The Poetics of Waste : Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith

Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics. The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith examines how waste, in both literal and metaphorical manifestations - detritus, garbage, pollution, ordure - has affected 20th- and 21st- century arts and letters. In chapters devoted to Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Andy Warhol, and Kenneth Goldsmith, I examine how these artists' depictions of waste refract the pressures of consumer capitalism, with its conflicting emphases on efficiency and disposability. While Waste Matters broaches economic and ecological concerns, it does so largely through the lens of poetic theory and gender-and-sexuality studies. In the 20th-century, queerness has often been figured as unregenerative, as an index of 'spoiled identity'; thus, the queer artist's engagement with waste may be especially identificatory and profound. Finally, because poetic writing is situated athwart typical channels of currency and exchange, the genre offers an opportunity for the queer writer to recuperate waste - to make waste matter "In this remarkable, illuminating study, Schmidt explores the 'mysterious charisma of waste, ' the magnetic pull it exerts on a vital strain of modernist and contemporary poetry ... Schmidt's brilliant, incisive argument gives us valuable tools for understanding key features of avant-garde poetics - such as fragmentation, collage, excess - in a fascinating new light: as complex, subversive methods of 'waste management.' A timely, provocative, and important book."--Andrew Epstein, Associate Professor of English, Florida State University, USA, and author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry "Waste matters.' Say what? In this revelatory and often funny study, Schmidt identifies, analyses and celebrates the dreck polluting modernist and postmodernist poetry ... We'll never think about poetry - or garbage - in quite the same way again.' - Daniel Kane, Reader in English and American Literature, University of Sussex, UK "Through brilliant uses of Queer Theory, Taylorism and its dietary subset Fletcherism, and much else of theoretical/historical interest, Christopher Schmidt's The Poetics of Waste forges powerful new connections and traces salient divergences among Stein's erotic poetry, Ashbery's undervalued 'scrapbook, ' Schuyler's 'camp waste management' and writing by two tantalizingly different Conceptualists. Figuring waste as oppositional resource, queer fertility, Schmidt demonstrates the remarkable volatility of categories like efficiency and excess, reduction and proliferation."--Thomas Fink, LaGuardia Community College, USA and author of 'A Different Sense of Power': Problems of Community in Late Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry Since the modernist period, waste has functioned as a potent symbol of cultural decline and environmental damage, in artworks ranging from T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' to Pixar's Wall-E. In The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith, Christopher Schmidt argues that before we demonize excess out of hand, we ought to attend to the many possibilities for artistic innovation and literary experiment that detritus, garbage, and excrement have afforded artists and writers throughout the twentieth century. Schmidt looks at modernist and postmodernist writers who resist such biases, developing poetries that are formally excessive and preoccupied with waste's transgressive aspects. This lineage stretches from the counter-modernism of Gertrude Stein to the New York School poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler, who grapple with and resist ideologies of Taylorist efficiency, cold war 'containment, ' and phobias associating queer bodies with mass cultural waste. The book ends with a consideration of more recent conceptual poetries and asks the question, do these twenty-first century writers reanimate modernist prejudices against gender politics and queer sentimentality? -- Provided by Publisher Front Matter....Pages i-xv Introduction: The Poetics of Waste Management....Pages 1-25 Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein....Pages 27-56 The Queer Nature of Waste in John Ashbery’s The Vermont Notebook....Pages 57-90 “Baby, I Am the Garbage”: Camp Recuperation in James Schuyler....Pages 91-122 Kenneth Goldsmith’s Queer Appropriations....Pages 123-156 Afterword Poetry, Waste, and the Body Politic....Pages 157-166 Back Matter....Pages 167-224