Politics and the Personal Lyric in the Poetry of Joy Harjo and CD. Wright

Abstract

What those of us whose lives are permeated by a sense of unremitting political emergency, and who are at the same time writers of poetry, most desire in our work, I think, is to attain to such osmosis of the personal and the public, of assertion and of song, that no one would be able to divide our poems into categories. The didactic would be lyrical, the lyrical would be didactic. That is, at any rate, my own probably unattainable goal. (128) Denise Levertov On the Edge of Darkness The private lyric poem continues to hold a central place in our thinking about contemporary American poetry. Commentators who mention the genre often recognize its persistence as well as its inadequacy. In a 1982 review, for example, Katha Pollit provides a scathing description of this sort of poem that I think depicts accurately, if parodically, what is perhaps still the dominant poetic form found in many of our literary magazines, public readings, and creative writing classrooms: A free verse elegy on the isolation of the self, set on a campus in the Middle West and decorated with references to snow, light, angels and the poet's nostalgia for his [or her] childhood. Ours is a poetry, in other words, of wistful longings, of failed connections, of inevitable personal loss, expressed in a set of poetic strategies that suit such themes a lax syntax and simplified vocabulary that disclaim intellectual pretension, and ethereal numinous images that testify to the poet's sensibility. (qtd. in Doubiago 35) If there is a role for the reader in what become the conventional personal poem, it is to observe the poet's private experience, as a kind of voyeur. At the same time as much literary commentary centered on the private poem (even as many find fault with it), academic criticism turned increasingly historicist, often examining literature as a text made up of various politically charged cultural discourses, an orientation that risks reducing poetry to a conscious or unconscious statement about power relations. Marjorie Perloff remarks that she stirred up contention in her refusal to abide by either of what she suggests are the two preeminent stances in current discussions of poetry and poetic theory. Perloff tells us that the first perspective, which assumes that poetry has an essential nature that is timeless and universal, evaluates poets according to their 'sensitivity' and 'craftsmanship,' the appeal of their subject matter and emotional range (Introduction 2). The second view assumes that poetic discourse (like the other discourses of a given culture and moment) is defined largely by what the dominant classes take it to be, that indeed there is no such thing as inherent poetic value, the production of poetry always being culture specific and ideologically determined. As such, our role as critics is, in the first place, to characterize the dominant discourse and then to read against it that writing it excluded or marginalized, thus redefining the canon so as to give pride of place to the hitherto repressed. (2) As a poet and critic, I have found many of the insights of the new historicisms to be compelling. These approaches clearly offer possibilities for much richer interpretations of literary works than Perloff's remarks, simplified for her own rhetorical purpose, imply. Still, I am wary of criticism that seems to overlook the specificity of poetic forms in seeking to determine implied positions on predetermined ideological conflicts. In identifying a tendency toward oversimplification in some academic criticism of poetry, I do not mean to reassert some sort of mythical purity of the poetic text. Rather, I am interested in the ways innovations in poetic form can heighten and even change poets's and readers's consciousness of the language and other symbols that frame public life. …