The Lyric in the Age of the Brain

Nikki Skillman

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780674545120
• eBook ISBN: 9780674970090
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Exploration of our inner life—perception, thought, memory, feeling—once seemed a privileged domain of lyric poetry. Scientific discoveries, however, have recently supplied physiological explanations for what was once believed to be transcendental; the past sixty years have brought wide recognition that the euphoria of love is both a felt condition and a chemical phenomenon, that memories are both representations of lived experience and dynamic networks of activation in the brain. Caught between a powerful but reductive scientific view of the mind and traditional literary metaphors for consciousness that have come to seem ever more naive, American poets since the sixties have struggled to articulate a vision of human consciousness that is both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.

The Lyric in the Age of the Brain examines several contemporary poets—Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and experimentalists such as Harryette Mullen and Tan Lin—to discern what new language, poetic forms, and depictions of selfhood this perplexity forces into being. Nikki Skillman shows that under the sway of physiological conceptions of mind, poets ascribe ever less agency to the self, ever less transformative potential to the imagination. But in readings that unravel factional oppositions in contemporary American poetry, Skillman argues that the lyric—a genre accustomed to revealing expansive aesthetic possibilities within narrow formal limits—proves uniquely positioned to register and redeem the dispersals of human mystery that loom in the age of the brain.

CHAPTER 1

Robert Lowell and the Chemistry of Character

FOR ROBERT LOWELL, the most urgent philosophical questions about the nature of mind issued from emotional imbalance—from the torment biological circumstance relentlessly wrought upon him over the course of his adult life. Lowell suffered his first manic episode and subsequent depressive collapse at thirty-two, and would be hospitalized fourteen times during his remaining twenty-eight years as a result of debilitating breakdowns. The severity of these breakdowns is difficult to overstate; gripped by hallucinations, monomania, delusions, disfiguring transformations of personality, and the emergence of identities other than his own, Lowell described witnessing his “mystical experiences and explosions” in a pathological ecstasy, his “fascinated spirit watching the holocaust of irrationality.”¹ This dissociative quality of Lowell’s psychosis meant that clear memories remained after his mania subsided; he would describe the aftermath of his breakdowns—the “purgatorial feelings” (L 458) of humiliation and regret—as “the worst part.”² In the rounds of apologies that followed his bouts of madness, Lowell’s attempts to accept accountability for “imbecilic, inhuman, dangerous, embarrassing” (L 239) behavior forced the question of how he could claim responsibility for his actions when he could not claim continuous will or, in any meaningful sense, continuous selfhood; in the wake of his manic episodes, he would pit physical and spiritual interpretations of his mental condition against one another, ever alert to the philosophical challenges posed by a mind that seemed to be, somehow, physically ill. Apologizing to T. S. Eliot, Lowell proposed that his “true” self was mysteriously dispersed across his well and ill temperaments, for “fragments of the true man, such as he is, are in both phases” (L 444); in a perplexed letter to another friend, Lowell describes his convalescence from his first manic crisis to have been “like recovering from some physical injury, such as a broken leg or jaundice, yet there’s no disclaiming these outbursts—they are part of my character” (L 239).

The aura of the deranged, suicidal artistic genius certainly contributed to Lowell’s popular image during his lifetime—in his fictional portrait of the poet in Armies of the Night (1968), Norman Mailer speculates that “Lowell’s brain at its most painful must have been equal to an overdose of LSD on Halloween”—but Lowell himself was for the most part without illusions about his illness, perceiving it to be an impediment to his creativity.³ “To make the poems possible,” he once explained, “a huge amount of health has to go into the misery.”⁴ Along with his treatments, Lowell’s understanding of his “manic seizures” became increasingly medical over time, and the more closely he came to identify his experience of mind with the intractable determinations of his body, the more intellectually significant to him his condition became. Indeed, the metaphysical quandary his surges of “high blood” occasioned, and the intellectual reckoning with the problem of mind and body he undertook in light of them, formed a climate within which he restlessly revised his style.

