"Post-Language Lyric": The Example of Juliana Spahr
2010; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 55; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoIn Note introducing her sixty-page Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003 from This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, Juliana Spahr observes that after September 11, 2001, she felt a need to think about what I was connected with, and what I was complicit with, as I lived off fat of military-industrial complex on a small island [in Hawai'i]. I had to think about an intimacy with things I would rather not be intimate with even as (because?) I was very far away from all those things geographically. This feeling made lyric--with its attention to connection, with its dwelling on beloved and on afar--suddenly somewhat poignant, somewhat apt, even somewhat more useful than I usually find it. The unease suggested by Spahr's qualifying somewhats is not surprising given her relation to Language writing and its suspicion of lyric subjectivity, particularly as manifest in recent personal lyric. Spahr, after all, earned her PhD in Poetics Program at SUNY at Buffalo, where she studied with such noted figures associated with Language writing as Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe. She is deeply familiar with documents like 1988 Aesthetic Tendency and Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto, coauthored by Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten, which attacks the personal, 'expressive' lyric [that] has been held up as canonical poetic form and complains that its authorial 'voice' lapses into melodrama in a social allegory where author is precluded from effective action by his or her very emotions. Spahr has expressed gratitude to Language writing for freeing her from just such conventions: As writing showed me that is a tool, it also showed me that poetry need not be merely about intimacy or personality, she writes in After-Language. Noting especially crucial role women writers have had in Language writing, she adds, language writing's self-aware roots in modernism and, to use Hejinian's word, 'inquiry,' rather than confessionalism, felt to me to be a way out of sad poetess model. However, Spahr, like others of post-language generation, has not been bound to practices of her Language mentors; her relationship to lyric, while still fraught, has come to be less antagonistic. In her prose memoir The Transformation (2007), Spahr amusingly recalls youthful thinking of her cohort in Buffalo Poetics Program: A that was radical was a work. At time it was difficult to describe what being radical meant. It meant more a feeling, a hard-to-read reeling. Eventually they would define what they had meant by radical as writing that used modernist techniques of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on. A that was radical used more modernist techniques than other works. Wry mockery here indicates that her subsequent understandings of what constitutes a good work have departed from Language orthodoxy, and her Poem Written from November 30, 2002 ... suggests that an openness to resources of lyric, has, despite those somewhats, become crucial to her poetics. The lyric she looks to, however, is not postconfessional lyric that Language poets derided. Instead, she looks back to earlier approaches to lyric, and in this particular poem (which demonstrates debts to Gertrude Stein and alludes to multiple earlier lyrics, including Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach and W.H. Auden's elegy for W.B. Yeats) relies especially on Sappho and Ezra Pound to help her convey value of lyric for our time. Robert von Hallberg's recent book Lyric Powers (2008) distills from across centuries aspects of lyric practice that account for lyric's authority; consequently, his suggests some reasons why post-Language poets might be reluctant to relinquish genre's resources. …
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