Thesis ID: CBB600708384

Joint Experiments: Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and the Coproduction of Knowledge (2017)

unapi

Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer, American avant-garde poets and longtime friends whose book-length publications span the 1960s to the present day, together represent an important trajectory in postwar poetics and conceptualism, but the key terms for understanding their writing have been inadequate to address their thoroughgoing investigations into poetry as an epistemological endeavor. Fascinated by science, both Coolidge and Mayer incorporate scientific information, models, and processes as thematic components of their poetry, and they are surprisingly literal in the way they inhabit scientific subjectivities, embarking on arduous self-experiments with fixed temporalities that involve stranger, more instrumentalized versions of neutral scientific framing than conceptual writers who treat science as an aesthetic. Yet, when considered in terms of language-oriented writing, the discourse that has guided their reception, these frameworks are ultimately non-experimental modes of production: rather than proceeding on an expected path toward authorizing the reader in the coproduction of meaning, both poets appear to relish the in situ manipulation of their interlocutors long after the open text and decentered artist become basic criteria of progressive poetics. In Joint Experiments, I propose an alternative set of terms for understanding Coolidge and Mayer to be experimental poets by regarding their books as experimental in the scientific sense, as structured forms of knowledge production in which they deliberately manipulate the effects of the empirical methods they employ. In my account, their appeals to science and its authorizing conventions become the building blocks for superficially normative models of authorial control that are then painstakingly interrogated, infiltrated, and in highly circumscribed ways, steered to rebellious political or formal ends. I elaborate on how they instrumentalize quasi-performative spaces in their writing, assigning strange participatory tasks to an externalized subjectivity—a “research partner”—who occupies the position traditionally associated with the later reader. Rather than ignoring debates over the role of the reader, I argue, Coolidge and Mayer establish alternative ways of understanding the relationship between authors and readers, where the author is someone who endures a timed, rule-bound experiment and the reader “plays” the text by meticulously recreating all of the steps of its construction with a finite set of available resources rather than entering a fixed subject position or wading through the text’s field of meanings to further its possibilities. Each of the four chapters in Joint Experiments centers on a single book-length poem by Coolidge or Mayer and reframes the relationship between its stated concept, its procedure, and its primary structuring devices using archival materials and concepts imported from science studies. In chapters one and two, I show how both poets incorporate earth science models into their writing. In Moving (1971), Mayer develops a strategic and quietly politicized version of the geological process of erosion, co-opting it as an authorial guise that brings the ideology of Vietnam War protest into an unstable collaboration with scientific authority. In Quartz Hearts (1978), Coolidge juxtaposes human and geologic timescales at the level of the sentence, framing entropic collapse as a controlled, generative process, which distinguishes his sentence-level experimentation from the models that later emerge in the context of language-oriented writing. In chapters three and four, I show how these earth science models inflect the conceptual procedures that organize later projects such that otherwise non-experimental narrative and referential elements become tools for shaping perspectival knowledge. Mayer’s one-day writing experiment, Midwinter Day (1982), involves a more structured relationship to its underlying labor of documentation than its domestic narrative would suggest; I read the poem as a structured testing ground for models of coproduction that can integrate the mutually exclusive procedural labors of conceptual writing and motherly care. In The Crystal Text (1986), Coolidge writes only in the presence of a quartz crystal and repeatedly laments his inability to acquire knowledge; I argue that he enacts an extremely literal version of the scientific process of crystallography, driving an analytical process to generative ends. Where other countercultural poets would have limited the scope of their engagement with science, regarding it as intractably complicit in violence and war, Coolidge and Mayer make intentional incursions into the methods of scientific experimentation with few disclaimers. By referring to their self-experimental writing, counterintuitively, as joint experiments, I want to emphasize that these are science-inflected sites for testing alternative models of connectivity, exchange, and coproduction that do not depend on active collaboration between equal partners while also indicating that these experiments manifest, rather than proclaim, a thoroughly countercultural ethos. Both poets embrace technocratic overtones of forceful control, inhabit them, and then redirect them rather than advocating for a more straightforward politics of resistance or free thinking that might be assumed to guide their poetics.

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Authors & Contributors
Wonham, Henry
Sean DiLeonardi
Green, Elspeth
Anderson, Penelope
Laetitia Rimpau
Phillips, Philip E.
Concepts
Science and literature
Literary analysis
Poetry and poetics
Epistemology
Modernism
Natural philosophy
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, late
18th century
Early modern
Enlightenment
20th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
England
Prague (Czechia)
Germany
Europe
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