Stave Sightings: Long Poems and the Poetics of Notation, 1960-2011

Abstract

This is a thesis about the literary and poetic uses of musical notation in North American long poems, 1960-2011. My aim is to explore how a “notational poetics” guides and has guided the process of writing long poems, and the linkage-points of such a notational poetics to discourses across multiple social and stylistic frameworks. Whether through-composed or strophic, long poem grids and matrices contain and critique myth and culture, scored or glyphed in poetic labor. This might show up writing itself as a kind of literary scoring (of vernacular speech or textual performance). Yet notational poetics are closely related to the analogy of musical forms. An unresolved but fruitful tension remains across both modernist and contemporary long poems between analogous musical forms (canzones, fugues, masques) and techniques of collage and assemblage, where staves are “sighted”/cited as facsimiles or pictures, included in the poem’s capacious documentation. In both instances – and especially when several discursive registers are “chorally” aligned along the lines of a literary stave – this has implications for how these poems are to be read. This thesis is, then, a critical experiment exploring ways in which expansive poetries have used notational poetics to read or be read, and the implications of notational poetics on reading practices, with equal weight given to reception and production.

The six chapters develop ways of reading each long poem with these multiple kinds of notational poetics in mind. Beginning with the Zukofskys’ experiments in notational settings, chapter one looks at analogous musical form and critical poetics in Bottom: On Shakespeare, “A,” and Autobiography, tracking the development of stave-work in the writing of a “graph of culture.” Chapter two pairs Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz with Lew Welch’s “Din Poem.” Both use the “template” of notation as a matrix through which vernacular writing – transnational, cosmopolitan, hemispheric – is scored. Chapter three reads Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets as a paratextual long poem which deploys several discourses of origins (of written musical notation, via archaeomusicology, and of language itself) through the persona of an imagined scholiast. Chapter four examines bpNichol’s The Martyrology, exploring concepts of tonality and the interplay of collagistic notation with the idea of notation as a compositional or choral form for writing to move through. Chapter five concerns “register-reading” in Joan Retallack’s Errata 5uite, a sequence which uses a complex and procedural scoring of thought and citation along the five invisible (and silent) lines of a grand-staff. Waldman’s The Iovis Trilogy is the subject of the last chapter, and the most recent long poem to have used notation as part of an array of literary techniques. Iovis presents a genderqueer politics – and (body) poetics – in search of an androgynous city. The words and musical notation are a litany for Joe Brainard, written in the aftermath of death from complications caused by AIDs in 1994. Each of these long poems show in different ways how notational poetics transforms the epic’s relation to discourse and form in the contemporary moment; how a notational poetics assists in the translation of knowledge to thought; and how such a poetics might provoke further challenges to the ways in which long poems are read.