Word sightings: Visual apparatus and verbal reality in Stevens, Bishop and O'Hara.

Abstract

This project examines the response of 20<super>th</super>-century American poetry to the proliferation of technical, visual media. It treats the modern poet's problem of how to accommodate a cultural focus on photo-realism and technologically enhanced vision in a verbal aesthetic medium that itself generates no actual images. Relying on references to material media in the poets' correspondence and biographies, as well as on tropes and visual semiotics in the poems, the project explores the paradoxical sensation of reality effects in language. The first chapter draws its interpretive model from Wallace Stevens' postcard collection to argue that the denotation of real places or views is undermined in the poems by verbal strategies of negation, inversion, and doubling. As in the two-sided postcard, the opacity of language opposes mimetic sighting of the referent, yet still shares its indexical structure. The chapter observes how, given the absence of real objects in poetry, Stevens modifies phenomenology to nomenology, and turns sense back upon language itself, and in so doing, creates word effects of color, sound, and synaesthesia. Chapter two draws from Elizabeth Bishop's citations of optical instruments to show how her failed efforts to convert poems into visual apparatuses are simultaneous with the readerly sensation of real images. Binoculars, the camera obscura, the stereoscope, and the magnifying glass, offer particular frames for seeing though linguistic obscurity. Expanding upon Roland Barthes' theories of the reality effect and the camera lucida, the chapter reveals how Bishop's evocation of seemingly visible, concrete details depends upon a binocular structure of one visual eye and one verbal eye. The poet Frank O'Hara's ample references to the movie theater, film stars, and Hollywood technologies, as of 3-D or Technicolor, contextualize the discussion of poetic effects of cinematic emergence. Moving beyond ekphrasis as a model for reading O'Hara's affinities with abstract expressionist painting and cinema, the chapter shows how oxymoron, hyperbole, and other stylistic devices are employed at once to generate and to destabilize a poetic structure of spectatorship. The failed efforts to materialize poetry into a literal apparatus, as for each of the poets, produces its own verbal reality.