Brendan Gillott | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)
Papers by Brendan Gillott
This thesis is concerned with the longform poetics of Charles Olson and of John Cage, and with th... more This thesis is concerned with the longform poetics of Charles Olson and of John Cage, and with the role indeterminacy plays in their constitution and reception. The work of these authors poses unusual and particular challenges to readers, and it is towards readers and reading that this thesis is primarily oriented. Each chapter describes a problem or difficulty which these texts create for readers, and attempts to model that difficulty as clearly as possible in order to demonstrate how it forces readers to reassess received readerly protocols. As such, the thesis is also concerned with the limits of traditional critical methodologies in the face of such works. Though the concrete examples presented are mostly taken from a relatively circumscribed time and culturethe USA post-World War Two-I claim that the problematics of indeterminacy herein discussed are generally prevalent in long poetic forms, and in a certain sense constitutive of them. The thesis maps how 'indeterminacy' as a concept within literary criticism conflicts with that model of criticism concerned primarily with the 'close reading' of texts and the hermeneutic elucidation of 'meaning' thereby. Between historicism and close reading, it argues that this indeterminacy is most pervasive and yet most critically overlooked within traditions of what I call 'longform' poetics. The Introduction, discusses the unfitness of Cage's early text 'Indeterminacy' to traditional modes of close-reading as exemplified in I.A. Richards and William Empson. It then recounts the developing discourse around poetic indeterminacy as it emerged through Roman Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser, Marjorie Perloff and Charles Altieri, and how that discourse increasingly configures the question of indeterminacy less around meaning and more around reading as an activity in itself. Chapter One provides a critical redescription of Olson's hugely influential manifesto-essay 'Projective Verse' via comparison to Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry. Chapter Two addresses the problem of reading speed with reference to Olson's interest in the cinema. Chapter Three describes the poetics of heterogeneity and surprise exemplified by Cage's Mushroom Book. Chapter Four investigates the arrangement and disarray of Olson's 'archive poetics' and his insistent habit of listing. Chapter Five considers how Cage's cavilling over the idea of 'ideas' informs and deforms his huge mesostic lectures I-VI. Chapter Six uses Olson's interest in models to tease out the constitution of his longform poetics on a set of indeterminate part-whole relations. Chapter Seven traces the effects of typos in two editions of Cage's Anarchy, and in the thought and editorial practices of Olson. Throughout, the thesis delineates various protocols for reading, models for how to engage the longform texts of Olson and Cage, aiming to demonstrate how for these poetries one needs to select and 'read through' a poetics as a sort of optic, one through which such reticent texts can be made legible. Though 'indeterminacy' has a long history both within Cage's own work and in the subsequent scholarship, this thesis does not simply follow his sense of the term. Rather, in tandem with Olson's own pervasive though less explicit engagement with the indeterminate, it develops a fresh poetics for thinking and reading indeterminacy which mutually illuminates the work of both poets.
Textual Practice, 2019
The latter half of the twentieth century saw increasing interest in the production of aleatoric, ... more The latter half of the twentieth century saw increasing interest in the production of aleatoric, 'chance-determined' texts. The writing of poetry outside of simplistically naturalised 'intentional' paradigms was not of course new, being common to the early century's 'automatic writing' and ancient oracular traditions alike; but poets writing in the twentieth century developed new anti-intentional methods under the sign of process philosophies and cybernetics, and mediated by new printing and computing technologies. The immediate reaction many of these texts evince is a sense of their 'randomness', their resistance to settled orders of symbol, rhetoric and signification, and to established protocols of reading. This essay asks what 'randomness' might mean in a poetic context. It considers the term's changing use across history, particularly in interaction with 'chaos', and outlines the information-theoretical definition of randomness as noncompressibility, drawing an analogy between this and the problem of poetry and paraphrase. How might this framework help in reading seemingly 'random' poetry? Taking examples from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and John Cage's Empty Words, the essay delineates some distinctions between the happenstantial, the procedural and the truly random in writing, and considers some consequences for the theory and practice of literary criticism.
Humanities, 2018
Charles Olson’s hugely influential essay-manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ is usually understood as pr... more Charles Olson’s hugely influential essay-manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ is usually understood as proposing a close - and a necessary—link between poetry and body. Some account of Olson’s as a ‘poetics of embodiment’ or a ‘breath-poetics’ is almost ubiquitous in the extant criticism, yet what this might actually mean or imply for poetry and poetry-reading remains unclear. ‘Projective Verse’ is deeply ambivalent about print, seeing in it the ‘closed verse’ Olson looked to replace, while simultaneously idealising the typed-and-printed page as the only medium for the supposed immediacy of the poet’s breath. This essay contends that Olson’s lionisation of the typewriter is accompanied by a suppressed inscriptional register—a concern with carving and engraving—and asks what the substrate hosting this inscription might be. The aims of the piece are twofold: to demonstrate that ‘Projective Verse’ contains a logic of inscription which has gone severely underappreciated; and to argue that this ...
