URBAN EXPERIENCE AND LANGUAGE POETRY

Abstract

In the early to mid-1970s, a group of American poets began writing who have come to be known, collectively, as the 'Language Poets'. This thesis will examine the poetics and poetry of three of these Language Poets, namely, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman and Bruce Andrews. What will be demonstrated in this thesis is that attention needs to be paid to the close connections between the textual strategies employed by the Language Poets and contemporary urban experience. Specifically, this thesis will explore their writing in relation to the discourses produced in the fields of contemporary urban geography and media studies. Chapter one will examine the various strategies adopted by contemporary urban geographers including, among others, Edward Soja's assertion of spatial consciousness, and Michael Keith and Steve Pile's reassessment of the process of identity in the urban. Chapter two will examine the effects of the electronic mass media on the contemporary urban citizen. The chapter will explore the growing dominance of electronic mass media: the world of Baudrillard's "hyperreal". It will also explore sociologist Mark Poster's proposition that in the contemporary urban, the object is the flow of signifiers and the subject is "decentred, dispersed and multiplied in continuous instability". Chapter three will examine some of the deep-rooted concerns and beliefs regarding poetry and language shared, as well as some of the poetic strategies adopted by Bernstein, Silliman and Andrews. This includes their (1) foregrounding of devices of language, (2) belief in poetry as explanation and process of production of meaning and value, and (3) quest for what Andrews terms social literacy. Chapter four will examine in detail Bernstein's poetry in Dark City as well as his views on characterisation and irony in poetry in relation to the processes of identity in the urban. Chapter five will examine in detail Silliman's Tjanting as well as his theories on poetic procedure and the new sentence in relation to the concept of spatiality in the urban. Chapter six will examine in detail Andrews' poetry in Give Em Enough Rope, as an instance of both symptom and critique of the electronic mass media. It will also examine the way in which Andrews' poetry bears some of the more visceral symptoms, namely noise and violence, of the postmodern urban environment.