Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 4

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Reading Duhamel, Kocot, and Lease with Altieri's The Particulars of Rapture / Thomas Fink

Keywords:

<1> Since at least the early eighties, Charles Altieri has been a major scholar-critic of contemporary poetry, and Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (1989) extended the scope of his reputation to Modernism and its intersection with visual art. Throughout his career, he has been engaged with literary theory; perhaps because he has articulated alternatives to prevailing trends in Poststructuralism, New Historicism, and Cultural Studies, the critical mainstream has not always granted Altieri’s subtle, dialogically complex work in this area a substantial hearing.

<2> The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (2003) is one of Altieri’s boldest theoretical forays, and, though Altieri’s most contemporary poetic examples in the book are from the work of Robert Creeley and C.K. Williams, I believe and hope to demonstrate that his ways of reading the emotions in literature can be helpful in the analysis of various contemporaries. The book is full of intricate conversations with philosophers’ and an overall challenge to cognitivist stances, but I will focus here on a few theoretical constructs that are germane to my purposes as a reader of poetry. Expanding on philosopher Richard Moran’s theory of the emotions, Altieri explores “where we can go by thinking of emotions in adverbial rather than adjectival terms” (107-8). This signifies that “emotions become… modifiers of how people act rather than states people enter”—that is, “attributes of attitudes being formed by agents in ways that modify desire and hence indirectly modify actions” (108). “Our sense of what goes into expressing the emotion” is “what becomes vivid,” and “the expression has force because of the qualities it exhibits as features of the forming of an attitude. Manner matters because it puts the emphasis on concrete vividness as the locus of significance for the activity” (125). Processes of adjustment are a central feature of considering emotions adverbially:

<3>

... we adjust how we project identities—about our own emotions or about agents whom we observe. We are responding not to how beliefs shape the person’s world but to who the person becomes as he or she manifests the working out of attitudes in relation to that world….

Because it makes states of the agent so fundamental, this adverbial approach also helps us clarify the kinds of values that bring satisfaction within these affective states. Concerns about manner clearly open the way for the range of second-order endorsements and self-assessments that are fundamental for any sophisticated emotional life. (125-6).

<4> Altieri finds adjustment to the specificity of an expression crucial, partly because, “if we seek only explanations for actions, we tend to ignore everything” in literature or visual art, for example, “that might give such particular expressions distinctive vividness and force” (126). In the entire book, in fact, he desires to resist “reducing art’s intensities to philosophy’s forms of projecting and assessing wisdom” (173).

<5> In order to address how “working out of [people’s] attitudes” function adverbially, from Spinoza, Altieri takes the notion of conative energy or force, which involves, not the construction of a stable identity, but an individual’s ability to continue existing and behaving in ways that move toward greater satisfaction:

<6>

Mind expands the space through which the body moves in its efforts at satisfaction. At one pole this expansion takes place because the imagination fosters images we reach out to desire; at the other pole, it takes place by the work of active intellect bringing the body into the realm of determining causes. Identification is not just naming a process one’s own. It is also testing how conative energies can be maintained and extended when we bring second-order considerations to bear on the spaces opened by our manners of acting. (144)

<7> It is precisely this kind of “testing” that I will proceed to examine in three diverse contemporaries, both in terms of poetic tendency and genre, Denise Duhamel, Noelle Kocot, and Joseph Lease.

Class-conscious confession

<8> Denise Duhamel gained a reputation in the nineties as a feminist poet who uses humor and multiples strands of narrative to foreground the affective and cognitive experience of patriarchal injustices against women, to critique masculinist ideology, and to advocate for female empowerment. (I have analyzed this work in light of notions of visibility and invisibility in my 2001 book, A Different Sense of Power: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry. In her poetry of the last ten or twelve years, Duhamel has also concentrated on issues of class, race, and ethnicity. Like the 1999 lyrics “Art,” “Cockroaches,” and “How Much Is This Poem Going to Cost Me,” as well as substantial portions of the 2009 series “Play Money” and the poem “Stupid Vanilla, the 2005 poem “Egg Roll” focuses on the complexities of class status. The speaker is a working class graduate student at an elite institution, Sarah Lawrence, where Duhamel herself received her MFA. Instead of evincing frustration and anger at her privation compared to others in her environment, the speaker in the long opening strophe of “Egg Rolls” builds up, after detailing minutely and thoroughly what she is forced to think about and endure, into acknowledging embarrassment and even shame at being at the chance that she could become an object of pity if more privileged people knew about her actual circumstances. While Duhamel frequently uses long lines in her poetry, there is irony in the lack of confidence here being represented by lines that resemble Whitman’s exuberant proclamations of trans-class equality:

<9>

I was walking down First Avenue and knew
my check wouldn’t clear for another two days and I had two tokens
and a can of tuna at home and an old roll which wouldn’t be so bad
if I warmed it up in the oven and there was some cheese they let me take home
from the graduate student reading except my roommate had already eaten
most of it he was pretty good about not touching my stuff but I guess he knew
this wasn’t really “mine” in the sense that I hadn’t paid for it
since it was just rolled up in some party napkins half of it sliced
the other half a big cube and I had exactly seven dollars in my pocket
which was my train fare to and from school the next day
I went to Sarah Lawrence where the flowers were in bloom
and everyone in the town had shiny blond hair and pastel turtlenecks
and I tutored a woman who had all her meals catered macrobiotic
delivered right to her dorm and I knew she’d feel bad for me if she knew
I ate fish from a can she’d feel bad like my dad did the time he visited me
and he saw my thirty-nine cent chili that I bought from a supermarket cart
where they dump all the food with expired codes and the dented cans
and my father said don’t eat this you could die of botulism
and I felt like I’d botched up and that botulism was a disease
that hit people like me who didn’t have enough to open a checking account
who cashed checks and just lived off the money until it was gone. (Two and Two 3)

<10> On the one hand, a reader may surmise that Duhamel has presented (not hidden) all these vivid details so that comfortable bourgeois readers like the macrobiotic-eating student grow less comfortable with their privilege, not condescending about it. But on the other hand, the speaker clearly uses the “botulism/botched” word play to confess her shame about being poor, to register the sense that her flawed character and bad financial planning have caused her inability to “have enough to open a checking account….”

