My dissertation examines 1960s U.S. poetry and demonstrates that the turn toward specific new performance and publication strategies that characterized this period arose out of anxieties produced by threats that mass-mediated communications posed to poetic language, the mind, and the conditions of possibility for political dissent. Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Judith Butler, and Guy Debord, among others, I argue for a new understanding of the cultural and political functions of poetry at this politically volatile moment of late capital.
First, I show that the lyric, culturally understood as short verse written in the first person that reveals something of the psychological state of its speaker, occupied a uniquely valuable literary position in the context of New Left psychopolitics. As a result of the sense that poetry, following the Howl trial, might be a legal techne for plumbing and expressing the depths of one’s consciousness, poetry became an essential literary form for the New Left. Second, I argue that the long tradition of imagining poetic language as transcendental, or somehow outside mediation, made poetry a site of intense interest as questions about mediation became increasingly political during the 1960s. For some, like Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, poetry offered an escape from vexing questions about the mediation of consciousness, and for others, such as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka, it offered a uniquely positioned place from which to explore such questions. Finally, despite its popularity, poetry was a uniquely poor literary commodity. As practitioners of a craft that was poorly adapted for absorption into a mass-mediated culture increasingly reliant on both narrative and visuality, poets created performative texts that were often marginalized from mass-mediated culture; this had political benefits, as poetry was the major literary genre most removed from the capitalist culture that the New Left critiqued, but it also presented practical problems, because political efficacy is inevitably tied to efficiency of communication. It is within this anxious space that I examine the media theories and poetic work of politically committed poets, especially Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov.
My first chapter, “Poetic Justice: Poetry, Pornography, and Publication in the 1960s,” focuses on the Howl trial and offers entrance into this historical moment, exploring the nascent connections between poetry, politics, and media via the problem of obscenity. The use of New Critical reading strategies to exonerate Howl-which I explore through a close reading of the trial-marks a crucial transitional moment in which we can see modernist reading strategies being deployed to legalize a new lyric poetry, a lyric whose insistence on frank discussion of the mind’s contents made possible (in a crucial legal sense) the public exploration of individual consciousness that centered New Left politics in subsequent years.
My second chapter, “Unacknowledged Language Makers: Mass Media, Language, and Allen Ginsberg in the 1960s,” details Ginsberg’s early theorization of and engagement with mass media. I show how “Wichita Vortex Sutra” demonstrates the irresolvable dual commitments of the New Left; it advocates practical democratic strategies and a critical approach to the ideological apparatus of the mass media, while at the same time advancing a metaphysical answer to the problem of ending the war. In reading it in the context of its performances, however, I show how rather than simply exhibiting the failure of this mindset, the poem reveals the vital power of poetry as rallying point for a rapidly fragmenting New Left.
My third chapter, “‘They Think You’re an Airplane and You’re Really a Bird’: Amiri Baraka Headlines the Black Arts Movement” argues that Baraka framed his turn to Black Nationalism as a rejection of mass media fame, recognizing the futility of trying to produce radical political change through a corporately owned system. Using archival materials I look in particular at the reception of Baraka’s work to explore the way in which the review of his plays and poetic performances in major mass media sites itself constituted an important component of the political work of those events.
My fourth chapter, “Poetry in an Age of Televised War: Mediation and the Poetics of Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan,” rereads their oft-discussed differences over political poetry to reveal their mutual attempt to deny the power of television as a mediator of both war and poetic practice. I show how their mutual unwillingness to reckon with the threat television posed to the lyric voice that was at the root of their disagreement over the role of politics in poetry.