10th June 2024
Sneha Chowdhury, Brown University
Forms of Late Modernist Lyric, ed. by Edward Allen, Liverpool University Press, 2021.
Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is a multifaceted survey of poems that appear on the cusp of modernism and postmodernism and chart, in editor Edward Allen’s words, their own ‘third way’ (3). Although ‘late’ in the title is a temporal marker suggesting their subsequent place in a chronological order, the poets and poems discussed in the collection tend to ‘move sideways’ and frustrate the dictates of dating (4). ‘Late’ in this instance, is a productive metaphor for reviving the dated in the new. The diverse forms engaged in the book offset the critical tendency to focus on the post-Romantic lyric as a monolithic genre that turns poems, as Allen notes in citing Virginia Jackson, into ‘individual or communal ideals’ (9). One instance of an idealised lyric form is the short poem, a definition Allen derives from a school poetry guidebook titled Moon on the Tides: The AQA GCSE Poetry Anthology edited by David Wheeler. Such ideals limit the broad historical scope of the lyric and eclipse forms which deviate from them in different ways. The present collection recovers these deviant forms ‘resistant to textbook description’ to unlock their lyric potentialities in late modernism and challenges any stable concept of the lyric (4).
In his well-known speech delivered in 1960 upon receiving the Georg Büchner prize, German poet Paul Celan, while describing the tense relationship between art and poetry, notes that poetry treads the path of art only to set itself free.[1] The late-modern incarnates in the present collection claim a similar freedom from their older forms. Allen’s term for these poetic freedoms, borrowed from Caroline Levine, is ‘affordances’: ‘Levine expects the principle of “affordances” to help us grasp the ways in which “forms can be at once containing, plural, overlapping, portable and situated”’ he notes (11). In other words, the poetic forms in the book have more ‘give’. The book’s literary timeframe, ‘late modernism,’ also enjoys a similar flexibility as it neither fully gives in to the ‘new’ in Ezra Pound’s slogan to ‘make it new’, nor does it adopt postmodernism’s suspicion of metanarratives. Against the negative view of the term ‘postmodern’,[2] Allen favours period markers so long as they foster a spirit of questioning, with the hope that the question mark can instil a sense of intellectual curiosity in the reader.[3]
A similar interrogative spirit undergirds the themes of the essays in the collection, which do not take lyric studies for granted but open them up to unexpected cultural and theoretical frameworks. Drew Milne’s essay in chapter five, ‘Interpellation: Addressing Ideology in Claudia Rankine’s American Lyric’, for instance, strongly exemplifies the ‘shape-shifting nature of lyric’ (12). The chapter sheds critical light not on lyric poetry, but on the ‘lyric book’ in Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). Comprising different forms, Rankine’s lyric book ‘works with prose poems, dramatized situations, and intermedial conjunctions that mediate the experience of other media, such as visual art, photographs, video installations, and television.’ (108). Therefore, Citizen’s form, its length and multimedia content, does not constrain Milne’s lyric reading but provokes him to revise his preconceived notions about the lyric genre according to Rankine’s unparalleled creative approach. The paratactic structure of the book formed by distinct paragraphs is meant to represent the ‘discrete micro-aggressions’ faced by racial minorities in America (108). In Citizen, Rankine recreates situations of racial discrimination or micro-aggressions in the home, the classroom, and the supermarket, as well as on the tennis court against Serena Williams, on the football field against Zinedine Zidane, and a variety of other social spaces. These situations are then addressed to an indeterminate ‘you’. One such instance occurs when ‘You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.’ (Citizen 10, emphasis mine).[4] The ‘You’ here could be an intimate addressee or an unknown other, but the general reader is already inscribed in this experience of rampant discrimination. In Milne’s masterful reading, this mode of address is ‘[l]yric interpellation’ where the undifferentiated ‘you’ confounds possibilities of private address and is inadvertently implicated (or interpellated) in racist ideologies (110).[5] When adopted as a mode of poetic address, interpellation confuses easy identification with the speaker, who is not stable either but takes on multiple subject positions in Rankine’s work, rendering the ‘American lyric’, as well as American identity, a contested category.
