of aesthetic judgment as an ecstatic community that is radically indeterminate, yet posited nevertheless. Throughout these investigations I emphasize how the collective is not a lamentable or optional feature for these poets: rather than using lyric to plumb the depths of personal experience, they use it to imagine and create various emergent commons.

In my dissertation, I investigate the epic writings of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Hayden to tell the stories of black working class life and culture in postwar New York City, Chicago, and Detroit. I suggest that these writers' modernist epics offer a counter-poetics to the "clean" modernism of urban renewal and, implicitly, lay bare the racial exclusionism foundational to not only urban renewal's specific policies of segregation and displacement but also to its aesthetic claims to architectural avant-gardism and newness. This was a time of urban renewal-slum clearance programs that displaced and disrupted black communities--more specifically, a time when race, modernism, and geography all collided in urban renewal--and I argue that we can see both urban renewal and the poetic responses to it in terms of aesthetic modernism.

In my first chapter, "Alternative Geographies of Community in Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred," I claim that Hughes's poem about the struggle for home and belonging in postwar Harlem invokes the importance of black self-determination and action through the democratic movements of bebop jazz and montage. In my second chapter, "Building `Social Width' in Gwendolyn Brooks's `In the Mecca,'" I read Brooks's epic as a poetic formalization of the negotiation of private and public space and, in particular, of the voices which speak for and shape a community. In my third chapter, "Racial Grief and Racial Mourning in Robert Hayden's `Middle Passage' and `Elegies for Paradise Valley,'" I argue that the epic becomes impossible for Hayden because of the way blacks are displaced from their history, beginning with the rending racial grief of the Middle Passage; "Elegies for Paradise Valley" revisits the experience of racial grief and racial melancholia is one affective avenue his poem offers.

My dissertation, Thinking Otherwise, is a triptychal essay that pursues the consequences of a common feature of two very different artists, Agnes Martin and Alice Notley, who each renounce the products of reason—concepts, ideas, knowledge—for the sake of thinking. Both choose the theory of evolution to exemplify their refusal to believe in ideas. Evolution is forsworn because of its fitness as an emblem of reason—a paragon of reason’s fruits that stands as explanation and cause of the way things are the way they are. Upon release from the class or hold of mental objects whose function the theory of evolution exemplifies, each artist performs a visionary perceptive mode without which her art would be impossible, and which she avers is transmissible to the audience.

Chapter one reads against the ubiquitous trend in Martin scholarship that divides the visual from the verbal, dissociating Martin’s “visions”—the way her paintings occurred to her entire, “the size of a postage stamp”—from her “voices,” auditory hallucinations symptomatic of Martin’s schizophrenia. Critics insist on this division between Martin’s visions and her voices to preserve the integrity of the paintings, leaving them uncompromised by Martin’s mental illness. I argue that consigning the voices to Martin’s pathology undermines her thinking about thinking, an activity that isn’t the same as the wordless activity her visions provide. To take seriously the mental activity Martin wants her work to initiate, I turn to two psychoanalysts working at the time Martin was diagnosed: Marion Milner—for her work on the boundary between creativity and madness in both her clinical studies and her auto-criticism—and W.R. Bion, for his understanding of hallucinosis and his theory of thinking as an apparatus that develops in response to thoughts.

Chapter two maps the trajectory by which Alice Notley’s “poetics of disobedience” authorizes not only her remaking of poetic genres, but also the launching of scientistic claims which culminate in her insistence that poetry determines speciation and is a tool with which we can measure the laws and nature of the universe. I show how Notley’s work exceeds the limits of feminist epistemology, and I consider her work in connection with the decolonial work of Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter. The imbrication of Notley’s formal imagination and a counterpoetics (Glissant’s term) leads to a counterhumanism (Wynter’s term), which rivals secular humanism—deposing Darwin’s the Descent of Man with Notley’s The Descent of Alette.

The final chapter reads Martin’s paintings and Notley’s poems to discover a synthetic argument for measure’s capacity to recondition both the materials and process of thinking. Inhabiting the nexus of creative and academic writing, this chapter is a lyric essay that is both a narrative of my own responses to the objects of study and an exploratory confession of my methodology and my own filiative poetics.

In the prevailing critical reading paradigm, poetry is an exceptional instance of language that projects its own world. Cleanth Brooks holds that a poem should be read as if it were in "dramatic context": any effects the poem might have only apply as if on stage. This dramaturgical metaphor frees poetry of obligation to verisimilitude, and suggests an orientation that Theodor Adorno then construes into a politics: poetry stands so resolutely apart from society as to repudiate it. But the figure also predetermines that the relation between poetry and its immediate referents will be universally vicarious: poets and readers only engage with their worlds through what Kenneth Burke calls "identification," which Paul DeMan darkly extrapolates into the state of all language, a "linguistic predicament" also known as "death." We can only imagine doing something in a poem, never actually do it.

In my dissertation, I read eight twenty-first-century poems -- Vanessa Place's Statement of Facts, Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw, Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, Rob Fitterman's "The Goths," M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, Claudia Rankine's "Situation #1," Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal, and Lisa Robertson's "Face/" -- in which the poets try to reclaim agency for poetry by performing poetic acts of reading that mimic or parody the "dramatic" metaphor in poetry criticism. I cast these poets' interventions into twentieth-century institutional, disciplinary, and pedagogical history into relief by the poems with four reading methodologies -- close reading, contextualization, historicization, and lyricization -- in each of my chapters. In my readings, I attend to these poems' direct repercussions--the ways they move their readers; I argue that by pushing back on their readers' readings, contemporary poets are working to re-claim political efficacy for poetry.