<11> Inadvertently reinforced by the speaker’s father’s pity and fear, such shame about the precarious situation of having only “seven dollars in [her] pocket,” “two” subway or bus “tokens,” and “a can of tuna… and an old roll,” and knowing that a paycheck “wouldn’t clear for another two days” entails a barrier to satisfaction, which is the goal of conative force. The pain of this negative emotion by itself does not necessarily provide motivation to arrive at second-order self-assessments that align the speaker with new actions (conative energies) to remove the shame; instead, the negative emotion might snowball into hopelessness and reduce the likelihood of positive action. Indeed, it can reinforce selective perception that intensifies her dark mood. (For example, does “everyone in the town” really have “shiny blond hair and pastel turtlenecks,” as opposed to the speaker’s implicitly lackluster hair, due to insufficient funds for regular shampooing and conditioning, and dingy old clothes, or does she focus on several people who pass her on the street and not notice the rest?) Further, shame can distract the person from an awareness of large social factors that influence economic class situations as much as or more than character traits, and she might also ignore how accidents and anomalies of individual experience have long-term effects. Duhamel, of course, has addressed these social factors a great deal in other poems.

<12> The speaker’s shame, however, does not snowball, and the poem features a subtle, gradual movement toward shame-disputing conative adjustment which offers a possible attitude toward the very narrative of how she adjusts to deprivation. In the second strophe’s opening sentence, the framing of what previously seemed to be the present as the past briefly creates a distancing effect—until the concrete details take over:

<13>

it’s easy to feel sorry for my former self
the one that wanted to go to grad school so bad she was a nanny
and a receptionist and taught at a nursery school and cashed all her savings bonds
to buy a two-hundred-dollar-car that died the day after she bought it
because she hoped it would make her life easier and the mechanic said
it would take at least nine hundred dollars to fix so she just junked it and refused to eat because everything she tried was an ugly mistake a sour bargain
and there was no way she could get ahead or even make the time to feel her angst
to write a good workshop poem since she had to be at her job at five
in the morning where she was a receptionist in a health club
and they gave her a big gold key that looked like a key to the city…. (4)

<14> The present self, which apparently does not face the same difficulties, is not saying that she feels sorry for her “former self,” but that “it’s easy” to do so. This seems an indication that there is a different and perhaps more satisfactory attitude that the present self can take. In the meantime, though, the speaker narrates how the former self takes the incident of the “clunker” vehicle as a synecdoche for all that was going wrong for her at the time. Although one could argue that she made a foolish error in either paying a reliable mechanic to inspect the car before purchasing it or, if that was beyond her budget, postponing the purchase, I would suggest that total inexperience in such matters (and not stupidity) is responsible for the “sour bargain.” “Angst” would logically fuel a “workshop poem”—turning suffering into quasi-professional advantage, but the speaker is so trapped in her scrambling to deal with work, her domestic situation, and school in order to remain at a subsistence level that there is no “leisure” to process emotions. (By adding the second adjective “workshop” between “good” and “poem,” Duhamel, I surmise, is also poking gentle fun at the manipulation of stimulus-response, the attitude tying personal emotional expression to poetic production in U.S. poetry workshop culture.)

<15> When the “big gold key” that opens the “health club” is said to resemble a “key to the city,” this is not merely a fatuous fantasy that helps the speaker momentarily escape from the misery of her existence or a bitter ironic gesture. In fact, it begins to remind her that, not only did she want “to go to grad school so bad[ly]” as access to aesthetic development and a professional career but that living in New York City itself is a part of both: in a cramped, filthy apartment where her roommate holds the lease and, the aspiring poet discovers, pays one-tenth of the rent to her nine-tenths, the speaker “wrote her poems with her typewriter on her lap but still she wrote them and/ she never felt so bad for herself really because she was in New York/ on the corner of First Avenue and First Street where everything began…” (4-5). In a purely geographic sense, there is a great deal of Manhattan below First and First, but “everything” pertaining to the speaker’s dreams “began” for her in that location.

<16> As the sentence quoted above continues, the speaker utters the poem’s broadest affirmation: “… and most of the time she felt like she had everything” (5). Obviously, she is not referring to material acquisition but to a particular psychological state that a reader must infer from the poem’s details, since Duhamel does not follow these brief, general insights with abstract elaboration. Through renewed focus on long-term goals that she has chosen for herself, she grows able to disrupt the negative trajectory of shame. One way in which she sharpens conative energies is to establish and become the kind of person she wants to be: one who chooses a particular set of challenging goals that require working through a complex array of difficulties and who persists. Thus, all of her numerous calculations and adaptations to money problems and their effect on nutrition, transportation, environment, physical energy, and overall health (“by the time she arrived at Sarah Lawrence she fell asleep in her literature class/ and she knew it was an insult to the professor who was stern and took it seriously// and she did too so that’s when she learned about coffee and diet pills/ and how to stake awake even on days when she woke up at 3:30 am…” [4]) are based on an assessment of a hierarchy of priorities.

<17> The speaker is aware, then, of possessing agency, despite so much that is outside her control, and this can be read as a source of satisfaction and the possibility of moving in a direction to increase such satisfaction. Note how she stresses how, in the pre-laptop days, poems written “with her typewriter on her lap” are “still” poems written. On the basis of the many images of precarious experience, one can also imagine her realization that her ability to make these choices also involves laboring for a future that, like the $200 car’s functionality, is in no way assured, and it takes courage to make such a wager, to gamble with basic resources. Further, since her larger decisions involve lengthy (and at this point seemingly indefinite) postponement of relatively minor gratifications that the women she tutors would consider “necessities” and constant efforts to ignore scores of inconveniences, she can get away from feeling “so bad for herself” through awareness that adversity has enabled her to develop formidable physical and mental endurance, flexibility in thought and action, and resilience:

<18>

…and where else
was she going to live for $450 a month just ignore the mother cockroach she saw
diving in the bread crumbs and the baby cockroaches that scattered
in the kitchen sink and the hot pipe she burned her leg on every time she peed
because that toilet was so small and the soles of her feet were black with grime
because she couldn’t get the floor clean and why should she try
she was paying most of the rent she shouldn’t have to be the maid too…. (4)

<19> This chunk of the third of four sprawling strophes includes a parody of the coda of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” a famous hymn to resilience triumphing over psychic bleakness, in the scavenging of a mother cockroach and ends with a small feminist gesture that might be viewed as a paradoxically retrospective harbinger of Duhamel’s own poetry of resistance to patriarchy. As in Lowell’s poem, the trope/image of the title “Egg Rolls” enters in the final phase. At the end of the third strophe, the aforementioned line, “and most of the time she felt like she had everything,” is followed by a qualification that runs into the final strophe and leads to the story of a purchase:

