:The Value of Poetry

Abstract

In light of Falci’s repeated turns to contemporary nonwhite authors to manifest “critical” modes of lyric subjectivity, it seems necessary to somehow move on from midcentury and postwar debates over lyric and language. Poetry is both more and less than an abstract defamiliarization of language through which poets and readers become more conscious of their language and its ideological underpinnings. It remains a huge leap from poetry revising language to “muster[ing] our will” and generating new “forms of attention” to face climate change (178–79). Falci’s luxurious phenomenological accounts tell a different story about contemporary poetry and its grappling with civilizational crisis. His readings recognize poems’ diverse needs; they prove the complexity and at times futility of reading “form,” which sometimes merits mimetic accounts, and at other times becomes a sign of modernism’s “metrical self-reflexivity” or even, in the work of Denise Riley, the “scourge” of “formal penance” (128). The same complexity attends genre. Caroline Bergvall’s programmatic collection of Dante translations in Via (2005) may register a “pathological form of lyric speaking,” yet it only appears as such because of our own tendency toward “bad lyric reading” (148). Perhaps Bergvall anticipates and allegorizes our critical projection of lyric voice. Yet whether the work is then a critical lyric or just the critic’s lyric, its real value stems from Falci’s patient exploration of the feeling of not-quite-reading, not-quite attending, while remaining fascinated.