This thesis is concerned with the longform poetics of Charles Olson and of John Cage, and with th... more This thesis is concerned with the longform poetics of Charles Olson and of John Cage, and with the role indeterminacy plays in their constitution and reception. The work of these authors poses unusual and particular challenges to readers, and it is towards readers and reading that this thesis is primarily oriented. Each chapter describes a problem or difficulty which these texts create for readers, and attempts to model that difficulty as clearly as possible in order to demonstrate how it forces readers to reassess received readerly protocols. As such, the thesis is also concerned with the limits of traditional critical methodologies in the face of such works. Though the concrete examples presented are mostly taken from a relatively circumscribed time and culturethe USA post-World War Two-I claim that the problematics of indeterminacy herein discussed are generally prevalent in long poetic forms, and in a certain sense constitutive of them. The thesis maps how 'indeterminacy' as a concept within literary criticism conflicts with that model of criticism concerned primarily with the 'close reading' of texts and the hermeneutic elucidation of 'meaning' thereby. Between historicism and close reading, it argues that this indeterminacy is most pervasive and yet most critically overlooked within traditions of what I call 'longform' poetics. The Introduction, discusses the unfitness of Cage's early text 'Indeterminacy' to traditional modes of close-reading as exemplified in I.A. Richards and William Empson. It then recounts the developing discourse around poetic indeterminacy as it emerged through Roman Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser, Marjorie Perloff and Charles Altieri, and how that discourse increasingly configures the question of indeterminacy less around meaning and more around reading as an activity in itself. Chapter One provides a critical redescription of Olson's hugely influential manifesto-essay 'Projective Verse' via comparison to Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry. Chapter Two addresses the problem of reading speed with reference to Olson's interest in the cinema. Chapter Three describes the poetics of heterogeneity and surprise exemplified by Cage's Mushroom Book. Chapter Four investigates the arrangement and disarray of Olson's 'archive poetics' and his insistent habit of listing. Chapter Five considers how Cage's cavilling over the idea of 'ideas' informs and deforms his huge mesostic lectures I-VI. Chapter Six uses Olson's interest in models to tease out the constitution of his longform poetics on a set of indeterminate part-whole relations. Chapter Seven traces the effects of typos in two editions of Cage's Anarchy, and in the thought and editorial practices of Olson. Throughout, the thesis delineates various protocols for reading, models for how to engage the longform texts of Olson and Cage, aiming to demonstrate how for these poetries one needs to select and 'read through' a poetics as a sort of optic, one through which such reticent texts can be made legible. Though 'indeterminacy' has a long history both within Cage's own work and in the subsequent scholarship, this thesis does not simply follow his sense of the term. Rather, in tandem with Olson's own pervasive though less explicit engagement with the indeterminate, it develops a fresh poetics for thinking and reading indeterminacy which mutually illuminates the work of both poets.
Textual Practice, 2019
The latter half of the twentieth century saw increasing interest in the production of aleatoric, ... more The latter half of the twentieth century saw increasing interest in the production of aleatoric, 'chance-determined' texts. The writing of poetry outside of simplistically naturalised 'intentional' paradigms was not of course new, being common to the early century's 'automatic writing' and ancient oracular traditions alike; but poets writing in the twentieth century developed new anti-intentional methods under the sign of process philosophies and cybernetics, and mediated by new printing and computing technologies. The immediate reaction many of these texts evince is a sense of their 'randomness', their resistance to settled orders of symbol, rhetoric and signification, and to established protocols of reading. This essay asks what 'randomness' might mean in a poetic context. It considers the term's changing use across history, particularly in interaction with 'chaos', and outlines the information-theoretical definition of randomness as noncompressibility, drawing an analogy between this and the problem of poetry and paraphrase. How might this framework help in reading seemingly 'random' poetry? Taking examples from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and John Cage's Empty Words, the essay delineates some distinctions between the happenstantial, the procedural and the truly random in writing, and considers some consequences for the theory and practice of literary criticism.
Humanities, 2018
Charles Olson’s hugely influential essay-manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ is usually understood as pr... more Charles Olson’s hugely influential essay-manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ is usually understood as proposing a close - and a necessary—link between poetry and body. Some account of Olson’s as a ‘poetics of embodiment’ or a ‘breath-poetics’ is almost ubiquitous in the extant criticism, yet what this might actually mean or imply for poetry and poetry-reading remains unclear. ‘Projective Verse’ is deeply ambivalent about print, seeing in it the ‘closed verse’ Olson looked to replace, while simultaneously idealising the typed-and-printed page as the only medium for the supposed immediacy of the poet’s breath. This essay contends that Olson’s lionisation of the typewriter is accompanied by a suppressed inscriptional register—a concern with carving and engraving—and asks what the substrate hosting this inscription might be. The aims of the piece are twofold: to demonstrate that ‘Projective Verse’ contains a logic of inscription which has gone severely underappreciated; and to argue that this ...