Savage Torpor: Forms of Attention in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

"Savage Torpor: Forms of Attention in Twentieth-Century American Poetry" argues that American experimental poetry, starting from Pound's call for the "direct treatment of the 'thing,'" has been crucially concerned with representing the perceptual apparatus through which we interpret the world. I situate this literature within a discourse of attention since the late nineteenth century, when attention began to be a subject of scientific inquiry and demands for attentiveness began to permeate institutional discourses in an effort to produce orderly and productive subjects. I propose that the object-oriented poetics of Imagism and its inheritors reproduces a normative view of attention that turns focused concentration into a moral imperative often cast in masculinist and ableist terms, which results in a relatively narrow view of what counts as valuable and interesting experience for this kind of poetry.;In the twentieth century, Imagist attention has been challenged by other innovative poets who explore the dangerously unproductive places on the attentional spectrum. My first chapter situates H.D.'s Trilogy and Andre Breton's early experiments with automatic writing in the context of the early twentieth century's occult revival and the rise of psychoanalysis, arguing that for these writers, trance states model a form of poetic attention that is simultaneously rational and irrational. Chapter Two explores the temporality and philosophical possibilities of boredom in Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and John Cage's oeuvre, particularly his "Lecture on Nothing." My final chapter investigates "distraction techniques" in the Language poets and Flarf Collective, and argues that rather than reproducing the supposedly detrimental effects of television and the Internet on attention spans, these poets explore what such a culturally "noisy" environment reveals about the complexity of the cognitive processes involved in reading and writing. Taken together, these poets of "dysfunctional" attention argue that all points on the spectrum of attention are interesting and worthy of the phenomenological examination that poetry makes possible.