Lowell’s dynastic New England Calvinism and rebellious conversion to Catholicism have framed our relatively limited picture of him as a philosophical thinker, and lyrics such as “Beyond the Alps”—the inaugural poem of Life Studies—have encouraged us to identify his watershed stylistic transition from symbolic density to conversational intimacy with his descent from spiritual rarefaction to the “terra firma” of an ostensibly Freudian humanism.⁵ But while this familiar account of Lowell’s most famous formal transition rightly implies a close correspondence between his interpretation of the nature of subjective experience and his patterning of mental life in poetic language, significant facets of that correspondence and its fate over the remaining decades of Lowell’s career remain to be explored. The controversial and widely influential formal ruptures that continued to punctuate Lowell’s poetics of the 1960s and 1970s reflect fitful transformations in his philosophy of mind that were inextricably bound up with his experiences of illness and somatic treatment—transformations that reveal him to have been not only captive to but captivated by the natural forces that govern the articulation of character, emotion, and selfhood.⁶ As he lived through a paradigm shift in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders, Lowell witnessed, shared, and finally rejected the hysterical enthusiasm for chemical treatment fostered by the commercial juggernauts of the pharmaceutical industry in the 1960s. His illness, in other words, tapped him directly into the era’s transforming conceptions of mind just as the institutional scientism of today’s mental health landscape was emerging. David Healy, writing in 2008, observed that “In recent years drugs like Prozac, Valium, Viagra, and chloropromazine … have changed how we view ourselves, and these changes now occur within years or sometimes within months of each other.”⁷ Lowell’s philosophical and aesthetic trajectories, indebted in unacknowledged ways to his evolving, experimental treatments, illustrate the emotional consequences of this historical phenomenon, demonstrating the effects of its shifting premises and promises within one ravaged life.

In an elegant summary of recent critical biases against Lowell, Dan Chiasson gives pride of place to “facticity”: to Lowell’s vision of the self as an accumulation of autobiographical facts and to his faith in the transparent epistemological value of recording “what happened”; by his own account, Lowell was a poet not of “the imagined,” but of “the recalled” (CP 838).⁸ Lowell’s commitment to fact, Chiasson notes, has seemed naïve to readers after the linguistic turn, who emphasize the specifically semiotic distortions that confound self-knowledge; this facticity has also seemed politically suspect to readers who observe, as Elizabeth Bishop once did, that Lowell’s confidence in the inherent significance of his life’s facts draws unearned force from his exceptional privilege as a member of the Lowell clan.⁹ And yet, Chiasson concludes, “Robert Lowell cannot be read satisfyingly without an interest, on his reader’s part, in autobiography—an interest, that is, in the way the self is constituted in the social world, by means of autobiographical fact: the names and dates that plot us on the various grids that constitute familial, social, and political life. (If you think that such data have no place in lyric poetry, you won’t enjoy reading Lowell).”¹⁰ Chiasson’s assessment acknowledges the integral role of circumstantial “data” in Lowell’s conception of the self, even as it reflects endemic assumptions about the kinds of facts that matter to Lowell as he makes and remakes himself in language. An unusually sensitive reader of Lowell, Chiasson nonetheless takes it for granted that “Lowell’s facts are not scientific but historical.”¹¹

In fact, embedded in the history of Lowell’s mature poetics is a history of attempts to make sense of his riven emotional life as a function of biological process; as his faith in spiritual and libidinal schemes of psychic determination waned, the notion of a curable, chemical self presented Lowell with a new dogma—a source of zealous hope, an object of necessary skepticism, and a structure of thought demanding a new form. In the years following his earliest breakdowns, Lowell’s physiological descriptions of mental life implicitly question the epistemological premises of confession as an aesthetic mode that privileges introspection and expression as reliable sources of knowledge. It is only in the polarizing experiments Notebook 1967–1968 (1969) and Notebook (1970), however, that Lowell invents an experimental form shaped by the extreme biological determinism he entertained upon discovering, in a crucial turning point in his life and art, an apparent cure for his ruptured selfhood in a pill—in the lithium carbonate that seemed to justify, while its success lasted, a fundamentally materialist interpretation of the self as a chemical effect. The disarticulation and reconstitution of Notebook in the subsequent volumes History (1973) and For Lizzie and Harriet (1973) reflect Lowell’s withdrawal from the materialist extremity of that initial experiment, a withdrawal that anticipates his disillusioned reinstatement of dualist logic in The Dolphin and his “heartbreaking” poetics of philosophical exhaustion in his final volume, Day by Day.