<20>

except that time she smelled those egg rolls
the ones wafting from the Chinese restaurant and she told herself

maybe I should run home and sell my subway tokens to my roommate and walk
the forty blocks to work tomorrow in the frigid dark and have one of those egg rolls
the ones with shrimp bits and light green vegetables inside and I fingered
my seven dollars the five and two ones I carried with me
just in case the apartment was robbed and I stopped and looked in the window
the egg rolls lined up like sleeping bags under fluorescent light and the cook smiled
the Chinese man with a gray ponytail and white bibbed apron and I went in
and asked how much and bought two because they were small
and ate them on the street…. (5)

<21> Olfactory pleasure leads to visual pleasure and then a taste thrill for the student poet/ health club receptionist whose supervisor had indoctrinated her “about the new diets” (4), which turn out to be ridiculously limited, if economical. If this can be seen as an example of a lack of impulse control, it is hard to imagine that this choice could begin a slippery slope toward the loss of the speaker’s dream. Perhaps, instead, it is an intelligent decision to depart momentarily from the usual priorities to balance austerity with a bit of enjoyment and accept inconvenience “tomorrow.” The simile of “sleeping bags” may signal egg roll consumption as harmless escapism. But Duhamel assigns greater significance to this action as she brings the poem to closure:

<22>

grease burning my lower lip
the hot insides burning the roof of my mouth you’re supposed to drink milk
that’s the only way to cure that scorch something about the protein
healing the cells of the tongue but I had no milk so I blew into the egg roll
like a mother blowing on her baby’s spoon
or like a diva testing a microphone and the whole city hushed
as I squeezed the greasy napkin and it was like I was singing a torch song
but I wasn’t that sad that I wouldn’t have the money to go to school tomorrow
or that my diet was shot and I actually remember feeling kind of rich . (5)

<23> Even the speaker’s little greasy pleasure involves careful adjustments to pain that she tries to place in grander contexts through the string of similes. Since “singing a [celebratory] torch song” and “feeling kind of rich” seem to be hyperbolic responses to eating two (small) shrimp egg rolls, evidence from the poem as a whole indicates to me that the speaker is using this mundane occasion—which, after all, will make her miss a day of school and cannot be indulged in too often—tacitly to acknowledge and celebrate the satisfactions that her conative energies make possible. Not only has she proven able to break through the feelings of shame and hopelessness that had surfaced earlier in the poem’s narrative, but the text itself has provided a thorough, specific record of how she has marshaled the resources of affective and cognitive adaptability to constantly shifting, complex circumstances influenced by class position. In part, what she is in the process of becoming is a flexible, resourceful person who practices openness to diverse experiences or, in Keats’ phrase, “negative capability.” Never succumbing to multiple “sour bargains” or shying away from useful risks, the speaker, in Altieri’s terms, has persisted in considering, testing, and at times modifying identifications rather than passively accepting externally driven definitions. She often foregoes and at times enjoys small comforts in her efforts to gain the larger satisfactions of academic absorption and advancement, engagement in the life of New York City, and, later, the kind of career as a poet (and professor?) that the actual Denise Duhamel has been having. Although I have only discussed a single poem, a full treatment of Duhamel’s poetry about feminist, class-oriented, and ethnic/national concerns, I believe, could make ample use of Altieri’s deployment of Spinoza’s conatus.

Elegiac verse

<24> In her numerous elegies to her husband, the composer Damon Tomblin, who died of a heroin overdose in 2004 after they had been married for ten years, Noelle Kocot tests conative energies and the possible satisfactions and problems stemming from them in ways that are extremely different from Duhamel’s in “Egg Rolls.” Some elegies appear in Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006), but the greatest number can be found in Sunny Wednesday (Wave, 2009), which will serve as my sole focus here. Kocot frequently entertains the idea that the deepest satisfactions may involve a turning away from the pleasures and pursuits of the world to honor her loving commitment to her husband, as in the last two lines of “For Damon”: “I have given up the greenness of my spirit// With yours, my toasted animal, my breath” (36). “Breath” is often a synecdoche for life, but in these lines, it evidently signifies the sustenance that feeds “in-spir-ation.” Thus, to give up “greenness,” a focus on natural growth, is not to give up “spirit” but to combine the “animal” and “spiritual.”

<25> For Kocot, the directing of conative energies in the action of mourning must face the basic problem of absence. “Rite” begins:

<26>

Nothing remains of your abrupt presence
Of seeing and suffering a geography of smoke
Through which dense air presses,
Lit by the electricity of your human shape

Threading the streets of non-being. (17)

<27> The various clauses and phrases knock against each other with agitation. Against the sense that “nothing remains,” the recounting of disappearance—“dense air” seeming to extinguish the “smoke” and corporeal “electricity”—indicates that a great deal of vivid sensory information remains in the memory. The poet insists in “Rite” and elsewhere that her love can (or must?) transcend impossibility and recuperate presence through envisionment. Having “seen” the beloved’s “face/ Stained with the obsequies that bleed their haloes/ Into gutters” Kocot is willing to venture into the “arrowy grime” of any hellish emotional landscape to achieve her goal. And in the poem’s fourth quatrain, she recognizes that this requires the sacrifice of attention and absorption in the life that goes on after her husband’s passing. In order to valorize what for many people would be an overwhelmingly great sacrifice, she imagines herself going along with its opposite, characterized as the “abandonment” of Damon, and she steadily communicates how unappealing it is for her:

<28>

I want to live here and forget my life
With its processions of twilight.
I want to forget that I live gripping the momentum
Of another time vying for the wreath of my bones

And in the pinch of the eventual lapse back
Into the clenched earth.
And so I forget, and the day becomes a smoldering inkwell
Splashed by the stiffened limbs of evening

Across the slats of whitewashed fences,
And I forget the traces of your devotions wept
Into the mad chalice of moments without end,
And I forget your cheekbones that float in the dark,

And the smell of your muffled voice
Thrown off like a wet cloak in the wind…. (17)

<29> Because the intense awareness of what she misses so tremendously keeps returning, Kocot cannot put it aside to focus on what others enjoy. Note that the reiterated assertion of forgetting (“And so I forget”; “And I forget”; “I forget”) ironically demands that all “forgotten” items be articulated—that is, remembered—in the poem’s present tense. By cataloging in this way, the poet communicates how vital all of these items are to her and what a loss actual forgetting would be. Even if “processions of twilight” and vampire-like appropriation of the living, her “bones” transformed into a “wreath,” as well as “the pinch of” her “eventual” burial seem ghoulish and life-denying, Kocot represents the alternative as a gothic nightmare. Her “inkwell,” in fact, is “smoldering” in the sense that one main activity in her life as a widow is to write poetry about her loss.

