3 3. A crucial figure for a number of the American poets who address these themes is Paul Celan (1920–1970), the Romanian Jewish poet, translator, and Holocaust survivor whose German-language poetry is generally regarded as one of the most important literary responses to the crisis of faith precipitated by the Shoah.
4 4. See Weinfield 11–33 for an extended consideration of their literary and personal relationship, one of the most important poetic encounters of the mid-twentieth century.
WORKS CITED
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4 Duncan, R. (2011). The H.D. Book. Berkeley: University of California.
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6 DuPlessis, R.B. and Friedman, S.S. (1981). ‘Woman Is Perfect’: H.D.’s debate with Freud. Feminist Studies 7 (3): 417–430.
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9 Enduring Epiphany: The Politics of Revelation in Contemporary Poetry
Nikki SkillmanIndiana University Bloomington
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
Since its publication in 1961, James Wright’s poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” (Wright 2012, p. 114) has acquired the dubious distinction of paradigmatic status as an epiphany poem. “The ‘deep image’ epiphany at the side of the road,” writes Michael Davidson, “the apotheosis of horse turds into epiphenomenal vapor…these are attempts to represent the casual as special, to escape contingency through better advertising. Instead of returning us to everyday life, such images strive for continuities outside of time” (Davidson 1991, p. 344, italics Davidson’s). Davidson’s misgivings about “Lying in a Hammock”—his mistrust of the poem’s aura of metaphysical “apotheosis,” his embarrassment at its gestures toward “escape” from time and responsibility, and his intuition that the experience the poem describes is false “advertising,” a contrivance presented in bad faith—exemplify ubiquitous objections to the epiphanic mode in American poetry over the last forty years. It turns out that Wright’s revelation amid the blazing horse turds marks a watershed moment in the history of American poetry, a point at which secular revelation was wrested out of the realm of world-ordering modernist grandeur and domesticated, inspiring a “seemingly endless round of epiphanies” (Perloff 1981, p. 252) by the early eighties and, even more influentially, a backlash that helped define the course of late twentieth-century experimental poetry. Recalling the coalescence of language poetry into a poetic movement in the early 1970s, Charles Bernstein identifies the disingenuous, tediously formulaic poetics of epiphany as the point of origin for the movement’s critique of the unified expressive subject: “We shared a very strong dislike of the Official Verse Culture of that time,” he writes, “which seemed to favor poems so crippled by their formulas for personal epiphany that personal epiphany was shed at the starting line in favor of a highly mannered voicey voice ‘indicating’…rather than expressing the poet’s feelings, the so-called feelings of the so-called poet’” (Bernstein and Freschi 2005). In a retrospective introduction Lyn