While the etymology of apocalypse is closely associated with that of revelation (both signify unveiling or revealing), the latter term also evokes the complete opposite—a reveiling or recovering. And if we look closely at how apocalypse figures in recent literature and literary theory that concerns itself with our imagination of cataclysm—particularly ecological and financial—we find an apocalypticism that understands both crisis and our path to averting it as a matter of embracing ignorance and unknowability over knowledge or knowability. In a host of recent works of poetry that have sought to imagine a horizon of political and environmental change, the horizon is frequently all we are permitted to imagine because what lies at or beyond it is supposedly inaccessible to human understanding. This tendency, which is consonant with some recent developments flying under the broad banner of the New Materialism, deserves a new name: the agnotological turn. This chapter focuses on two recent works of American poetry that push in important ways against that turn: Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse (2013) and Jane Gregory’s Yeah No (2018)

This chapter is intended as a contribution to the history of American women's literature, which is to say, it is intended as a history. But readers will quickly see in it a polemical purpose as well. For the history that I am offering here – one that insists on the coterminous centrality of lyric as a genre and subjective expression as a value (both in their celebration and their critique) – should require us to reconsider, if not abandon, our justifications for studying (or producing) women's poetry as such, that is, as women's poetry.

In the first two sections of this chapter, I attempt to show how, even in the face of the most acute critiques of lyric and its conjunction with subjective expression, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, the commitment to poetry as a vehicle for individual expression persists – indeed, it could hardly become any stronger. As I show in the second section, the effort by poets, critics, and scholars to think about the difference women make to poetic production, precisely because it raises the specter of an apparently irreducible and dispositive difference at the level of the body, yields an occasion to think about the relationship between subject position and literary form, with the inevitable effect, I argue, of making form appear to be the indexical trace of particular subject positions.

Reviewing Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (reissued in 1934 in an abridged edition that reduced the novel's original 900-plus pages by almost half), Conrad Aiken complains about the still relentless effect of the novel's repetitious style, calling it “a complete esthetic miscalculation: it is dull; and although what it seeks to communicate is interesting, the cumbersomeness of the method defeats its own end…[I]t sounds as if someone attempted to paraphrase Jung's ‘Psychological Types’ in Basic English.” Aiken's passing reference to the lingua franca known as Basic English would be lost on many readers now, but in 1934, I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden's 850-word version of English, touted as an easy-to-learn alternative to Esperanto that would solve the communication difficulties of a “babelized” political economy, was an object of popular, and indeed, of distinctly poetic fascination. Aiken's point in invoking it here is to reiterate the frequent charge of excessive simplicity in Stein's writing by attributing that simplicity to an impoverished vocabulary (by implicit contrast to, say, the nearly 30,000-word vocabulary attributed to Shakespeare). The idea, then, is that Stein's choosing to repeat sentences with only slight variation over dozens of pages entails using a disproportionately small selection of words in forming those sentences. Obviously for Aiken, Basic English is just an incidental vehicle for denouncing one of Stein's early literary experiments. To poets like Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, however, Basic looked like a violation of the very medium of their art.

In The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1937), Gertrude Stein describes the effect of flying over the United States and looking at the land from above, which she distinguishes from what happens when you “climb on the land”:

What does Stein mean by the “human mind” if it involves no remembering or forgetting (faculties most of us would tend to associate with nothing if not our minds)? The best way to make sense of this counterintuitive definition is to look at what else Stein aligns with the “human mind” in opposition to what she calls “human nature.” She adds to the distinction between climbing on the land and looking at it from above in another passage when she remarks that “the land is flat from on high.”

LITERALISM (AGAIN)

If, as we saw in the last chapter, the problem metaphor created for poets like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky was that it depended on “abstract terms” for analogies between “things” and thereby gave up the possibility of rendering the liveliness of “acts,” then (for Pound and Zukofsky at least) the Chinese ideograph stood as a kind of correction to metaphor through the fantasy that its “vivid shorthand pictures” dynamically transformed “things” into “acts.” And as we saw in earlier works of both Williams and Zukofsky, the effort to block the abstract exchange of meaning on which metaphor supposedly depended also took the form of literalizing “things.” Thus both Williams's transformation of his “Botticellian Trees” into the physical letters on the page and Zukofsky's transformation of the sawhorse in “‘A’-7” into a literal horse and at the same time into the letter ‘A’ that the sawhorse shape resembles are efforts to overcome metaphor that result in the very kind of literalism that would become the hallmark of language poetry in the late 1970s.

But at the same time that language poetry was just getting started, and indeed in the same year that Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein launched the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978), the philosopher Donald Davidson published an essay in Critical Inquiry called “What Metaphors Mean,” which went on to become one of the most influential and controversial accounts of metaphor in the latter half of the century.

Peter Henry Emerson is significant to the early history of photography not only for the stunning photographs he produced during the 1880s but also for his impassioned campaign to grant photography the status of a fine art and to articulate the standards by which photographs could be evaluated as art. The standards depended above all on the photographer's ability to control what Emerson called the “values” (light and dark tones) of any photograph – his ability, that is, to alter them “at will.” But in 1890, when the chemists Ferdinand Hurter and Vero C. Driffield published an important finding from their experiments with photographic plates, the news effectively ended Emerson's artistic career. They discovered what would become known as the “characteristic curve” of all photographic images, which refers to the fact that while any given tone can be altered by process, the differential relation between tones in an image remains the same no matter the intensity or time of exposure, or density of the emulsion used (Newhall, P. H. Emerson, 89). Upon learning of this discovery Emerson immediately began to recant his previous arguments for the artistic merits of photography, initially by mailing a letter of renunciation to all of the magazine editors he knew, and next by issuing a pamphlet proclaiming the “Death of Naturalistic Photography” (92–93).