<30> For a long time, poets have compared sleep and death (“the stiffened limbs of evening”), but for this poet, the paradox of life-in-death and death-in-life that animates Yeats’ “Byzantium” characterizes her experience. “Whitewashed fences” of an existence outside mourning are vulnerable to the significance of his dying. Damon is “alive” for her after his death, and she is “dead” with him while literally alive or, perhaps, “dying” to reach his (after) life. Lamenting that, “too often, [he is] only a shadow cast/ /Across an endless sunny Wednesday,” Kocot in “’You Will Always Be My Animal’” declares: “In reaching toward you my arms catch fire.// In attempting to touch you they blossom into ash./ They mingle with yours forever and forever and forever” (44). Whether she expresses confidence in the assertion about mingling or fears that the “attempt” to reach the presence of his afterlife will fail and that the mere trace of “a shadow cast” is insufficient” is open to question. In “Rite,” the sensory memories that Kocot cannot really forget are “traces of [his] devotions” that she regards as sacramental, if sometimes intoxicatingly deranged (“the mad chalice of moments without end”). Through the testing of conative energies in the poem, Kocot finds that forgetting this “chalice” would not make her into the kind of person she wants to become; she would view herself as a betrayer of the eternally applicable marriage vow and one who abandons her helpless beloved, as the phrase “thrown off” with the simile of the “wet cloak in the wind” indicates. Moreover, the poet regards Damon’s present absence as rich plenitude and “forgetting” as an invitation to despair and nothingness. The poem ends with the speaker either pretending to forget what she obviously remembers and thus pretending to reap the negative consequences or narrating a temporary forgetting:

<31>

I forget the flames of this invisible life
That sometimes makes small flashes across your urban hillside,
I forget and walk off into the dying world without you
And the memory of your laughter that keeps clawing at the void. (18)

<32> Even if she knows that her “life” that seeks reunion with him can only be in an “invisible” realm, “memory” solidifies Kocot’s image of Damon’s life-in-death, the “clawing” “laughter” that does not succumb to “the void,” and seals her sense of responsibility. One aspect of memory, though, is the awful scene and overwhelming negation of her husband’s disappearance, to which the poet returns at the beginning of “Neptune”: “I saw my love shoot up the intravenous moonlight,/ Vanished in a Milky Way of negatives” (27). Subjected to such trauma, she feels compelled to engineer a magical restoration of his presence, his return—at least into life-in-death—through poetic means. Here is the iamb-tinged closure of “Neptune”:

<33>

But if I stepped on Neptune, I would find
A vatic searing library announcing your arrival
And I would stand far back in a garden of starfish
Growing legs for each one severed. (27)

<34> Whereas, early in the poem, Kocot had rejected the idea of an imaginative stopover at Neptune’s “garden of starfish,” now the image of a “vatic… library” holding the best news she can imagine enables that garden to serve as a trope of physical/psychological healing. This may be a fantasy about turning what is “severed” to operational wholeness, but fantasy is posited as a greater reality than what is earthbound.

<35> When Kocot considers a kind of hermeneutics as a strategy to achieve re-attachment in “I Am Impatient,” at first it seems promising: “I am impatient to break like a meteor/ Upon your sealed world, impatient/ To decipher those cryptographic symbols/ Drifting through the shadowless ambience/ That time and time presents itself: …” (59). “Time and time” not only indicates temporal repetition but emphasizes the fact of temporality, out of which the poet wants to break in order to have access to Damon’s eternity. Signifiers existing in time are supposed to point to the eternal signified. Kocot’s attempt at meteoric de-composition of current elements in her life is intended to break down barriers to the kind of interpretive actions that have the potential to “unseal” Damon’s “world.” Immediately after the colon, the poet gives a possible example of a “cryptographic symbol” that begins with a gentle lyricism and then morphs into something ominous. The difficulty of reading this and other symbols darkens the poem’s mood as it draws to a close:

<36>

The pink slow blossoming of a summer night
Tied like a tourniquet around your arm
That, sleeved in a newly ironed shirt,
Both draws me and prevents me
From drawing close to you. (59-60)

<37> Not only does the poet, perhaps thrown off by the incongruous detail of the “newly ironed shirt,” refrain from speculating on the meaning of her husband’s fatal heroin addiction, to which she had been drawn, of course, in her desire to save him from what eventually happened, and which also constituted what they could not share in their life together, but, here and in other poems where she “walk[s] a,pmg the ghosts” (“Nature Poem” 61), she is resigned to the probability that, despite her “impatience to decipher,” she will not gain the tools to decipher. In the elegiac poems, Kocot submits to trial and error, and none of the poems indicate either that they have arrived at the “final” redemptive interpretation that delivers full presence or that the poet will abandon the quest. At times, though, even in a poem with the glum title, “A Wish That All Could Remain the Same,” Kocot is bolstered by a hope that something more potent than an interpretive blueprint or interpretation itself can assist her in realizing her aim:

<38>

But you are close, closer than
What I’m able to fathom in my pain.
There is a love that remains,
Is all that remains, after dying.
This is what I mean when I say
Hold me, as black insomnia breeds. (74)

<39> Instead of suggesting, as elsewhere, that she must overcome the truth a tremendous absence to realize presence, Kocot now takes Damon’s closeness as an article of faith and her own “pain” (at his physical absence) as the barrier to full affective recognition of this creed. By articulating both the nature of the obstacle and the belief it disturbs, she lessens the power of the barrier through consciousness of the overall dynamic. And this leads her to the triumphant naming of the “love that remains” and, as the “only” remainder, that constitutes in her living mind the closeness that permits her apostrophe, “Hold me,” to make him appear in order to give her sustenance amid her sleeplessness. Strangely enough, given the rhetorical force of the sentence as a whole, the repetition of the verb “remains” does not reinforce the secondary signification of corpse or ashes—except perhaps for an inveterate deconstructionist—and allows “love” to signal continuity. Note that the phrase “after dying,” aside from marking Damon’s (life-in-death) in his wife’s mind, implies Kocot’s entrance into death-in-life, a rejuvenation which for her is more properly characterized as life-in-death-in-life, a phrase too gangly for Yeats’ “Byzantium.”

