| Identities in Relation: Transcribers, Translators, and Performers in 20th Century American Poetry argues that Langston Hughes, Jack Spicer, Jerome Rothenberg, and Cecilia Vicuna have incorporated methods of translation, transcription, and performance into their poetry in order to draw on, respond to, and challenge cultural and literary traditions. In doing so, they have attempted to individuate American poetry, from various cultural vantage points, as well as draw connections between and call into question different national, ethnic, and racial identities. Thus, the work of these poets points to the existence of an "American" poetry that is defined not by linguistic or cultural commonalities, but by its acknowledgment of and response to degrees of difference. These degrees of difference are a necessary aspect of Edouard Glissant's "Relation Identity," which defines identity not by legitimacy, entitlement, and lineage, but as an active exchange between cultures. In addition to positioning the work of the transcriber, translator, and performer as central to the development of a richer American poetic identity, this dissertation, by including an African-American writer associated mostly with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a gay poet of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s, a contemporary poet mostly known for his association with ethnopoetics, and a contemporary Chilean artist who lives in New York, also responds to the general tendency to delimit literary study according to racial or ethnic identity, tradition, gender, or historical period. Moreover, by circulating through these identities what seems at first glance completely arbitrary---namely, flamenco performance and Federico Garcia's Lorca's theory of duende---this dissertation further demonstrates how different modes of artistic and cultural expression can respond to one another, and provide unusual insight. |
