Notes on Lyric Poetry; Or, at the Muse's Tomb

Abstract

Translating language of things into that of humans entails not only translating silence into audibility; it means translating nameless into name. - Walter Benjamin One of my close friends, also a worker in mine fields of poetic, says to me the lyric is dead. I cannot but agree, if by lyric we mean that private self-regarding effusion of language, that romantic mea culpa by which a world is nostalgically recalled, privileged and measured against what is. Likewise, I would emphatically add, poetry is dead or at least dying out of a swoon of novelty if it subscribes too closely to those collocations of contemporary thought we call theory or cultural studies, studies which invoke other nostalgias for certainty, for rightness, for order. Another way of putting this might be: lyric is dead primarily as it reinforces a masked ideology, including about myth of personal. But, as well, typical critique that lyric is subjective ought to be juxtaposed against sub-rosa reality, more difficult to enunciate in face of avant-garde tribalism (do we know of anything more tribal, more nationalistic than poetic clique?), which reminds us that poetic bandwagons are never merely matters of aesthetics, indeed, may involve many more subjective dimensions than we'd care to explicate. What can be stated concerning theory- or philosophically driven work is that it is clearly a product of statism and would-be statism, what Deleuze and Guattari point out in Towards a Minor Literature as those styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, [which] have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, [an] official language. On grounds Deleuze and Guattari are making, lyric as judged by a post-modem mentality, can never be sufficiently political; it is not doing a man's job, lifting weight off masses, creating utopias, etc. But a case can be made that, in this century, this is precisely lyric's strength, that strictly speaking, lyric is neither a product of thought nor of intention but rather comes as a recognition of a gap or rupture in one's thought and intention. (My use of impersonal singular pronoun is meant to suggest that lyric qua lyric has no hope of ever becoming a kind of group-think.) Casting lyric against other poetic forms, one finds something that is more than merely interesting. The narrative mode, rhetorical mode and gnomic mode, even purely private or expressive mode of lyric (with its hidden ideological baggage) as well, have a kind of self-sufficiency. The reader participates by wandering around entities created by such forms. Indeed, a form is erected that in some way does not depend on a reader - as in case of story, a form which, even as it wants hearers, is ultimately enclosed and folded in on itself. Not so much interactive as presentational. The self-containment of such forms, polished-egg quality of either story or poetico-logical structure may already seem anachronistic when set against polyvalent and even fuzzy operations of mind. And old romantic lyric, especially that poetic trace of delicate impressions caught on wing, now strikes reader as orotund and even unsympathetic to contemporary awareness and consciousness. So we must admit that if we are to talk positively of a lyric moment, of a moment for lyric, we must acknowledge that while presenting itself as something gathered out of flux of existence itself, it is no more free of contingent, historical or philosophical than any other form of life or thought. And yet, function of lyric, and by implication poetry's first principle, is that it exceeds or modifies very conditions it arises from. Even in minims of speech or figure, it is always unplanned, unaccountable supplement. …