<40> Of course, apostrophe is a trope utilized in many of Kocot’s elegiac poems. Jonathan Culler in his essay “Apostrophe” considers “the clearest example” of this trope’s “structure” to be “the elegy, which replaces an irreversible temporal disjunction, the move from life to death, with a dialectical alternation between attitudes of mourning and consolation, evocations of absence and presence” (The Pursuit of Signs 150). A poem like Shelley’s Adonais, states Culler, “displaces the temporal pattern of actual loss and… makes the power of its own evocativeness a central issue.” He views apostrophe as something which, “if it works,… produces a fictive, discursive event” rather than representing “an event” (152-3). Speaking of “a complex play of mystification and demystification,” Culler asserts that “the poem… dares us to resist” an effective apostrophe’s mystification “and shows that its power is irresistible” by inducing readers to forget “the temporality which supports” “empirical lives” and to try “to embrace a purely fictional time” (154). In such poems as “Rite” and “A Wish That All Could Remain the Same,” I believe that we can be simultaneously aware of our resistance to apostrophe’s mystification and our desire/ability to experience the trope’s power via Keatsian “negative capability,” as well as Kocot’s alternating fear of apostrophe’s failure and her confidence in its successful conquest of ordinary temporality.

<41> Since “Once Upon a Time in America,” provides fresh formulations of ground that we have already covered and at least one important new perspective, it is a good poem with which to concude my discussion of Kocot’s elegies in Sunny Wednesday. The poem starts with a narrative about the actual context of Damon Tombin’s passing:

<42>

Here in this room I slept in
As you lay dead and alone
After you died, while I, superstitious
Peasant, slept, slept through
Phone call after phone call from
Detective after detective, finally
Waking to Daniel’s simple and beatific
Damon’s dead, and me waking up
Lizzette, breaking the news,
Making arrangements like a cop
Or fireman, taking a few minutes
To say I love you to the morning sky.
I still have never let anyone see me cry. (49)

<43> One thing that is unsettling about this free-verse passage is that, even though there is no rhyme scheme, slant rhymes (“in”/”alone” and “up”/”cop”) and a rhyming couplet (“sky”/”cry”) crop up unexpectedly, as if to echo the struggle between controlled forms of behavior and eventual emergence of uncontrollable grief. Returning to the particulars of her encounter with this overwhelming tragedy, Kocot registers each aspect of her initial (unconscious?) deferral or resistance to the awful truth, as well as the displaced expression of love and refusal to share the most acute non-verbal manifestation of grief with others. Perhaps the poet does all this as a preparation for reflection about how to organize conative energies after the actuality has sunk in so that the right kind of mourning can succeed “morning.”

<44> Next, Kocot tells us how her previous existence had prepared her, to a small degree, for the estrangement that is to follow: “Never having been one of the fully/ Living, I live, half of me in/ A cornfield filled with skyscrapers,/ Half of me in that place where we are/ Before we’re born and after we die” (49). The repetition “living” and “live” emphasizes how much she recognizes the opposite state, as well as the personal sense of non-existence (alienation) in her environmental “field” where the natural (“corn”) and synthetic (“skyscrapers”) bizarrely interact. But Damon had embodied the part of her life that ran counter to that alienation; now, deprived of that influence and seemingly alluding to his own struggle with dark forces, she reports that she is “thinking/ Of that holy drunken terror Jackson Pollock./ Fuck you moon,/ He’d shout and cry,” while finding, coincidentally, that a dog called “Jackson” by his owner has just run to her. Perhaps Pollock’s heroic (or egomaniacal) bid to supplant nature with his art has come from the same source as the addictive behavior that killed him. The poet does not insist on parallels between him and Damon but allows them to be drawn, as though, like the dog owner, she wants her “Jackson” to “come back home.”

<45> At this juncture, Kocot articulates her determination to fulfill a task that comprises the poem’s primary conative drive: “You my teacher, died unknown/ And there’s nothing for me to do/ About it right now except to write/ Your legacy no matter how inept/ I can be” (49). Whereas in other poems, mourning involves efforts to (re)establish private communion, and this is shared, almost as an afterthought, with the readership, here the audience plays a more significant role in affirming the value of Damon’s tragically brief life by certifying the representing poet’s sincere, self-effacing transformation of the “unknown” into a distinguished source of a “legacy.” (Though relatively famous and infamous during his life-time, Pollock received tremendous posthumous “assistance” from Lee Krasner.) But there is more to Kocot’s sentence: while the modifying phrase “right now” might signify the immediate present, it can also mean any time following Damon’s death, indicating that, for her, to “write” in order to “right” this wrong will be a lifelong responsibility. This poetry of mourning can be said to celebrate a life by extending the presence of its most salient aspects through the means of another medium. Thus, “no matter” is transformed into matter, poetic material with the potential to matter.

<46> The closure of “Once Upon a Time in America” returns to the occult reading of “cryptological” signs in other poems. When “the phone rings,” it is a reminder of all the calls that Kocot slept through before learning of Damon’s death, but now she “slide[s] across pink ice to get it,” and her apostrophe demands legible answers: “When I asked you for a sign,/ The fireplace doors shattered” (49). Is the poet being told how to remove the barrier that protects her from joining Damon? She knows that she must wait: “You are a dead musician who died/ Alone. I wait to go you,/ Smoking and breaking curses under/ The Jackson Pollock fuck you moon” (50). The repetition “dead” and “died,” mockingly echoing the earlier “living” and “live,” underscores the severe barrier between the poet and her beloved, whose dying did not occur with her potentially comforting nearness. Whereas Pollock cursed the moon in his drive for dominance, Kocot’s waiting to rejoin Damon includes not only “smoking,” literal inhalation of smoke and a figure for intense emotion, but, under that moon, striving to undo the force of “curses”—for example, in the project of writing her husband’s legacy. It seems likely that the legacy-writing, as well as expression of absolute fidelity to Damon’s life-in-death within her mind’s understanding of her own death-in-life and the imagination’s life-in-death-in-life, provide conative satisfactions that make the brutal “nothing” of mere waiting more bearable. Turning the reader away from platitudes about love, loss, and death’s immutability, Kocot’s elegiac poetry, read in light of Altieri’s theory, brings to the forefront of interpretation the dynamic between the deployment of conative strategies, the articulation of possible results, and assessment of their value.

