L. M. Freer

Why My Dissertation Is About What It Is About (What Is It About?)

September 3, 2009

Very broadly speaking, my dissertation examines the effect of Cold War-era sexual politics on the composition and publication of the long poems written by American poets of the twentieth century. Before I go into how I got here, a few explanations:

Firstly, I am using the phrase “sexual politics” in a very particular way in this project. I am positing that during the Cold War (roughly 1945-1989, by my reckoning), there was in the United States a symbiotic relationship between public rhetoric about politics and public policy (both domestic and foreign) and public rhetoric about gender and sexuality. It wasn’t possible to fully separate sex and politics in the public imagination. (I’m actually not sure that we can separate these rhetorics at all well in the present day. But I’m also not sure that what we call the Cold War ever really ended—certainly U.S. imperialism is still a very real aspect of both our foreign policy and our domestic mores.)

Secondly, I’m using this rubric as a way to actively reclaim these poems as epics, albeit epics that deconstruct and criticize the usual epic form. Traditional epic poetry is about the realization of a nation by a male hero—one whose quest is to found an empire via both the subjugation of women and also, eventually, through the erasure of his own body. The secure establishment of an imperial body, in other words, requires that the sovereignty of the human body be denied—regardless of that body’s gender. U.S. poets of the Cold War period, however, are purposely generating ironic epics, epics that deconstruct their genre through the conscious rehabilitation of the body. (Though sometimes this happens through the rejection of the imperial self, as in Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, where “I” is not only a character, but a character who is eventually killed off—buried alive in a vat of LSD—because everyone else finds him so irritating.) The scale of these poetic works is a necessary response—indeed, I think it the only viable response—to the imperial ambitions of Cold War cultural ideology. While the American postwar quotidian is attempting to take a cue from Modernist ideals of “re-membering” (putting back together) in creating a new sociopolitical empire of great cultural and military power, these poems are resisting that effort both aesthetically and politically, via the ironic implementation of an originally “imperial” form.

I could go on, of course. Dissertations are epic projects themselves; I’m not unaware of the irony. Back to my point: how did I get here?

Let’s head back in time… to my senior year of college. Having concluded my junior year with my best work to date, a lengthy study of Sade, I decided to write my fall semester senior thesis on Ezra Pound—despite the objections of my professor, who thought Pound an “inappropriate” topic. In my thesis I wrote about the Pisan Cantos, about totalitarianism at the end of World War II, and about how the line structure of one of the Cantos in particular was reflective of Pound’s post-fascist efforts to generate a different kind of poetic voice. This did not, to put it mildly, go over well. I was told the paper was not only irrelevant, but also obtuse. (In truth, I think parts of it were poorly written—but only because I didn’t yet have the language with which to fully elucidate the concept I was trying to explain. The concept itself was sound.) I nevertheless held my ground, utterly convinced that this was, in fact, the correct way to read Pound, the better way to read him, and that just because someone was a fascist, it didn’t mean their poetry was unimportant.

I earned the worst grade of my entire undergraduate English career on my fall semester thesis. I was mortified. I got angry. I was convinced that I hadn’t been heard. I went and did a spring semester thesis on Chaucer, so that I wouldn’t have to think about Pound or the project at all. And then I got into grad school. I came to CUNY, started teaching composition, and began completing my doctoral coursework. My doctoral coursework was extremely wide-ranging, which is not really how it is supposed to go—or so they tell me. Nevertheless, at one point I was writing criticism on the science fiction of Samuel Delany and practicing Old English conjugation patterns in the very same semester. But eventually, almost by accident, I ended up in a course with the faculty member who is now my dissertation director. I started reading what is generally called New American Poetry in that class, and I remember opening up Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems and thinking: “this is what Pound was trying to get to. I was right. I was right about that.”

Everything came rushing back. By the end of the semester I knew I had to talk about long poems, I had to talk about postwar imperialism, and that as someone committed to inclusive and appropriate feminist and queer literary criticism, I was in a unique position to help explain the structure and value of a set of works which are critically elusive, notoriously slippery, and don’t maintain allegiance to a single interpretive model. Furthermore, with five years of teaching experience, I also had a wealth of information about how other people read, about how my students reacted to the study of poetry, and about what might interest a diverse body of people. I’m hoping, in the end, to write a dissertation that will become the basis of a “crossover” book. I want my project to appeal to anyone who is interested in poetry—not just my academic peers. I want my family and friends to see why these poems are important to our understanding of American culture today. I want to share my vision about the world we live in and how we can improve it. And I truly think I can do that through continuing to write and teach—that’s why I went into this profession.

I didn’t have the perfect rubric to discuss this poetry as an undergraduate because I was reading Pound as the end of an aesthetic trajectory, not as one of the beginnings of one. There wasn’t much opportunity to discuss post-1945 American poetry at my college in 2002 or 2003. (I note with pleasure that this has since changed somewhat, as it seems to be changing in English departments across the country.) So here I am, seven years later, beginning a dissertation that stays true to my various selves—the 21-year-old who was righteously convinced her interpretation was correct in the face of opposition, the 24-year-old who left grad school for a year to train recent immigrants on computer skills because that seemed a better way to help improve the world, the 28-year-old who wants to reach a wider audience. This is me, writing.

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