This study focuses on the works of three authors whose first poetry books appeared in the 1970s, in the context of the dictatorial and authoritarian regimes that began seizing power in Latin America in the 1960s and '70s. At a juncture in which both traditional leftist discourse and the programs of earlier avant-gardes had begun to seem inadequate, younger poets sought to articulate, in the realm of the symbolic, coherent responses to increasingly oppressive and polarized political environments. The works in question are the following: Brazilian Waly Salomão's "Me segura qu'eu vou dar um troço" (Rio de Janeiro, 1972); Juan Luis Martínez's "La nueva novela" (Santiago, Chile, 1977); and, by Mexican conceptual artist Ulises Carrión, the unpublished "Poesías," from 1973, as well as a selection of his poetry-based artists books. These are hyper-referential, process-oriented, polyphonic works. They are not only politically motivated, but, given their understanding of the entwinement of politics and genre, are also decidedly against the ideology bolstering the lettered tradition, lyrical poetry, and self-expressive tendencies. At the core of their critique is a rejection of an economy of meaning in which the author's function, as Foucault puts it, equals "the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning." First and foremost, in their goal to burst open the meaning-making process, Salomão, Martínez, and Carrión disembody the utterance and question notions of literary value that set apart literary language from common speech. Relying heavily on appropriation and framing devices, they each posit an alternate model of authorship in which writing and reading are inextricable and, consequently, the work is co-created by the reader. Key among their strategies is that of acousmatics--here understood as the concealment of the source of the utterances in the text--in order to, primarily, create conditions of reception in which the reader can interact with the material on the page directly, without its being mediated by the poem's subject. Salomão, Martínez, and Carrión each achieve the uttering subject's removal from the text through different procedures that are contrasted in the dissertation. Emulating the cacophony of popular culture, Salomão performatively adopts multiple subjectivities in his works, saturating them to the point that no unitary subject can be said to be manifest in them. Martínez, on the other hand, mirrors the cacophony of printed matter. Besides failing to attribute the copious materials he samples in the wide-ranging word/image works comprising "La nueva novela," in presenting them he adopts the depersonalized institutional tone of textbooks, photographic captions, and paratextual materials such as footnotes, editor's notes, and bibliographical annotations. In Carrión's works the subject seems to have vacated the poem entirely, as author function is reduced to misreading canonical materials and performing interventions and erasures on them. Resulting from Carrión's operations are open structures that serve as models for post-literary ways to engage with texts. The way these authors assembled and put their books in circulation is also examined, since "Me segura qu'eu vou dar um troço," "La nueva novela," and Carrión's artist books are the result of a thorough rethinking of the politics of the book, the lettered tradition's keystone institution.

Orientador: Luiz Roberto Velloso Cairo / Banca: Suely Fadul Villibor Flory / Banca: Sílvia Maria Azevedo / Resumo: Integrado ao projeto romântico de nacionalização da poesia brasileira, Gonçalves Dias (1823 - 1864) desempenhou um papel primordial para o estabelecimento de uma poética nacional. A crítica literária que logo tratou de lhe conferir o título de consolidador da estética nacional, acabou por estabelecer como única possibilidade de leitura para sua poesia o signo da nacionalidade. Sem maiores questionamentos sobre outras possibilidades de reconhecimentos, a mesma crítica tem se furtado a questionar-se sobre a validade do designativo "indianista", quando o próprio Gonçalves Dias denominou sua poesia de americana. Relendo o processo de nacionalização da literatura brasileira, e a idéia de "cor local" como estratégia de nacionalização, e questionando, sobretudo, os valores que a crítica impôs ao poeta e sua obra, este trabalho elegendo a poesia americana de Gonçalves Dias, como objeto de estudo e reflexão, pretende reler essa parcela da obra do poeta maranhense, tendo como premissa a possibilidade de leitura dela como produto de uma intuição da identidade americana do brasileiro / Abstract: Inserted in the romantic's project of Brazilian poetry nationalization, Gonçalves Dias (1823 - 1864) played a fundamental role in the establishment of a national poetry. Literature Criticism quickly gave him the title of consolidator of national aesthetic, which eventually established that the only possibility of reading his poetry is the sign of nationality. Without any more regards about other possibilities of identification, the same criticism has been avoid questioning itself about the validity of the designator "Indianist", when Gonçalves Dias himself named his poetry as American. Rereading the Brazilian literature's nationalization process, also the idea of "local colour" as a strategy of nationalization, and, particularly, questioning the critical values imposed to the poet and his work, this dissertation, by electing the American poetry of Gonçalves Dias, as a subject of reflection and study, intend to reread this portion of this Brazilian poet's work, having as premise the possibility of reading it as a product of one intuition of the Brazilian's American identity / Mestre

