Poetical investigations: Philosophical thought as enactive process in twentieth-century American experimental poetry (Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Joan Retallack, Charles Bernstein)

Many twentieth-century American experimental poets conceptualize their works as sites of rigorous thinking conducted poetically, enacting processes of thought unique to verbal art. Such "poetical investigations" engage in empirical explorations of contested theoretical issues that provide a basis for readers to join in open-ended philosophical thought via the medium of poetry. The particular writers upon whom I focus, Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Joan Retallack and Charles Bernstein, present readers with formally disjunctive texts that require one to rethink what constitutes meaningful language. Unable to rely on a clearly intended message to which the formal attributes of a poem are subordinated, readers must actively create meanings from the organization of verbal materials provided by the author.; Experimental poets' critiques of widely held beliefs about language and interpretation correspond to the similar projects of many modern philosophers and literary theorists intent on rethinking how our linguistic conventions produce meaning. However, the common identification of experimental poetry with a narrowly construed notion of poststructuralism overlooks additional fertile sources for analysis and comparison that help reconcile this writing's textual indeterminacies with these writers' investment in the social consequences of language usage. My study draws upon several strands of philosophical inquiry, including poststructuralist literary theory, Continental philosophy, and Anglo-American pragmatism and ordinary language philosophy, with excursions as well into linguistics and cognitive science. Its comparative method allows me to concentrate on the particular qualities of the literary works investigated, extrapolating philosophical implications from the poetic practices exemplified in specific texts without subordinating poetry to any one theoretical model. Through readings of individual poems, I demonstrate the philosophical richness of poetry that enacts processes of thought rather than reports thought's conclusions. My readings of individual works yield a model of "enactive reading" that explains how a reader of experimental poetry is often called upon both to perform texts as one would musical scores and to perform in texts considered as verbal environments integrally connected to forms of action in extra-verbal contexts. This poetry thus models ethical principles in the collaborative relationships it solicits between writer, reader, and textual materials.