| This dissertation attempts to answer two apparently straightforward questions: (1) What is the nature and function of citation? (2) How does contemporary poetry make use of it?; The first question seems the easier one, because citation is of course quite familiar to scholars. Traditionally, one cites or quotes from another work to illustrate or decorate the citing text. In the case of illustration, a citation functions to support the aims and claims of the citing text, which are typically advanced in a linear and expository way. In the case of decoration, citation's function is to adorn the text with a stylistic flourish. In both situations, however, a citation plays a role subservient to that of the citing text. An illustrative citation is simply the indifferent instrument for substantiating the citing text. And an ornamental citation, despite possessing more independence than an illustrative citation, is nevertheless shuffled away to the actual margins of the page as epigraph or footnote, lest it interrupt the flow of the writing and contaminate the citing text.; But what happens when citations find their way into poetry, a mode of writing that does not lend itself as well to linear and expository expression? When the context is altered in this way, the inherent capacity of citations to displace and substitute for the citing text may be explored, generating new possibilities for the status of authors, texts and readers. Citation's nature is thus revealed as hybrid, as capable of both illustration and displacement.; Poetry would seem to be the last place to find citations, because poets are supposed to speak in their own inimitable voices and offer literary works of originality. But a host of poets have been making creative use of citation for nearly a century. Eliot and Pound are obvious cases in point and are discussed in Leonard Diepeveen's Changing Voices: The Modernist Quoting Poem. My project follows in the footsteps of this work by addressing the postmodern situation, particularly so by examining John Ashbery's early poetry and the language poetry of Charles Bernstein. Poets like these savor the latent possibility of citations to disrupt the citing text and offer multiple textures of expression in a given poem. |
