Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry

1. Manifesting Literary Feminism

One Manifesting Literary Feminism “Masculinity” [. . .] is best understood as transcending the personal, as a heterogeneous set of ideas, constructed around assumptions of social power, which are lived out and reinforced, or perhaps denied and challenged , in multiple and diverse ways within a whole social system in which relations of authority, work, and domestic life are organized, in the main, along hierarchical gender lines. Lynne Segal, Slow Motion Patriarchal poetry a choice. Gertrude Stein, “Patriarchal Poetry” 1. Dear Reader: An Epistle There are no genderless subjects in any relationship structuring literary culture: not in production, dissemination, or reception; not in objects, discourses, or practices; not in reading experiences or in interpretations . This book—analytic, invested, affectual—discusses masculinity and maleness in poetry as marked and constructed social subject positions framed within a cultural poetics of gender. It investigates male poetic power and how it constitutes and sustains itself in richly emotion-­ laden interactions. Indeed, these poets’ ideas and actions—about masculinity , the feminine, the effeminate, the erotic—were continuously articulated and loomed large in their self-­ creation as writers, in literary bonding, and in its deployment. Contentious male-­male dyads, one characteristic formation of this period, and the sex-­ gender regimes in which male poets acted and self-­ presented have recently come under scrutiny by significant critical work rejecting the notion that aspects of the male poetic career were natural manifestations of masculine subjectivity.1 Assumptions about maleness and varieties of masculinity help construct consequential models for institutions of poetic practice. Purple Passages asks, among other questions, how particular twentieth-­ century male poets—those with allegiances to the Pound tradition—faced challenges posed both by modernist feminisms and by male-­ male eroticism. The 4 part one short answer? Unevenly. The dynamism of “virile thought” intercepted the trajectories both of female cultural coequality and co-­ temporality and of gay civic and erotic claims (Hulme 1955, 69). That is a loosely­ social statement and is one track within this book. Another track involves the question that Judith Butler asks in Undoing Gender: is the patriarchal order of sexual difference and power relations so imbedded in the “symbolic” that it is ineligible “for social intervention” (Butler 2004, 213)? Rejecting the postulate of fixed hierarchic genders means that one should “trace the moments where the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged, where the coherence of the categories are [sic] put into question, and where the very social life of gender turns out to be malleable and transformable” (Butler 2004, 216). This book traces some of these debates and contradictions by discussing male poets who are strongly invested in the patriarchal order. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Edward Said proposes both a “situated” text and a critic; in that spirit, this critic and book try to be “skeptical, secular, reflectively open to its [her/his] own failings” but not “value-­ free” (Said 1983, 26). The book also takes up the gap that Said sketches in modernism between “filiation” and “affiliation”—their interchange , their tensions, the passages between them (Said 1983, 23–24). Filiation is organic, hierarchic, and paternal, a “quasi-­ religious authority ” or covenant; affiliation is that “new form of relationship,” perpetually yearned for in all evocations of “newness”—“collegiality, professional respect , post-­ familial,” worldly (and possibly idealized by Said) (Said 1983, 16, 20). The propulsions for the shift, the motor of any changes from and in filiative and affiliative relationships in modernism, are, in my view, hard-­ won, hard-­ fought alterations in the civic, political, and sexual status of women and sexual nonconformists.2 In these poets’ male-­ male relationships and in their relationships with female colleagues (somewhat less discussed here), the strains, incompleteness, and tensions of this fraught passage back and forth between these formations are explored. It becomes clearer that there is no one-­ way passage as Said perhaps had hoped; we will all have to negotiate repeated ways of making passages that struggle with the binary system of gender and with the ideologies that support its practices. Both Michael Davidson and Libbie Rifkin have examined the “structural function of exclusion” of women and of the feminine “at the core of both [male] authorial identity formation and avant-­ garde institution building” (Rifkin 2000, 7); Andrew Mossin has signaled the importance Manifesting Literary Feminism 5 of “male subjectivity” to the careers of these poets (Mossin 2010). While one can summarize the mechanisms through which maleness and its cultural resistances are generated—“overdetermination of male bonding” and at times “exaggerated...