Sociopolitical montage

<47> Joseph Lease’s thirty-plus-page “Free Again” (2007), all sections of which have the poem’s title, includes a great deal of second-order contemplation of the frustration, anxiety, fear, anger, and at times) hope of an “I” who seems to represent Americans unsure of how to respond to the conservative ideological turn, corporate ethos, and ecological crisis characterizing the U.S. during George W. Bush’s years in the White House. This “I” is engaged in both the effort to maintain and enhance his individual conative force and to imagine ways to join with others to enhance what might be called the U.S.’s conative energies, currently blocked. He—the gender is specified in the opening section—includes other voices, whether to parody them or register empathy. He implicitly recognizes how such voices point to trends in the U.S. that influence his and others’ experience.

<48> The first prose-section of “Free Again” focuses specifically on this “representative I” and the impact of class distinctions on how he identifies his possibilities for action and satisfaction:

<49>

When I can’t sleep I am full of red buds and torn curtains and
shiny cars parked in a lot. My lower-middle class manners tear
through my upper-middle class manners: I stared at braided colors
in water while my peers figured out the art of the deal. I was (I
wanted to be) a Midwestern boy with a disco in my eyes—Chicago
Jew, greengolden suburb Jew, son of a Coney Island Jew. When I
drank I got punched up by luminous waves of anger. I thought I had
to choose between winning in New York and being a good person.
I’m not a good person: a good person doesn’t talk about himself—
or so good people tell me. (37)

<50> In the opening lines, insomnia manifests both personal and collective anxiety. The “red buds” could be a trope for spiritual bleeding or the recognition of soulful beauty, while the “torn curtains” bespeak a violent violation of privacy, and a lot of “shiny cars,” though likely possessing seductive qualities, can be a sign of deadening commercialization. Next, the speaker tries to account for his uneasy feelings about class. He finds that, in the effort to comport himself like a typical upper middle class person to achieve long-term effectiveness in dealing with others, he cannot repress his “lower-middle class manners” that elicit others’ prejudices, including the implicit demand for consistency. He recognizes the multiplicity of heterogeneous influences on how he has formed and continues to form modes of communication and behavior. The mass culture of the “disco,” an upbringing in a “greengold [Chicago] suburb,” one of his parents’ seemingly unintended transmission of a former “Coney Island Jew’s” values, aesthetic impulses derived from educational/cultural encounters, interactions with “peers” with Donald Trump-like material ambitions, and those who believe that they promote verbal and behavioral “selflessness,” including relinquishment of personal ambition as an index of “goodness” all exert influence. However, reconciliation of these conflicts or definitive choice of a particular attitude as a guide to action seems impossible to achieve, and by not singling out a choice or synthesis, Lease implies that no valid alternative has yet emerged. In the middle of the opening section, the poet moves from an individual to a national context, and flag-waving is not on the agenda:

<51>

What is our country. Did it start as blank, as blank blank, as blank
blank blank. I would love to fly to Vegas for the Punk Festival—we
aren’t the first culture to “monetize relationships”—force steel
splintering, force breathing, moisture in the air: the city dissolves, one
long story of corruption: USA means the outer miracle kills the inner
miracle: history has to live with what was here: no images, no
lightning, no letters of flame: leaves move, clouds move, night pushes
through the money— (37)

<52> The poet’s ironies register his anxieties about what it means for him to acknowledge his complicity in less savory aspects of the national identity. It is interesting to note that the poem is dedicated to Werner Sollors, a major figure in American Studies with whom Lease studied as a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard. The myth of American exceptionalism interpreted by Sollors and many of his colleagues includes the perception that U.S. economic success is predicated on the ability of nineteenth century pioneers to develop so much “blank blank” terrain. However, this perspective constitutes a “blanking” of Native American presence and its decimation by the “force” or “steel,” superior military technology, as well as the fact of slavery and class divisions among whites. If “Punk” flourished as an art form to resist, among other things, the rise of hegemonic multinational capitalism, its diluted presence in Las Vegas, emblem of the American way of making art and architecture into kitsch and of the weird instability of how wealth is acquired and depleted, marks its cooptation.

<53> Urban “corruption,” as in Eliot’s “unreal city” in The Waste Land, is viewed as both material and spiritual, and “monetizing” of “relationships” produces “the outer miracle”—what our politicians have long called the largest middle class in world history but what has arguably become a small group of the miraculously wealthy—that “kills the inner miracle,” the possibility of egalitarian relationships based on trust and love that some believe sixties youth were poised to achieve. Though he reiterates the opening line of Robert Lowell’s long sonnet-sequence, History (1973), Lease’s poem takes the Boston Brahmin’s de-idealization of history in a different direction—from a focus on violent conquerors (and other intense individuals) to brief registers of linkages among institutions and other groups. For him, “history has to live with” past trends and enduring regularities establishing power relations as spiritual darkness (“night”) manages to “[push] through the money.”

<54> Different sections of “Free Again” present differing manifestations of concepts, conditions, and actions that choke the conative drive toward a re-establishment of “the inner miracle” on both individual and collective levels. Understanding leading to “second-order endorsements” and then strategies of resistance and reconfiguration is a means to the possibility of revivifying the conatus. One prevalent behavior that merits critical evaluation is the evasion of socially contextual thinking through manifold sensory pleasures, even in relative isolation: “We could just get lost in this hot day, in our wanting—we could just get lost—hot day, parking lot, dear friend on the phone but no one in the parking lot to make this day better—spotlight on Otis Redding, warm Wild Cherry Pepsi, sweet soul music, Archie Bells and the Drells…” (42). When “soul music” like Redding’s with actual aesthetic and social merit is framed by commercial associations with products like the latest variation of nutritionless Pepsi, it can make it harder to detect what makes the music valuable. The repetition of “we could” underscores the idea that there is a choice not to surrender to prolonged, unreflective sensory saturation, and perhaps the last detail in the paragraph, the olfactory jolt of “amazingly bad Kung Pao chicken” is just unpleasant enough to get the representative I to pull back from immersion and question its effect and significance. It may also allow for disputation of the equation in the brief verse section after the paragraph: “Where I am equals who I am—does she like Southern/ Comfort through the snow—.” Since “where I am” is changeable, “who I am,” at the very least, is complicated by intersections of personal history and the heterogeneous elements of current location. And whether the kick of “Southern Comfort” is genuinely comforting or numbing to one in “the snow,” an emotionally frigid or threatening ambiance, as it is later in the poem: “thin snow is aiming/ for the hole in each word” (54).

