Poetics of Liveliness: Natural Histories of Matter and Change in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Poetry

My dissertation addresses the relationship between twentieth and twenty-first century poetics and histories and theories of materiality. The project traces a distinct literary genealogy concerned with "poetics of liveliness," including writers such as Gertrude Stein, Francis Ponge, Christian Bok and Lisa Robertson, who have attempted to extend their poetic practice into the epistemological and experimental domains of other disciplines, in particular natural history and biology. I have developed the concept of "liveliness" as a way of signaling a particular engagement of these writers with the epistemologies of the natural sciences and with materiality as a process, which in its temporal dynamics of differentiation and change makes and unmakes the rich variability of animal, plant and mineral worlds. I argue that the contact that these writers seek to establish between language and matter, which ranges from Christian Bok's experiments with using bacterial DNA as a site of poetic inscription to Gertrude Stein's descriptions of how character arises out of a configuration of material properties of biological tissues, situate them outside of the bounds of the "linguistic turn," that has acted as a dominant critical paradigm for understanding experimental poetics in North America in the post-war period. My dissertation brings the work of these writers, instead, in contact with recent developments in science studies, philosophies of materialism, and the emerging field of animal studies, thus opening up an interdisciplinary zone of interaction, in which the descriptive techniques developed by these poet-naturalists can offer a less dualistic set of approaches to the interrelation between language and the material world. In Poetics of Liveliness I argue that the various techniques this lineage of writers has employed to stage the relationship between language and materiality unsettle not only representationalist models, in which referential capacities of language transparently offer access to the material world, but also the critiques of such models that emerged in the context of the Language writing movement within poetics of the late 1970s and 80s, and which acted to displace this sense of materiality onto language itself. Such critiques of reference were often accompanied by a disavowal of description, which was seen as dissolving the opacity of language to offer seemingly transparent semiotic access to the world. Poetics of Liveliness uncovers, instead, a countertradition within avant-garde writing, in which the empiricist techniques of description and taxonomic classification, grounded in observational procedures of the natural sciences, offered a way to account for the variegated particulars of the not inherently human material world, without collapsing their material granularity into the transparency of representation. Each of the chapters of my dissertation is configured around a particular form of materiality, so that the project as a whole constitutes a kind of miniature cosmology, inspired by the form of Lucretius' De rerum natura. The opening chapter, "Molecular Poetics: Latching and Unlatching in the 'Particle Zoo,'" is focused primarily on the work of the Canadian poet Christian Bok and his project The Xenotext Experiment, in which Bok offers a striking exploration of what a poetics of liveliness may look like by encrypting a poem in a sequence of nucleotides that comprise the DNA of a bacterium and then getting this microscopic organism to produce a second, 'collaborative' poem in the molecular structure of a protein it makes. My argument in this chapter positions Bok's poem in relation to both wider practices of bioart as well as the critique of "gene-centrism" that has been put forth by science studies scholars such as Evelyn Fox Keller. In light of this critique, I examine the ways in which The Xenotext Experiment stretches beyond the concept of DNA as a controlling code of life by employing the particulate nature of molecular shapes of proteins as a site of poiesis. As such, my chapter presents a continuity between the material-semiotic manipulation of these biological substrates and Bok's previous textual explorations of the molecular structure of crystals in his text Crystallography, locating both within the broader history of twentieth-century concrete poetry, with its characteristic concern with language as a form of materiality. The second chapter, "Differentiation and Change: Gertrude Stein's Zoopoetics," situates Stein's monumental descriptive and taxonomic project of The Making of Americans in relation to developments in the history of biology, and in particular transformations in biological understandings of the relationship between variation, heredity and mutability, which were crystalizing into the science of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century. This historical moment coincided with Stein's training in medicine and embryology, at a number of institutions that played a key role in the development of biological research programs in America, including Johns Hopkins Medical School and Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. Stein's training in the sciences exposed her to an epistemic intersection between what the historian of biology Jane Maienschein has called "the morphological tradition," with its persistent investment in the descriptive, observational and taxonomic methods of natural history, and the more experimentally grounded techniques of modern biology. As a result, Stein's literary efforts, from her early works, such as The Making of Americans, to later texts, such as "An Acquaintance with Description," remained as engaged with the descriptive methods of natural history as with the practices of experimentation, which characterized literary and scientific work of the first half of the twentieth-century. Within the critical tradition of modern and contemporary poetics, Stein has often played a role of a Modernist antecedent for the disjunctive, non-referential practices of later twentieth-century poetic avant-gardes. In Poetics of Liveliness I argue, rather, that her continued interest in description and taxonomy, channeled through her training in science, fueled an impulse towards a post-war poetic tradition that drew on the observational and descriptive practices of natural history. In chapter three, "Poetics of Slime: Natural History and Post-War Poetry," I offer a historical account of "poetics of natural history" in the post-war period, focalized through the depictions of small and non-charismatic organisms, such as snails and oysters in the work of Francis Ponge. I read Ponge in the context of American poetics of the 1970s and 1980s, where his reception in the Anglophone context was spurred by the 1971 translation of his 1942 book of poetry Le parti pris des choses by the American poet Cid Corman. The chapter situates Ponge's natural historical portraits of several small organisms, including "The Oyster" (L'huitre), "The Mollusk" (Le Mollusque), "Snails" (Escargots), and "Notes for a Sea Shell" (Notes pour un Coquillage) in relation to other works concerned with poetics of natural history that were appearing in the North American context in this period, including The Mushroom Book (1972) by John Cage, and several of the essays on poetry and science that were subsequently collected in Lyn Hejinian's The Language of Inquiry. In the final chapter, "Cloud Writing: Soft Taxonomies of Change in Lisa Robertson's Poetics," I extend my analysis of the significance of the discourses of natural history in post-war poetics to the work of the contemporary Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, who draws on the morphological conceptions of form and variability to develop a modality of description that is responsive to the temporal flux of materiality. In her book The Weather, Robertson, for instance, turns to the early nineteenth-century meteorologist Luke Howard, who in his 1803 Essay on the Modifications of Clouds d...