American Lyric Research Articles

Small Change

Abstract In recent debates about reading methods, in the field of microsociology, and in the history of the novel, small-scale observations of everyday life tend to be understood as conservative, reinforcing the status quo. Through a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) in relation to documentary lyric and the online genre of microaggressions, this essay argues for the political utility of description at the micro scale.

Place, Space, and Time in MC Solaar’s American Francophone

Place, Space, and Time in MC Solaar’s American Francophone

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: The Trans-Corporeal Ethics of Claudia Rankine's Investigative Poetics

For a majority of Americans, the events of 9/11, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the continuing conflicts in the Middle East were and are experienced via cable news networks, viral videos, and print/online news articles. These events are not experienced as material reality but rather as abstract intangibles constructed through words and images. Such media representations present violence, suffering, and other catastrophic events as singular incidents frozen in time and disconnected from the myriad of complex relations that contribute to the ongoing flux of existence. Furthermore, the bombardment of information via television, radio, the Internet, and social media outlets—not to mention the quick ease with which we switch from one to the other—may not allow ample time to analyze and discern what might exist beyond the camera’s frame; even the most raw and uncensored forms of journalism often do not communicate the complex relationships shaping particular political and cultural figurations. Most devastatingly, the intangible nature of mass media often suppresses both the material facticity of the human body and material interchanges between bodies. As Joan Retallack expresses in The Poethical Wager (2003), mass culture (as promoted by mass media) strives for simplistic, naive, and fantastical representations of reality, as opposed to “imaginative engagement with [realistic] material complexity” (26). For Retallack, innovative writing is one way “to stay warm and active and realistically messy” while disrupting the “shiny freeze-frames” (5) of mass culture. In her fourth book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), poet Claudia Rankine “stays messy” by exploding the boundaries of the lyric genre in order to disrupt the facile political frameworks promoted by mass media. Using investigative techniques, Rankine responds to the culture of information by writing poetry that engages the complexity of existence while emphasizing material interconnectedness and embodiment. Part documentary, part imagination, investigative poetry incorporates a variety of data and reportage into the poem—including testimonials, interviews,

Review: Emily Dickinson and Philosophy

Book Review| September 01 2014 Review: Emily Dickinson and Philosophy Jed Deppman, Marianne Noble, and Gary Lee Stonum, eds., Emily Dickinson and Philosophy. : Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. vi + 270. $99. Ryan Cull Ryan Cull 1New Mexico State University Ryan Cull is an Associate Professor of English at New Mexico State University. His work on Emily Dickinson has been featured in Nineteenth-Century Literature and The Emily Dickinson Journal. He has an essay on Walt Whitman forthcoming in Criticism and is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Unlimited Eligibility: Radical Democracy and the American Lyric.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2014) 69 (2): 280–283. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2014.69.2.280 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ryan Cull; Review: Emily Dickinson and Philosophy. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 September 2014; 69 (2): 280–283. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2014.69.2.280 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bundling the Day and Unraveling the Night