Collaborative Poetics: Frank O’Hara and Robert Creeley draws on literary studies, art history, and bibliography to examine the transactions between the visual and verbal arts found in the American poets’ work. Bringing longstanding aesthetic debates about poetry and painting to bear on studies of collaboration, the dissertation counters the field’s prevailing intra-disciplinary focus. Visual-verbal collaborations, it suggests, undo conventional dichotomies between these descriptive systems, rendering insufficient a binary view of the “sister arts” as antagonists or analogues. By examining Creeley’s and O’Hara’s interdisciplinary forms and practices, this study advances a notion of “collaborative poetics” that centrally depends on both inter-artistic and inter-subjective exchange. As two of the most prolific collaborators of the mid-20th century – completing over 50 projects with visual artists between them – O’Hara and Creeley serve as exemplary case studies, situated at the forefront of an era in which reciprocity between the avant-garde arts was increasingly common. Through analyses of O’Hara’s early ekphrastic poems (Chapter 1) and Creeley’s literary self- portraiture (Chapter 3), Collaborative Poetics suggests that poets’ interactions with visual media destabilize lyric authority, creating space for reciprocal attachments between artists, artworks, and audiences. The poets’ artists’ books – Frank O’Hara and Michael Goldberg’s 1960 Odes (Chapter 2) and Robert Creeley and Robert Indiana’s 1968 Numbers (Chapter 4) – further advance a claim for alterity by refusing the conservative demand for “artistic purity” and prompting conversation between different (and traditionally opposed) artistic media. Restoring these little-studied works to their original interdisciplinary contexts, the project reinvigorates their status as material objects and subjects of analysis. Finally, the coda both considers the still-tenuous place of such interdisciplinary projects within many institutional spaces, including the academy and the museum, and reflects on the midcentury poets’ collaborative legacy as it turns to a brief reading of contemporary American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and painter Kiki Smith's 2006 artist’s book Concordance. / 2020-12-11T00:00:00Z

Taking a cue from the occasional reticence of the often-exuberant American Romantic poetics, this project tracks what I call “rhetorics of silence” in verse: those moments where words are declared to be inadequate, impertinent, unavailable, unintelligible or otherwise unsuitable for a task that the poet has proposed. In this respect, the term “silence” functions here as a broad metaphor encompassing a number of meta-linguistic or meta-poetic gestures aimed at highlighting the shortcomings of knowledge and representation. Whereas earlier critics have noticed these silences in haphazard ways, this project looks toward a systematic account of why and when nineteenth-century poets rely on gestures to the space beyond language. This intervention is especially useful for reading the seminal American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Because Whitman seems celebratory and Dickinson doleful, it has often been difficult to offer productive readings of the two in tandem. Where Whitman does resemble Dickinson, it is often thought to be in his poems that abandon or despair of his project for a democratic poetics. By contrast, working through the lyric and political verse of the lesser-known poetry of John Rollin Ridge, this project reads visionary and despairing silences as alike rhetorical gestures aimed at highlighting the common humanity of the poet and the reader. “Silence” is therefore an outgrowth of American ideology, albeit one that frequently allows poets to expand and query that ideology in ways that are not possible in the many corresponding but often blither deployments of rhetorical silence in the culture at large.

The poetry, prose, and personality of Walt Whitman have attained a truly global circulation, and scholarship continues to reveal his complex and lasting impact on literature, art, and politics around the world. This dissertation reveals Walt Whitman's extensive appropriation by the Latin American avant-garde, an artistic current that encompassed dozens of regional, national and transnational vanguardia movements across the Americas from roughly 1918 through the late 1930s. My work tells the story of how these pugnacious literary and artistic communities used Whitman as the raw material for a self-consciously "modern" art, as they circulated, adapted, and repurposed the US poet and his texts. The dissertation moves from south to north, beginning in Chile, proceeding to Nicaragua and Mexico, and ending with Latino writers in the United States. "Out of Place: Walt Whitman and the Latin American Avant-Gardes" argues that the literary and political appropriation of Whitman becomes a part of these movements' active participation in the hemispheric and global conversation of their day. What these aggressive avant-garde groups find useful, provocative, or generative in Whitman, then, offers us a unique perspective that cannot be left out of American literary studies. For as they wrestle with Whitman and the concept of "America," as they adapt Whitman into their notions of art, of nation and of language, and as they read him against the backdrop of globalization and modernity, a new Walt Whitman emerges, a vanguardista Whitman who sheds new light on the enduring relevance of his own radical project of making a poetry for the Americas.

