In AnOther's Pocket: The Address of the "Pocket Epic" in Postmodern Black British Poetry

Abstract

As visions of a "global culture" assume the place that modernist visions of a "universal" culture vacated during the advent of postmodernism, a new sort of epic imagination has sprung back into being in the realm of poetry that I wish to discuss in this essay: the avant-garde which, whether called "Language poetry" in America or "experimental poetry" in the U.K., engages with poststructuralist ideas concerning language and the crisis of the lyric subject. 1 In one sense, everything about such work is "epic," and every such poem a "pocket epic." The located or peculiar "self" disavowed by contemporary theory vanishes into a discursive (dis)continuum that is perceived to control a region, or a nation, or a nation with "universal" aspirations, depending on the range of reference that the (ghost)writer commands. The space of such writing enlarges as its dislocated, disowned linguistic materials make their Barthesian slip back into history, implicating us all--"mon semblable, mon frère." The contemporary avant-garde epic might be said to be epic in photo-negative, epic that historicizes the dehistoricization, if you will, of western cultural discourse, replicating in photo-negative as it does other universalizing tales told by similar transcendental egos like Ezra Pound's in the Cantos or other remakers of epic who take classical works up in medias res. The crisis of the self, as black cultural studies has suggested, is a Euro-American crisis based on European identificatory models; even the deconstruction or erasure of the face constructed on such models requires the running of one's hands over it, "one" remaining, always, and even in inverted form, the "figure" inherited from national/cultural models of selfhood. What is the "place" or "face" of the epic or pocket-epic black writer in the U.K. who, unlike Derek Walcott, refuses to graft her/his features comfortably onto the epic imagination of the Greeks or its postmodern equivalents?