Though it would be in the late 1960s that Lowell would devise a form that depicts the chaos of inner life as an expression of chemical accident, the volumes that precede Notebook chart the descent of these mental phenomena—emotion, temperament, consciousness itself—ever deeper into the body. Suffused with the homespun materialism Lowell extrapolated from the phenomenology of his “ill-spirit” and from the electroshock and early chemical treatments that supplemented his psychotherapy, many poems of the late 1950s and 1960s trace psychic pain to its perceived sources and symptoms in the body. Written when his manic episodes and hospitalizations had become yearly occurrences, For the Union Dead (1964) contains many poems depicting the surreal terrors of his mania and the exhaustion of recovery; interspersed among these are portraits of loved ones and historical figures in whom Lowell saw his own distinctly physical experience of mental illness reflected.¹² Other poems ask unreservedly what the insentient blood and bone of the poet have to do with the sources and surfaces of poetry itself. Lowell’s long habit of using the problem of mind to frame the puzzling relationship between life and art is evident in these poems that confront the mysteries of (monstrous) behavior by contemplating the physical operations of a wayward brain. In “The Neo-Classical Urn,” for example—a diptych self-portrait of the poet in childhood and middle age—Lowell envisions verse not as an inspirited vehicle of the immaterial soul but as a hollow counterpart to the inanimate parts that somehow anchor human wholes.

“The Neo-Classical Urn” associates an inhuman act Lowell committed as a child with the nonhuman machinery that inexplicably generates “cerebration” and “free will,” and with the mercenary tendency of writing itself to transform experience into artistic “material.” The poem’s central vignette—Lowell’s memory of charging from an ornamental garden into a swampy wilderness, stopping to “snatch / the painted turtles on dead logs”—is bracketed by a pair of images of the poet’s skull; “The Neo-Classical Urn” begins with a surreal fusion of Lowell’s remembering head with the object of his memory (“a turtle shell”) and an image of memory itself as a roil of electrical charges and fermenting juices—a hydraulic mechanism powered by decay:

I rub my head and find a turtle shell

stuck on a pole,

each hair electrical

with charges, and the juice alive

with ferment. Bubbles drive

the motor, always purposeful …

Poor head!

How its skinny shell once hummed,

as I sprinted down the colonnade

of bleaching pines, cylindrical

clipped trunks without a twig between them. Rest!

I could not rest. At full run on the curve,

I left the cast stone statue of a nymph,

her soaring armpits and her one bare breast,

gray from the rain and graying in the shade,

as on, on, in sun, the pathway now a dyke,

I swerved between two water bogs,

two seines of moss, and stopped to snatch

the painted turtles on dead logs.

In that season of joy,

my turtle catch

was thirty-three,

dropped splashing in our garden urn,

like money in the bank,

the plop and splash

of turtle on turtle,

fed raw gobs of hash …¹³

The image of the poet’s “poor head” as both a fermenting mire and a “motor,” a “purposeful” machine and a painfully electrified lump “stuck on a pole,” contrasts with the benignly but ominously “humming” head of the rapturous child “at full run on the curve.” Looking back upon the boy as he hurtles from the domesticated garden through the liminally artificial “colonnade / of bleaching pines” and into the wild, eroticized swamp, the aging poet distinguishes the inert, sepulchral realm of art (the bare-breasted nymph is “gray from the rain and graying in the shade”) from the teeming realm of nature; the impervious child, however, tramples heedl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Lyric in the Age of the Brain
• 1. Robert Lowell and the Chemistry of Character
• 2. Physiological Thinking: Robert Creeley and A. R. Ammons
• 3. James Merrill’s Embodied Memory
• 4. John Ashbery’s Mindlessness
• 5. Jorie Graham and the Ethics of the Eye
• Conclusion: Anti-Lyric in the Age of the Brain
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index