<55> Throughout the poem, references to pollution’s stench signal the W. Bush era philosophy of unrestrained support for big business, especially deregulation, and indifference to worsening class stratification and its human consequences:

<56>

You never slept under a bridge—what blurs you—tell me common stories—
there’s a brownfield in Alma—petroleum processing—he says he’d rather
work at 7-11 than live over there in Midland near all that stuff—you
can smell it in the wind—

Letters shine outside “low-income housing”—there are arrows on the
water—crab-apple colored—thaw reaches up through mud,

drenching wet opens stink,
stains concrete moss-colored— (50).

<57> As Standard Schaefer writes in a review of Broken World, the book in which “Free Again” occupies the last half, “Lease’s America is full of voices refracted through one another,” and “one culture echoes in another… partly because of the musical complexity” and partly as a reminder of “our tenuous and often uncomfortable unity.” (Schaefer also rightly emphasizes how Lease “manages to zoom in and out during [a] montage” and thus creates “successful” “repetitions,” as “what returns never returns in the same proportion.”) While the kind of speaker who tells his story in the poem’s opening page “never slept under a bridge” and, thus, cannot really understand what it is to be homeless, Lease has opened his text to voices that reflect how working class people face distressingly narrow choices and environmental dangers. The presence of such evidence of suffering in the poem has the potential to enable the representative I to absorb its influence as he develops an “adverbial” assessment of his emotions about his country and gestures conatively toward how Americans might join together to transform power relations.

<58> Places names have relevance in the above passage. The name “Alma” is derived from a Latin word signifying “soul,” which itself seems threatened by the petroleum-drenched “brownfield.” And long before he pursued political ambitions, George W. Bush settled in Midland, Texas to try to repeat his father’s success in the oil industry, but he did not. However, this and later business failures proved to be temporary annoyances, because the son of the 41rst President was remarkably protected and bolstered by his filiations and affiliations—that is, separated from the kind of vulnerability that the poem repeatedly represents. Additionally, though, this “mid land” points to other sections of the poem, in which Lease laments how Bush’s party especially, with what be taken as insufficient resistance from Democrats, manipulates the heartland’s middle class in various ways with a version of the American Dream:

<59>

We are ourselves because this is the world’s first morning, and we
are ourselves because it is not, and we are also not ourselves. I
I want you to stand there in your brightly frisky middle-class
personalities and chant after me: “How about another tax cut, how
about another tax cut—” “our wilderness” and liberty and justice
for us: just equal the course of empire, the game of life—the self
that wins and wins—American self, sleepy self—after night rain,
sun pour through these chants—

America
                                                   Named you, said you are “I”: strip
malls equal temples or clouds that drift to the words we can’t
speak—

                                                   singing hymns for no reason: and,
and, and, and, and—I, I, I, I, I— (52)

<60> As in a passage discussed earlier, Lease plays on how the exceptionalist version of American identity has been bound up with a myth of origins, the Adamic myth. It is “’our wilderness’” that “we” transformed from nothing to abundance, as though the Native Americans never existed. President Reagan’s slogan, “morning in America,” used to promote his program for a military buildup and the implementation of what was euphemistically called “trickle-down” economic theory through appeal to the idea of a renewal of the American Dream, is evoked by the phrase, “the world’s first morning. But, utilizing paradox, the voice of Bush/Cheney-era U.S. ascendancy also articulates the opposite of identification with origins to promulgate the myth of the absolutely, uniquely new. The “origins” of tradition and innovative, eternity and the contemporary, allegedly meet in this privileged present. From Bakhtin’s theoretical perspective, parody as a form of “double-voiced discourse” includes both the validation of the borrowed voice’s claims and the implied exposure of the claims’ baldly ahistorical, mystifying, and contradictory elements. Thus, the clause “and we are also not ourselves” can signify that “we” are not merely twenty-first century U.S. citizens but “are” Adam and Eve, Jesus’ early followers, the Pilgrims, the founders of the republic, etc., while the doubling voice implies that “we” merely pretend to inhabit all of these identities to justify egotistical postures of domination. Another voice, one that takes responsibility for the perpetration of oppression at home and abroad in the name of “freedom” that, until about four decades ago, was left out of U.S. history, declares earlier in the poem: “we need to know why voices fall apart—// we did so many things wrong—and all/ our claims of innocence are false—and/ sure we want to claim it—” (40). Of course, even if, for some listeners, such “voices fall apart,” opportunists easily resurrect them.

<61> By insisting on the importance of tax cuts for everyone and indicating that “big government” is the enemy of the middle class, Republicans avert class conflict between what, since the financial meltdown of 2008, is often called the 1% and the vulnerable middle. Instead, in addition to abetting the general promotion of consumerism (“strip/ malls equal temples”), they facilitate the construction, not of Nixon’s “silent majority,” but of “brightly frisky middle-class personalities”—ones that are implicitly in conflict with the poor, to whom “big government” “gives away” money in the form of social welfare that comes from the pockets of the former. An alleged scarcity of resources makes “liberty and justice for all” seem unrealistic and the substitution of “for us” necessary for self-preservation.