Bundling the Day and Unraveling the Night Margaret Noodin (bio) To mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Society of American Indians, a group of friends and scholars traveled from The Ohio State University to a golf course in nearby Newark. There, among the tended greens, they climbed to the center of Observatory Mound and gazed across the Octagon Earthworks built by the Hopewell people between 100 bc and 400 ad. What can be known when gathering in a place centuries old? How have the shadows shifted? What traces left by others are real and what traces of today can be left in places where the layers of time are so visible? We knew these mounds, like the ancestors of those gathered, were Indigenous, crafted by people who planted, sowed, traded, and traveled near the waterways of the Great Lakes. People who fashioned small figurines and built vast geometrically perfect shapes centered on the arc of the lunar cycle. They wore large earrings, mined copper, gathered meteors, and buried their dead carefully, with precision, in mounds of earth. The stories they carved in stone included bears and severed heads. It is difficult to know much more for certain. We also knew that our more immediate predecessors came from many Native nations and were not yet citizens of the United States. Yet, when they gathered on the mound they sang the song Martin Luther King wove into his Dream speech, the song sung at both of Barack Obama’s inaugural celebrations, a song many forget is based on the British national anthem . . . “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” It is easy to understand the force with which they must have sung, “My native country, thee . . . I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills.” But the poignant irony of this particular group singing “Land where my fathers died . . . Land of the pilgrims’ pride” provokes a sort of melancholy that [End Page 237] postcolonial theorists might today connect to historical trauma. The first American lyrics were proudly written in 1831, shortly after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act setting in motion decades of removal, including the infamous Trail of Tears. Standing on the mounds in 2011, we knew the impact of the Reorganization Act, the cataclysmic ripple of the American Indian Movement, the importance of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the ongoing struggles to uphold the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. These laws came together here, these longitudes of practice and latitudes of purpose. Standing in a place that connected minds on earth with celestial time, I finally understood the theory of relativity. Space and time are related. Light and sound have speed. And perhaps the best way to stop time or cross time or step out of time altogether is to make sound. Not one of us moved one archeological spoon of earth, but we offered instead waves of sound across the day. We came to this ancient place and traded feelings with the unknown. Like those who came before us, we sang of the nations we wished most to represent. Many of us, already citizens of beautiful America, sang of our sovereign nations. Like those before us we stood in a space marked by the past and sang into the future. Jane Hafen sang a Hopi harvest song of gratitude she learned from her brother, John Rainer Jr. Alice Te Punga Somerville sang a Maori song from the other side of the world. LeAnne Howe sang a warrior’s song and pointed out that Choctaws were mound builders in the not too distant past. “I sing it quite a bit,” she said, “especially when I need strength to fight off something. I didn’t like the feeling of the invasion I had there: The men at work blowing away leaves, the grounds keepers’ keeping an eye on us, the rude men driving their golf carts over the mounds . . . just because they could.” Monique Mojica said hers was not a “traditional” cultural song but one she created for her play Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way. She explained, “I chose it over other prayer songs I could have offered because in the...

Landscapes of Iraqi Poetry: Reconfiguring the Image of Iraq in the Arabic (and American) Lyric Canon

Abstract This article explores the construction of Iraq as lyric object in the poetry of Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Maḥmūd Darwīsh, Saʿdī Yūsuf, and Sinān Anṭūn. I argue that there is a clear sense of ambivalence for these poets over how to represent Iraq; the country emerges in their verse as both an unmarred idyll and as a landscape of wretchedness and despair. In putting these Arabic works in dialogue with the anti-war poems of the American writer Brian Turner, I suggest the ways in which comparative analysis between these two canons can help us move beyond nostalgic representations of Iraq and the U.S. as civilizational others, and push us toward more constructive forms of cross-cultural exchange.

Narcissus in the desert: a new cartography for the American lyric

Narcissus in the desert: a new cartography for the American lyric

Narcissus in the desert: a new cartography for the American lyric

‘Poetry was all written before time was,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1844 in his essay ‘The Poet’. ‘Whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music’, he went on to write, ‘we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem’ (Emerson 1960: 224). As a poet, Emerson knows that he ‘miswrites’, for ‘it is not metres [on which he excelled], but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem’ (225). The poet that Emerson describes in his essay is not yet there in ‘America’. But, Emerson concludes on a hopeful note, ‘America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres’ (238). For a moment, in 1855, Emerson hailed the American poet in Walt Whitman, who, Emerson believed, heard America singing. As Leaves of Grass evolved in subsequent years, however, Emerson was no longer so sure. Beginn...