Orientador: Cláudia Maria Ceneviva Nigro / Banca: Emerson da Cruz Inácio / Banca: Flávia Andrea Rodrigues Benfatti / Resumo: O propósito deste trabalho é o estudo da intersecção entre raça/etnia e gênero, mais especificamente identidades negras-gay masculinas, construídas a partir dos poemas de autoria de Thomas Grimes, compilados na antologia Milking Black Bull: 11 Gay Black Poets [Tirando leite de touros negros: 11 poetas negros-gay] (1995). Interessa-nos verificar como esse cruzamento de múltiplas instâncias identitárias se adensa, ganhando corpo e voz nos poemas, instigando visões mais plurais e desbravando leituras mais ajustadas da identidade negra-gay masculina, secularmente sufocada, suprimida e subjugada ao anonimato e ao ostracismo por/em uma sociedade pronunciadamente branca e cis-heteronormativa. Defendemos a hipótese de que Grimes usa a escrita de modo a revolver as raízes íntimas daqueles que carregam o peso opressor de um fardo, no mínimo, duplo: serem negros e gays; sujeitos que, hostilizados pelo racismo e pela homofobia, fazem frente ao autoritarismo agenciador de estereotipias heteronormativas e raciais, perseguindo, ao mesmo tempo, a extenuante tarefa de encontrar um chez soi, um lugar ao qual possam pertencer. As reflexões aqui propostas estão em consonância com as analíticas queer e quare e com as perspectivas críticas que concebem o sujeito como performativo e reivindicador de posições e o processo de construção identitária como um mosaico provisório. O aparato teórico sob o qual este projeto está embasado e sustentado abarca, portanto, obras como as de Bauman (2001, 2005),... / Abstract: The main focus of this work is the study of the intersection between race/ethnicity and gender, more specifically black gay male identities, forged from Thomas Grimes' poems, compiled in the anthology Milking Black Bull: 11 Gay Black Poets (1995). We are interested in verifying how this layering of multiple identities gains body and voice in the poems, inciting more pluralistic visions and exploring more accurate readings of the black gay male identities, which have been stifled, suppressed, and subjected to anonymity and ostracism by/in an overtly white and cis-heteronormative society. We defend the hypothesis that Grimes makes use of his writing in order to go through the intimate roots of those who carry the oppressive weight of an, at least, double burden: to be black and gay; subjects who, oppressed by racism and homophobia, defy the limits of racial and heteronormative hegemony in pursuit of finding a chez soi, a place where they can belong. The reflections proposed here are in line with both queer and quare analytics and the critical perspectives that conceive the subject as performative, and the process of identity construction as a provisional mosaic. The theoretical framework under which this study is conducted is based mainly on the contributions of Bauman (2001, 2005), Butler (2000, 2002, 2008, 2016), Crenshaw (1995), Hall (2003, 2005), Hooks (1995, 2001), Jagose (1996), Johnson (2005), Wilchins (2004) and Woodward (1997) / Mestre

This study examines the literary career of the eighteenth-century American poet Joel Barlow. Because Barlow, unlike his peers, came to fully embrace print-based methods of authorship and advertising, between 1790-1810 he emerged as the most widely read American poet. Employing a book studies methodology, this project focuses on the publication details surrounding each of Barlow's poems including: his relationships with his publishers, the physical shape and appearance of his works, the cost of those works, how those works were advertised, and the extent of their geographic distribution. The arc of Barlow's career was extraordinary. Barlow's development, his transformation from a standard eighteenth-century club poet who relied on manuscript circulation and oral performance in the 1770s to an international man of letters and a periodical fixture by 1800, highlights the possibilities and limitations of American literary publishing during the early national period. Importantly, Barlow's ability to emphasize, rather than elide, his personal identity in the press, forces scholars to reevaluate their notions of late eighteenth-century republican print culture. Barlow's career also impacts our reading of American literary history. In an age of caution and deference in American poetry, Barlow was driven to maximize his audience, publishing his poems across all price points and in every medium offered by the time. Barlow's efforts at self-promotion, coupled with his staunch republican politics, allowed his poems to take on a life of their own in the era's fiercely partisan press. Thanks to his association with the transatlantic republican movement and radical religious thinkers, this study suggests that poems such as the "Conspiracy of Kings," (1792) "The Hasty Pudding," (1796) and the Columbiad (1807) enjoyed audiences as large and as economically diverse as those of popular fiction. Even in an age marked by the rise of the novel and the beginnings of romanticism, An Ink-Stained Neoclassicist contends that Barlow's proto-mass audience reveals the persistent popularity and cultural importance of neoclassical verse in the intellectual life of many Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Susan Goodman, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

ABSTRACT Genial Thinking: Frost, Stevens, Ashbery by Andrew A. Klein This dissertation explores how Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery have responded to the problem of philosophical skepticism that they inherit from Emerson: that while things do in fact exist, direct knowledge of them is beyond our ken. Traditionally read within the framework of an evolving Romanticism that finds them attempting to resolve this problem through some form of synthesis or transcendence, I argue instead that these poets accept the intractability of the problem so as to develop forms of thinking from within its conditions. Chapter One explains why poetry is particularly suited to this sort of thinking and what it can achieve that philosophy (or at least a certain understanding of it) cannot. Chapter Two focuses on the act of listening in Stevens’s poetry as a way to show how Stevens is not, as is typically thought, interested in “the thing itself,” but in "the less legible meaning of sounds," the slight, keen indecision that resonates in between sense and understanding. Chapter Three focuses on those moments in Frost’s poetry when, instead of attempting to comprehend, seize, grasp, and represent reality through the use of metaphor, he chooses to regard its inappropriability or otherness. And Chapter Four focuses on how Ashbery’s constant shifts of focus are not just the wanderings of his mind, but a technique for disrupting our absorption in a single plane of attention so as to achieve new economies of engagement. Overall, though, the goal of this project is to move the discussion about this line of poets out of the epistemological register within which they are usually read and into an ethical one.