The reciprocal relationship between form and content is one of the defining features of poetic craft. Formal elements (the line, meter, rhyme and so on) dictate the shape that poetic content may take; likewise, poetic content may dictate the formal elements used to express that content. One of the most fundamental—and therefore most contentious—elements of form is the line. Scholars, poets, and essayists take up a variety of positions on the line, and the debate transcends aesthetic disagreement, entering into the realm of politics and ideology. Whitman, as the (pig headed) father of American poetry, has received a good deal of critical attention regarding his use of the line.
I hope to further interrogate the political and aesthetic commitments associated with his particular approach to the line. More specifically, how is the expansive, sprawling, Whitmanian line—which seems to want to spread beyond the confines of the page—related to his utopian, democratic project? And what does the line mean for contemporary poetry, especially poetry with similar commitments? Is that project salvageable? And finally, what formal elements of craft could today be employed toward that end?
In that direction, I intend to both compose a poetic work of length which responds formally to the utopian Whitman and to develop an essay on the poetics of the utopian line. I will be entering a hotly contested conversation. In terms of scholarly work, I will present and respond to cases made by Robert Bly in “Whitman’s Line as a Public Form,” Robert Cushman’s attempts to recover the American-ness of the Whitmanian project in Fictions of Form in American Poetry, as well as Robert Duncan’s Fictive Certainties. I will also look more broadly at contemporary poetic engagements with the line, especially at essays by Joshua Clover, Dana Levin and Gabriel Gudding which appear in A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line. I will also need to deal directly with the poetry by poets who have themselves directly or indirectly responded to Whitman, including Juliana Spahr (contemporary partial embrace), Ezra Pound (modernist distance), Hart Crane (utopian modernism), and Allen Ginsberg (embrace of the long line toward nearly-opposite ends). In doing so, I will be stepping into a conversation about the line as an aesthetic object as well as as a political object.
I intend to finally and completely solidify my bibliography in the next few days while leaving room for new discoveries. The annotated bibliography will be in its final form before April 13th. I hope to have the very first draft of the essay done by next week so that I may continue to revise and update it before the 18th of April. The longer work of poetry is in progress, but it is as of now more difficult to determine when that will be presentable, but I expect major progress to continue steadily in the next week.
Bibliography
Bly, Robert. “Whitman’s Line As A Public Form.” The American Poetry Review 15.2 (1986)
Clover, Joshua. “Notes on the Point De Capital.” A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line. Iowa City: U Of Iowa, 2011.
Crane, Hart. “The Bridge: Atlantis.” Poetry Foundation. Web.
Cushman, Robert. Fictions of Form in American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Duncan, Robert. Fictive Certainties: Essays. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1985.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Poetry Foundation. Web.
Gudding, Gabriel. “The Line As Fetish and Fascist Reliquary.” A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line. Iowa City: U Of Iowa, 2011.
Levin, Dana. “Where It Breaks: Drama, Silence, Speed, and Accrual.” A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line. Iowa City: U Of Iowa, 2011.
Pound, Ezra. “A Pact.” Bartleby. Web.
Spahr, Juliana. This Connection Of Everyone With Lungs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
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