Last Words

Last Words Diana Fuss Suppose "you are on your deathbed," the poet C. Day-Lewis ponders in a poem entitled "Last Words"; "with what definitive sentence will you sum / And end your being?" Betting that the premature deathbed speech is "just the game for a man of words," Day-Lewis's question stands as a provocation, both to himself and to other poets, who find themselves attracted by the idea of authoring a death, even and especially their own.1 But can any life be summarized and ended in a single definitive sentence? And if not, why are poets repeatedly drawn to the precise moment beyond which language is no longer possible? Pushing voice to its farthest limit, what exactly do poets hope to learn by imagining, and reimagining, the dying hour? What follows are my first thoughts on last words, inspired by more than two centuries of British and American lyrics that take as their central subject the dying words or speeches of the unhappily condemned, mortally ill, or piously prepared. Last word poems can be found in ballads and sonnets, parlor poetry and political poetry, dramatic monologues and poetic dialogues, and elegies and epitaphs. As a group they transcend the formal properties of any one poetic type, sharing instead a single thematic preoccupation: the challenge of dying a linguistically meaningful death. Last words are, at base, a specifically literary problem. Whether written or oral, the question remains the same: what words are the right words for one's final conscious moments? Poetry of course is not the only genre fascinated by the drama of the deathbed and the power of last words. Early-nineteenth-century Evangelical revivals produced a host of religious tracts, mourning manuals, published sermons, popular magazines, and fictional works, all of which idealized the power of dying words to ensure a good death and an even happier afterlife. Deathbed scenes in the nineteenth-century novel invariably incorporate what historian Pat Jalland identifies as the central distinguishing features of an Evangelical good death: a slow, painful, but fully conscious demise, borne with great fortitude and equanimity by the dying, who, in their final hour, dispense farewells and blessings to attentive family and friends.2 In a good death, the [End Page 877] dying offer proof of salvation through words of contrition, confession, conversion, faith, forgiveness, wisdom, or grace. Informed by three centuries of Ars moriendi literature, Victorians in particular valued last words for the spiritual, social, and familial functions they could perform: saving one's soul, settling one's affairs, leaving one's legacy, instructing one's heirs, planning one's funeral, and consoling one's family and friends.3 Yet actual deathbed scenes rarely approximated the idealized version promoted by didactic deathbed literature. Recordings of family deaths, in diaries and letters, suggest that "holy dying" was extremely difficult to achieve in practice, with most private reports of the deathbed recording "bland or banal" last words, if such words are recorded at all.4 Dying words of any kind are, in fact, hard to find in an age when newly discovered narcotics like morphine, chloroform, and ether made speech itself an unlikely event in one's dying days. More than any other literary genre, poetry played an especially central role in Protestant death chambers, at once promoting the ideal of a good death and compensating for its absence.5 At the Victorian deathbed, relatives frequently read aloud poems, hymns, or favorite scriptural passages, made readily available in collections for the sick and suffering. Popular bedside companions compiled for both the dying and their watchers, like Mary Tileston's Sursum Corda or Priscilla Maurice's Prayers for the Sick and Dying, include entire sections of poems "Suitable to be read to Persons in their Last Hours." These books not only arm the sick with edifying lyrics on how to die well, they also provide deathbed attendants with exact instructions on how best to read the poems aloud ("very slowly, distinctly, with intervals; not in a whisper or in a loud voice, but clearly and calmly").6 Because the Evangelical model of a good death required words of uplift, poems were often at the ready to provide meaningful...

Unheard Writing in the Climate of Spectacular Noise: Claudia Rankine on TV

This essay investigates the modes of style and methodology by which Claudia Rankine's 2004 multi-genre text Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric animates concrete intertwinements between headline news and innovative literature; between hyper-capitalist marketing strategies and the incommunicability of physical and psychic suffering; between language's insubstantiality and the ever-intensifying Lyotardian demand for "new idioms" of political/aesthetic expressivity, sounded not only by the contemporary forms of social abjection and destitution thematized in the text—but by the experimental forms of its own presentation. Concentrating heavily on the self-effacing tonalities of the text, this essay traces the philosophic and tropic insistences structuring its implicit critique of the ideological position of critique itself.

The Effects of Web-Based American Music, Lyrics, Definitions, and Explanations on Taiwanese ESL Learners

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the effects of American music, lyrics, vocabulary definitions, and song explanations during online music study on listening comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, and lifestyle literacy in Taiwanese ESL learners. One-hundred-eight ESL learners from 2 large comprehensive universities in Taiwan participated. The results of this study suggest that online music study (as carried out in this particular investigation) does not improve listening comprehension skills in ESL learners. In addition, the results suggest that simply listening to online music does not increase vocabulary level in ESL learners. Instead, the addition of written lyrics and hypertext links to definitions of key terms is required to improve vocabulary level significantly. Finally, the results suggest that simply listening to online music does not improve lifestyle literacy in ESL learners. Instead, the addition of written lyrics is required to improve lifestyle literacy significantly.

