"It is America I can't contain" : poetry and identity in Anne Stevenson's Correspondences

Correspondences has a particularly important place in the work of the Anglo-American poet Anne Stevenson. Subtitled "A Family History in Letters", the text gathers together a variety of documents (not just letters) to tell the history of the Chandler-Boyd family of Vermont from the early nineteenth century through the 1970s. Stevenson sees the poem as an attempt to come to terms with an American identity and an American history. This essay offers a phonosemantic analysis of three passages from Correspondences, and indicates that while rhythmic, phonological, and syntactic order is hinted at, this is always undermined and denied. Thus, American identity is seen as disrupted and disjunctive. Rhythmic, phonological, and syntactic features are reinforced by enjambment, genre polymorphism, lack of textual cohesion, and fragmentariness of documentation.