Browsing by Author "Crymble, Phillip"

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    Mixed use: The hybrid imaginary in American verse practice from William Carlos Williams to Rebecca Wolff
    (University of New Brunswick, 2024-08) Crymble, Phillip; Leckie, Ross; Schryer, Stephen
    This dissertation contests the misconception that, throughout the twentieth century, mainstream and avant-garde poets in the United States were split into antagonistic camps. Along with belying allegiances between poets in opposing camps, this totalizing division also papers over hostilities between poets within the same camp. By the late 1990s, a movement referred to as “hybrid” or “post-avant” developed and its goal was to combine conventional and experimental practices to create a “third way.” Hybrid poets believed that affect, lyric address, and subjectivity were crucial to the artform and that experimentalists who felt otherwise had surrendered to a paralyzing insularity. But while post-avant poets assumed their approach was new, adverse poetries were actually brought together as early as the 1910s. William Carlos Williams, the first poet examined in this dissertation, combined the expressionist and constructivist strains of modernist verse practice to create an approach to the artform predicated on an inclusionist ethos. Mid-century poet Robert Lowell, who is also central to the hybrid debate, believed that lyricism and vernacularity were essential to poetry’s evolution, but was criticized, like Williams, for combining experimental and establishment practices. At the close of the millennium, as avant-garde and mainstream camps became increasingly balkanized, Rebecca Wolff, the third poet featured in this dissertation, spearheaded a hybrid revival by repudiating the verse binary in her debut poetry collection Manderley (2001), and by founding Fence, an iconoclastic literary magazine that was the first to platform post-avant writing. In positioning Williams and Lowell as inclusionists, then, and by demonstrating that, like Rebecca Wolff, they, too, were attacked and disregarded as much for prejudicial biases as for mixing discrete approaches, this study troubles the notion of the two-camp binary. Along with revealing the importance of pluralism to the evolution of the artform, the evidence also indicates that the idea of a closed verse community is little more than an illusion. In a world where binary thinking continues to be called into question, the controversial discoveries of these findings represent a breakthrough, and as such, will prove useful to future scholars conducting research into the cultural history of American poetry practices.