The Materials---Technoscience And Poetry At The Limits Of Fabrication.

Synopsis

This dissertation treats experimental poetry as a practice of materials research and fabrication, addressing its contemporary innovations as such alongside those of nanoscale materials engineering. In doing so, it affirms and updates the traditional claim that poetry is a form of building, considering the pertinence of that claim in the context of cutting-edge approaches to material construction. The dissertation thus assesses the situation of poetry and of technoscience at the limits of fabrication. Rather than couching poetic value in terms of a capacity to offer metaphorical figures of the unknown, the imperceptible, and the indeterminate, I begin by situating materialist poetics in relation to the relatively recent capacity of technoscience to effectively configure materials at scales below the threshold of the visible and at which quantum-mechanical effects come into play. While nanotechnology enables the controlled manipulation of matter at sub-molecular scale levels, the poets I consider engage in the formal mobilization of what Steve McCaffery calls the protosemantic : a domain prior to meaning in which writing operates as a material scene of forces. I track the historical trajectory of this technocultural context back to the late 1940s, when Buckminster Fuller and Charles Olson were both instructors at Black Mountain College. While Fuller was developing principles of design science that have had a crucial impact upon contemporary materials science and contemporary poetics, Olson was developing an objectist poetics grounded in post-classical physics, topology, and non-Euclidean geometry. Following the networks of influence and exchange emerging from this postwar milieu, I examine the influence of both Fuller and Olson upon the formal strategies of Ronald Johnson's ARK; the impact of Fuller's design science upon the structural principles of nanoscale chemistry; the background of Steve McCaffery's concept of parapoetics in Olson's objectism; and the pertinence of the latter to the confluence of biotechnology and solid-state chemistry in the non-organic poetics of Christian Bok and Caroline Bergvall. Throughout, the dissertation is concerned with the sub-visual phenomena, the self-organizing processes, the synthetic structures, the relational ontologies, and the ideologies of efficient form that we encounter in both technoscience and poetry at the limits of fabrication.