Recursive Structures in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Louis Zukofsky 

Jonathan Ivry, Stanford University 

In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter showed how recursive structures lie at the heart of Bach's intricate canons, M. C. Escher's self-engulfing prints, and mathematician Kurt Gödel's radical "Incompleteness Theorem" (1931), which stated that every closed system contains propositions that are not provable within the system itself. For Hofstadter, Gödel's theorem helps explain why a recursive paradox like "This statement is false" can exist within a language system but cannot be satisfactorily comprehended within that system. Understanding such a statement would require moving into a higher "meta"-plane outside the language system. Hofstadter shows how recursive networks and Gödel's metamathematical ways of thinking opened the door to computers and artificial intelligence. 

 My paper explores how recursive structures can help elucidate certain practices in the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Louis Zukofsky. In late Stevens, subjectivity is no longer a unified, metaphysical "self," but rather is re-conceptualized as caught inside paradoxical "strange loops." "Self" is now the by-product of a mechanistic structure in which an imagining mind imagines itself imagining itself ad infinitum. Stevens's "supreme fiction" becomes his term for an unreachable, idealized "meta"-poetics, in which the "recursive self" might be replaced by an articulation of self-presence: "I have not but I am and as I am, I am." 

 Louis Zukofsky expresses his ideal state of poetry in terms adopted from calculus; poetics is a definite integral with lower limit speech and upper limit music.  

Zukofsky recognizes that not only is subjectivity caught up in mechanistic recursive loops, but that language is similarly trapped in circles of referentiality. The ideal poetics can transcend these "strange loops" only by aspiring to a condition of music, in which self and language are no longer referential and expressive but rather performative and self-identical.  

KEYWORDS: Poetry, Recursion, Hofstadter