This project reconsiders literary engagements with space through a queer theoretical lens. How, I ask, do writers challenge the social and generic constraints that propel narratives along familiar routes? What is the role of desire in narratives that re-route or queer the quotidian, urban, or social navigations they set in motion? The texts I examine (by Samuel Delany, Renee Gladman, Thomas Pynchon, and Kazuo Ishiguro) unfold in worlds upended by material and social crises. Their geographies change, their landmarks vanish, and their subjects are confronted by energies greater than their own. These agential spaces often obscure the “human” story that James Wood, among others, takes as the proper subject of fiction. In the process, they invite us to develop new modes of reading that dissociate desire from the “human” subject and find it instead in the frictions and movements the text constructs.

Each of the texts in my archive constructs what I call an impossible map: a setting whose boundaries, distances, and proximities cannot be articulated by any static representation. The impossible map is neither improbable, given that it resembles the real but for its changeability, nor unknowable, given that it is, in most cases, relentlessly articulated. The material world we encounter is not a thing but a process, a gathering of intensities and affects that partake in the feelings we associate with getting our bearings but never allow us to “get” them. I refer to this process as orientation. One of the wagers of this project is that reading for orientation allows us to encounter subjects that are, like the worlds they traverse, given to a certain waywardness. Another is that getting lost might have its own politics and pleasures. The texts I study engage in more local and embodied efforts than those we might associate with Jameson’s challenge for the postmodern novel, namely, to produce an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” capacious enough to account for the complex dimensions of multinational capital. These texts commit themselves to spaces and intervals where Jameson’s “positioning” is indistinguishable from the more indeterminate effects of movement and change. They struggle to map even the shortest trajectories, and they seek—with an abundance of affects that include something like pleasure—new traction in the experience of getting lost.

The texts I examine allow me to develop a reading process that accounts for literature’s agential spaces and wayward desires. Each of my chapters centers around a different form of momentary orientation, understood as an instance of directionality that does not cohere into a stable map. Chapter 1 considers how cruising is activated by the figure of the periplum that informs Samuel Delany’s peripatetic defense of New York’s gay cruising scene in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999). Chapter 2 tracks how Thomas Pynchon’s 9/11 novel Bleeding Edge (2013) animates a tension between “loss” and “getting lost” that forsakes the cognitive map and troubles the myriad affective, political, and spatial connotations those terms have come to designate. My third and fourth chapters explore two texts that resist the “the end” that Peter Brooks and Frank Kermode, respectively, identify with narrative and apocalyptic desire. Chapter 3 zooms in on the figure of “turning” in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995), where discrete acts of turning around frustrate the decisive “turning point” the crisis-weary city longs for. Chapter 4 carries this line of argument into the more speculative terrain of Renee Gladman’s Ravicka novels (2010-2017), a series of four cross-genre texts that investigate a fictional city in crisis. Taking its cue from the narrator of Gladman’s second book, I argue that Gladman transforms the “circumstantial” and thus inadmissible evidence of crisis into a narrative method that privileges the accidental, wayward, and circuitous orientations that texture subjects’ encounters with social and urban space.

Lyric and the Rhetoric of the Serial Mode in Twentieth Century American Poetry: Figuring Voice in the Work of Spicer, Berrigan, and Ashbery

Serial poetry has been recognized as an important formal category and writing practice in postwar experimental poetry, but the vital relationship between seriality and conventional aspects of the lyric genre has been obscure. After critiques of "lyric" that argue the term is politically suspect because it is linked to Romantic ideologies of the subject, new, historicized models of lyric emphasizing the functions and effects of voice have returned in recent criticism of Modernist and postwar experimental writing. Building on this recent criticism, this dissertation proposes that lyric rhetoric informs the turn towards the serial mode in poems by Jack Spicer, John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan. The serial poetry of these postwar writers makes lyric poetry function contextually, reviving the notion of voice. Seriality is best understood as a mode, not a form, that decontextualizes and re-contextualizes prior lyric fragments and allows poets to think about social relationships in terms of poetic ones, and vice versa.

Seriality has been discussed in criticism of Spicer, but has not been a key term in appraisals of book-length poems by Berrigan and Ashbery. Therefore my research offers seriality as a new perspective to understand these poets' practices of citation, appropriation and generic mixing: methods of constructing their own poetic voices out of existing textual materials from traditions that they write themselves into. I argue that these practices of textual rearrangement and revision offer a model of historically responsive lyric that challenges assumptions about how postwar poets read lyric and imagine more engaged audiences for their own writing. Through analysis of the serial mode in poems by Spicer, Berrigan, and Ashbery, I trace the outline of a common poetic voice in different series constructed from diverse materials: an epistolary exchange, a recursive sequence of sonnets transformed by scissors and scotch tape, and a meditation about lyric that is written in diaristic prose. I frame my analysis with a critical discussion of "The New Lyric Studies" and modern histories of lyric genre by Marjorie Perloff, Mark Jeffreys, Virginia Jackson, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, and others. Lyric rhetoric and voice in the serial mode matters, I propose, to scholars of 20th century American experimental literature seeking to move beyond reductive conceptual oppositions that divide the field.