Outsourcing "The Raven": Retroactive Origins

In 1885 Influential Poe Biographer And Critic John Henry Ingram proclaimed"The Raven" "the most popular lyric poem in the world": It has appeared in all shapes and styles, from the little penny Glasgow edition to the magnificent folios of Mallarmé in Paris and Stedman in New York. The journals of America and Europe are never weary of quoting it . . . and no collection of modern poetry would be deemed complete without it. It has been translated and commented upon by the leading literati of two continents, and an entire literature has been founded upon it.1 Promoting the poem's transatlantic renown from his vantage point in England, Ingram dedicates his edition of "The Raven," which includes the "cream" of that literature, as well as literary and historical commentary, to STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ, Paris EDUARD ENGEL, Berlin, AND EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN, New York, Translator of and Commentators on "The Raven" By the turn of the nineteenth century, "The Raven" had been translated into German, French, Hungarian, Latin, Dutch, and Portuguese (by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis). What was true then is perhaps more true today; "The Raven" is quite likely the most popular American lyric poem in the world. Any Google search will show that translations, versions, and renditions continue to proliferate. Many of us are familiar with the Simpson episode in which the raven sports Bart's head, or Lou Reed's recent CD that bears the title of Poe's poem.2 This essay inquires into the reason for the extreme popularity of [End Page 205] "The Raven." Without too much help from academics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, "The Raven" continues to flourish in the mass media and among artists and ordinary people alike. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, according to Ingram, "an American journalist in want of a subject to eke out the scanty interest of his columns appears to revert to Poe and his works as natural prey: he has only to devise a paragraph—the more absurd and palpably false the better for his Purpose—about how 'The Raven' was written, or by whom it was written other than Poe, to draw attention to his paper and to get his fabrication copied into the journals of every town in the United States" (p. 84). Though Ingram claims that "one outcome of the immense popularity in its native country of 'The Raven' is the wonderful and continuous series of fabrications to which it has given rise," I will argue the reverse: that the poem's ability to engender fabrications results in its immense popularity (p. 84). The seeds of these fabrications —accusations of plagiarism, stories of collaboration, eyewitness accounts of the poem's creation, posthumous versions delivered by spirit mediums, hoax prototype poems, parodies, and translations—are cultivated within the poem itself. Paradoxically, they are related to the idea that the lyric poem originates deep within an individual psychology. In its diction, sonic properties, dramatic staging, and narrative form, "The Raven" stages questions about whether lyric poetry emerges from within or without the poet's mind. I will claim that the poem's ability to encourage readers to search for its origins results in its immense popularity. This essay will examine the relation of the poem's formal properties to the rumors and theories of origin surrounding it—including the theory that Poe himself advances in "The Philosophy of Composition" and the theories of his academic critics—that proliferate after its publication. I want to suggest that "The Raven" cultivates modes of interpretation that connect the poem to multiple locations of cultural significance via readers' quests for the poem's origins. Unlike Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which predicts its own dissemination among the people as an American Bible, "The Raven" instructs its readers to look backwards, towards the moment of the poem's inception, as a means of writing its own reception. By encouraging readers to cultivate fantasies of origin, the poem installs itself as a...

The Impossible Utterance: Imagining Ineffability in the Spanish American Lyric

The ineffable is a mode tied closely to metafiction, metapoetry and metacriticism; the subject of the contemporary Spanish American poem?implicitly or explicitly?is the poet's contention with the sayable and the unsayable, often taking the form of a metaphoric negotiation through the limits of language, the incommensurability of speech and experience, and ultimately, the poetics of the inarticulate: language dismemberment and silence, the latter of which borrows from Oriental (read anti-rhetorical) rhetoric, both in form and content. The Spanish-American tradition offers a full taxonomy of strategies of saying the unutterable, and demonstrates ineffability's other stricture: not what cannot be said, but what may not. As a result the poetic voice takes one of two basic stances toward language: martyrdom or nostalgia. Underlying either world-view is an important, modern assumption: that the world is a broken book.

