Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres by Jahan Ramazani

Abstract

Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres by Jahan Ramazani University of Chicago Press, 2013. 304 pages What is poetry? begins Jahan Ramazani's new book. Maybe it is a sign of the times that we have to ask this question, though when you look at the ineluctable messiness of the existing answers, it's clear that we've never had a functional definition (5). Poetry and Its Others, Ramazani's fifth book, explores the borderlands between poetry and other genres to see where, and how, poetry defines itself. In each of his books since the first, Yeats and the Poetry of Death (1990), Ramazani has gradually expanded his range of genres and authors. The Poetry of Mourning (1994) examined how twentieth-century poems about death both use and subvert elegiac conventions, and has become essential reading for anyone interested in elegy. While putting together a new Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) that included Anglophone writing from around the globe, Ramazani wrote The Hybrid Muse (2001), the first book on postcolonial poetry of the Third World. His subsequent work has been marked by a unique combination of expertise in poetic genre--arguably the most fundamental area of poetics--and extensive knowledge of non-Western Anglophone poetry. His prize-winning Transnational Poetics (2009) departed from the author-based analysis of his previous books to ask fundamental questions about how we conceive of twentieth-century poetry: what is about it, and how does it cross and transcend national--and hemispheric--borders? This book showed how (seemingly) effortlessly Anglo-American modernists could be brought into conversation with postmodern and postcolonial poets from around the world. Now, in Poetry and Its Others, Ramazani continues this global conversation while investigating the big question of poetry's identity. Ramazani may have traveled a long way from his first book, but his early study of Yeats left its mark on the way he thinks: delighting in oppositions, he dissolves them before our eyes. Some of the oppositions he has successfully made to vanish--even if they crop up again elsewhere--include modernism and postmodernism, West and East, the local and the global, the national and the transnational. These critical binaries fall away under the combined pressure of his patient examination and his passion for the art of poetry, an ancient river replenished by fresh streams flowing from around the world. At first, Poetry and Its Others seems to follow a similar pattern of dissolving oppositions. It takes but a few pages for Ramazani to dismantle--hopefully forever--the Bakhtinian view of lyric poetry as monologic by drawing our attention to poetry's constant intercourse with its others: Poems come into being partly by echoing, playing on, reshaping, refining, heightening, deforming, inverting, combating, hybridizing, and compressing extrapoetic forms of language (6). For all his wrong-headedness about the lyric, Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic relations between genres fits poetry's give-and-take with nonpoetry. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been especially fertile ground for poetic dialogism, Ramazani writes, citing the modernist propensity for borrowing from other art forms and postmodernist experiments that draw on an even wider range of media, from historical documents and photographs to scientific discourse, movies, and the internet. By page twelve, the answer to the question What is poetry? seems like it must be anything at all. That would not be a very satisfactory answer, because it would leave us with little to talk about. But poetry's distinctiveness is not so easily dissolved. Though Ramazani began writing the book as a consideration of poetry's dispersal into its others (14), he admits that his argument did not play out as he expected. He found to his surprise that poems hold their own in intergeneric dialogue, pushing back to reassert themselves as poems, often at the very moment of seeming to fuse with their others. …