<62> While the “hymns” to and of self that Lease mouths entail an obvious gesture of scorn for indifference to others’ suffering, other sections of “Free Again” offer bare hints of what the Republican leaders’ accounts of politics/economics, in the service of “the course of empire” and “the self” of capitalist expansion “that wins and wins,” leave out of their message of pseudo-empowerment to the middle class. These hints do not reach full-fledged analysis of how power relations function—for example, how multinational corporations receive remarkably generous “affirmative action” from governments, how they support autocratic regimes for financial gain, how they accumulate enormous wealth for a tiny number of people through inequitable labor practices and wage-scaling, and how they create and sustain myriad social problems which they are not forced to clean up. Instead, with the implicit sense that extended analysis could be developed in textual formats other than lyric poetry, Lease’s tropes and images tend to encapsulate the emotional texture of responses to fragmentary and often general but intense recognitions of these social conditions: “We are moving, swallowing pockets of garbage in our fat,/ harvesting tumors—“ (57). Next to the dash-ended sentence, “I’m just trying to make a night or a cathedral or a pine—” we see: “why don’t people talk more about corporations and power—” (39). At the same time, one voice recognizes how frightening “the truth” of contemporary multinational corporatism would be to many “people,” but it refrains from striving to elucidate that truth and instead anxiously tries to put a “curse” on “the rich,” as though there are no distinctions among them:

<63>

Why don’t people
tell the truth—you scare people—genocide and
how the rich got rich—even a bus shines
differently in the light, the glowing
splinters—why don’t people talk more about
the government and power—how do I know
the rich can’t sleep—promise me the rich can’t
sleep— (60)

<64> Given what Schaefer has stated about the multiplicity of voices in the poem, it would be a mistake to attribute this passage with what I have termed Lease’s representative I, which surfaces sparingly, but its perspective, if made more analytic and nuanced, would have a good deal in common with that more inclusive figure’s. As the representation of emotional reactions by voices (that do not validate “brightly frisky middle-class personalities” or right-wing puppeteers) accumulates, one can consider Altieri’s sense of the adverbial character of affects. Anxiety, anger, and other affects lead the representative I, which has incorporated and sorted the effects of the many other voices, to take action against mass acceptance of coercive notions of “freedom” and “opportunity” and in support of what it could mean to say, echoing Martin Luther King’s “free at last,” “free again”—that is, the development of a more effective, genuinely participatory democracy. Emancipatory hopes are reflections of both spiritual and political desire, as in this section of ringing anaphora:

<65>

             It could be gorgeous, it could be
loss, it could be broken, it could fold—

             it could listen, it could stop, it
could answer, it could fail—

             it could dangle, it could fall, it
could glisten, it could freeze—

             the soul inventing the world—
the soul inventing the soul— (46)

<66> The context of the poem as a whole dictates that the reiterated gerund “inventing” be read as “reinventing,” coming upon freedom “again.” And soul-re-creation here is not (or not primarily) an isolated individual act but an establishment of the “soul” as ethos, as a guiding emotion for conative investments in a broad community, at least the U.S. as embracing the principle of e pluribus (diversity) if not, literally, “the world.” However, just as this reinvention has the potential to be “gorgeous” and “glistening,” the representative I suggests in a substantial portion of the chain of verbs that it is a fragile process, vulnerable to varieties of failure. Like the “broken world” of the book’s title, “the soul” could emerge “broken” despite the effort to realize its coherence, but the risk of failure is obviously worth taking, given the alternative of the kind of status quo depicted in “Free Again.” Rather than sketching a specific political solution, these moments in Lease’s poem articulate a general desire for the establishment of a political/economic/social milieu based on equality and compassion in such a way that is designed to enable his audience to awaken to the (perhaps buried) presence of this desire. Schaefer speaks of his high regard for “the compassionate even if sometimes testy embrace of Joseph Lease’s stance as a poet, which seems to say, I don’t know you, I don’t know what I can do for you, I don’t know that the poetry will achieve anything, it may even ruin us both, but I will damn sure aim to make it do whatever you will let me.” Even if I might quibble with the phrase about “ruin,” Schaefer captures the spirit of Lease’s open, urgent melioristic expression of desire, also conveyed in these lines of condensed lyricism and elegant visual balance that evoke excrement, enchantment, and quasi-utopian promise:

<67>

             Stillness in red, stillness in green—I
have no words, light hangs like rope—

             We breathe our eyes, promise the
wind, boxes of shit, pieces of glass—

             Color the wind, we breathe our yes,
open the doors, one vote one corpse—

             One seed of light— (61)

<68> When the representative I acknowledges that he has “no words” to describe what seems to be a regenerative “stillness,” swathed in complementary (stop and go) colors, he is pointing to a desire, which language can only meagerly approximate, for healing what is broken. The “rope” joined in a simile with “light” may represent a force that, after the stillness of “hanging,” can either lift the “we” above its inertia/crisis or can “hang” it, causing further fragmentation and destruction. Though juxtaposed with “boxes of shit,” which, after all, can serve as mulch, the imaginative synesthesia of “breathe our eyes” infuses perception with renewed spirit. In the removal of a mere “e,” newly invigorated “eyes” morph into the breath of affirmation, the possibility that the purchase of the franchise through violence (“one vote one corpse”) will result in “one seed of light”—as opposed to George Bush Sr.’s paean to voluntarism as an alleged substitute for federal welfare programs, “a thousand points of light”—flowering into a superb collective energy. Lease’s attempt here to effect or at least encourage an emotional transformation in his readership from anger and despair (explored in other sections and crucial to “work through”) to empathy, solidarity, and determination can be viewed as a necessary prelude to (“seed” of) particular conative adjustments within individuals and within the dynamic of their interaction. And the hope is that these adjustments on a grand scale could eventually result in the rebirth of “the inner miracle” and its unification with a new “outer miracle.”

<69> In this essay, applying a few features of Charles Altieri’s “aesthetics of the affects” to poetry for the first time, I have considered the work of poets who are stylistically and thematically distinct from one another to assess the range of his theory’s applicability. And, though I have written criticism about both Denise Duhamel and Joseph Lease’s work on seven previous occasions, as well as conducting interviews with both, and Kocot on three occasions. Altieri’s theory has not only passed the test, but it has turned out to have a powerfully “de-familiarizing” impact. In writing this text while reviewing some of my previous interpretations of the poets, it occurred to me that my prior approaches to all three had left out important affective qualities of their work. Seeking focal consistency in my own analysis, I had sometimes coerced certain passages of Duhamel and Lease’s poems into a political frame that did not necessarily warrant such a reading. In fact, I hope that my use of the “tools” lent by Altieri now enable my readings of the social or political in Lease and Duhamel to be more specific and nuanced, especially because affective factors are more fully included. My approaches to some of Kocot’s elegiac poems had tended to take an obvious psychoanalytic line or to stick with “safe” paraphrase, whereas the concept of conative adjustment immediately made the greater complexity of her strategies for placing herself in relation to the fact of her husband’s death vibrantly evident. It seems to me, then, that Altierian affective critical strategies show a great deal of promise, whether used alone or in combination with other modes, for application to many other examples of current poetry.

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Print.

Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP,1981. Print.