The Course of a Particular: On the Ethics of Literary Singularity

In Wallace Stevens's poem Course of a Particular, cry of wintry leaves provokes a shift in mood from robust assurance that is part of everything to a depleted sense of world drained of meaning: The leaves cry. In absence of fantasia, without meaning more Than they are in finding of ear, in thing Itself, until, at last, cry no one at (Palm 367) These two dispositions--one expansive and gregarious, other contracting to vanishing point of consciousness--suggest two complementary responses to literature. I will be concerned with latter, which tries to acknowledge uniqueness of a literary work; but it must first be set against fantasia whose absence it announces in order to trace a path of diminishing returns. My purpose is to explore rhetoric of singularity in order to detect its final finding, that is, its and ethical limit. My hope is that artistry and ethics will converge: course of a literary particular leads to ethical discovery. According to Stevens, however, such a discovery concerns no one at all. This hardly sounds like a strong moral position, (1) and defining that position in relation to artistry that exposes it will be my subject. My own path, which runs from numerous to singular, requires some signposts. I intend, first, to mark path's two limits by contrasting a criticism of plenitude with a criticism of austerity; then to inspect some rhetorical devices through which singularity is indicated; then to show how this rhetoric isolates here-and-now in instant of its inception and deception, its birth and death; and finally to examine how an of singularity raises a comparable ethical challenge that sets moral generality against dignity of unique. Stevens will serve as one of my guides. The shipwreck of singular When studying any literary work, we customarily nudge it in two directions, though not in equal measure. Usually we relate it to other texts in an expanding pattern of interdependence within larger contexts and communities. Whether terms of explication are historical, cultural, biographical, national, generic, or religious, a work gains significance within a wider field to which it contributes, however modestly. No artist or artifact has its meaning alone, T. S. Eliot advises in a famous dictum, because it participates in an ideal order, a totality that is temporarily complete yet continually altered as new works are added to it (38). A text is intelligible through its relation to other texts: as one elegy in an elegiac tradition, or as an American lyric, or as a novel by Virginia Woolf, or as an example of women's writing, and so on. At imagined limit of this expansive view lies a glimpse of all literature conceived as one ongoing discourse--a grand intertextual poem, myth, or conversation forever in progress. Northrop Frye provides one of most daring modern attempts to see literature steadily and to see it whole by fitting every work into a vast network of modes, myths, and genres, (2) all combining in a sublime vision of cultural totality corresponding to what Eliot calls the mind of Europe (39). A poem is like a single thought within that mind. As critic's field of vision expands, however, individual works become more and more significant, yet less and less discernible as they are engulfed by whole. Ideal readers catch every allusion and influence, but at cost of losing shock of first discovery. As a countermeasure, they try to savor a literary work not in relation to other writing but in and for itself. It may be another eighteenth-century, middle-class novel written by a Protestant man for women readers, but it is this particular text and not another one, read here and now, not elsewhere. How are we to account for its specificity? Even an ardent advocate of intertextuality like Harold Bloom admits, There can be no poem in itself, and yet something irreducible does abide in aesthetic (Western 23). …

Robert Lowell's Monumental Vision: History, Form, and the Cultural Work of Postwar American Lyric

Robert Lowell's Monumental Vision: History, Form, and the Cultural Work of Postwar American Lyric

The First Hundred Years of the American Lyric Theater

For its first hundred years the American stage was primarily musical, and understanding this fact may help us understand theater in the United States today. An increasing number of studies concerning America's early theater is available. In addition, due to extensive graduate programs, local theater histories covering small areas have begun to appear (over 100 titles show up in Fredric M. Litto's American Dissertations on the Drama and Theater'). The result is that some interesting conclusions about American lyric theater may now be drawn. It is reasonably well known that writers of the eighteenth century created an almost unbelievable assortment of theatrical forms. Ballad opera and its offspring-the pasticcio and comic opera-found ever-larger audiences. Burlettas and farces, especially operatic or musical farces, and interludes and pantomimes (straight pantomimes, and speaking pantomimes, and serious pantomimes, each with distinctive characteristics) and rope dances and ballets and masques and extravaganzas and olios-all these were popular and took their places alongside the pastoral and comedy and tragedy. Add to all these the presentation of plays of the past and the repertory becomes awe-inspiring. If most of the dance forms originated in France, the singspiel in Germany, opera and pasticcio in Italy, and comic opera in England, nonetheless, America as recipient had a musical stage as the basis of her repertory. Those cities along the eastern seaboard where the drama throve in the 1700s saw a repertory in which well over half the works presented were musicals.2 Even straight drama was almost never performed without music. Comedies without songs, dances, and marches were virtually unknown. Tragedies without musical processions were rare. Where plays of the past had neglected to include music, the eighteenth century corrected the oversight by adding songs, choruses, and full musical accompaniment. Thirtytwo songs in The Tempest and thirty-three in A Midsummer Night's Dream were not atypical. Performers were expected, probably as an outgrowth of The Beggar's Opera

Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley, and Plath.

Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley, and Plath.

Six American Lyrics for Contralto or Baritone

Six American Lyrics for Contralto or Baritone