Chapter four by John Wilkinson titled ‘Elegy: Surreptitious and Prospective, from W. S. Graham to Margaret Ross’, on the other hand, highlights the indirection of lyric interpellation or address for the form of the elegy. On the one hand, the indirection is achieved through the elegy’s intimate address to someone who cannot respond, someone dead, but on the other, the determinate ‘you’ or the ‘pronominal identifications’ can thwart the general reader from identifying with the speaker’s address, rendering the act of address, unsettled and doubtful (80). Due to this indirection, elegiac address is believed to be a placeholder for poetic self-aggrandisement.[6] However, Wilkinson reads W. S. Graham’s ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ as ‘self-effacing’ (88). As an epistolary elegy dedicated to the memory of Graham’s friend and painter Bryan Wynter, the poem, unlike a mere letter, calls attention to its ‘prosodic make-up’ instead of its ‘semantic stresses’ (86). The bare-bones language of the poem, Wilkinson argues, lays bare the ‘line breaks, caesuras, modifications in cadence rather than nests of consonants or stretches of vowels.’ It is a meandering, walking poem with ample pauses in the form of iambs such as ‘Outside’ in ‘Outside your first house’ which gives the impression of ‘starting out’, of reconsidering one’s subjective position in addressing the dead (89). The poem’s prosodic signature lies in keeping alive the tension between the contradictory break and enjambment in ‘I am / You died.’ (88).
The sixth chapter titled ‘Veronica Forrest-Thomson and the Artifice of Resuscitation,’, by Gareth Farmer also examines this unsettling of lyric address through the analysis of Forrest-Thomson’s ode to Epicurus and the poet’s craft. According to Farmer, Forrest-Thomson harnesses the key lessons of Epicureanism — to increase pleasure and to decrease pain — to comment on her writing. Farmer succinctly describes the poet’s approach as: ‘Indulging in the pleasures of writing poetry, as in life, one must be exactingly disciplined so as not to cause aesthetic dyspepsia’ (136).
The book begins with Fiona Green’s chapter on the ‘Aubade’, a poem about lovers separating at dawn and ends with Allen’s chapter on the ‘Nocturne’, a poem about sleeplessness at night, and gives the impression of a day’s passing from daybreak to the fall of night as one moves from one chapter to the next or from one form to another, suggesting the historical range or the shifting character of lyric poetry across history, uncovering the uneven terrain of lyric poetry across time against the levelling force of the law of lyric genre. The chapters themselves, at times, due to the unresolved disproportion between the description of poetry and citation of the same, give one occasion to pause repeatedly and look for the poems elsewhere — too many poems are named and described but not quoted. This minor flaw notwithstanding, the sheer diversity of forms reintroduced in this collection restores one’s belief in the openness of a literary field like lyric studies.
Sources
Image Credit: Forms of Late Modernist Lyric cover, 2021, Liverpool University Press.
[1] Paul Celan, ‘The Meridian’, Paul Celan: Collected Prose, Rosmarie Waldrop (tr.) (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986), pp. 37-55.
[2] See Allen, p. 2. Edward Allen is referring to critic John Carey’s negative review of the postmodern content of Randall Stevenson’s The Oxford English Literary History, 1960-2000, Vol. 12: The Last of England? (Oxford University Press, 2004) as ‘awkward’ and deficient.
[3] See Allen, p. 11.
[4] Claudia Rankine, Citizen : an American Lyric (Minneapolis, Minnesota :Graywolf Press, 2014).
[5] Louis Althusser introduced the concept of interpellation in his well-known essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’. In simple terms, Althusser argues that ideologies define our identities, interests and choices and tricks us into thinking that they are outcomes of independent will. Interpellation is when ideologies turn people into subjects of the society.
[6] Best exemplified by John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ dedicated to the memory of his friend Edward King.
The Modernist Review 