Labor and the Lyric: The Politics of Self-Expression in Contemporary American Poetry

This project is about the persistence of lyric in the last half century, a persistence that I have come to think of as striking for several reasons: first, because it has taken place despite periodic and important attacks on the lyric; second, because as it has increasingly come to seem to me, those attacks have themselves functioned as part of the apparatus that keeps lyric going; and third (the last thing I came to realize but probably the most obvious), because what’s at stake in lyric’s persistence is something like the political economy of the poem in our time. And I should also say—to give some content, even if only anecdotal, to the juxtaposition of grand abstractions like “political economy” and “function of poetry in our time”—that this project has been conceived and is being written in a time when the conditions under which academic work is performed are being radically transformed. By which I mean that, at institutions like my own (the University of Illinois at Chicago), professors in the humanities are asked to perform increasingly like a cross between business managers and clerks rather than literary critics and historians. And it has increasingly seemed important to me that the conditions under which many of us now write should also be a part of what we write about.

By the lyric, I mean the most generalized idea of the genre as it has been passed down from edition to edition of our literary handbooks and as it has been taken to account most recently in the work of Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins in their call for a “new lyric studies.” That is, what persists is an idea of the lyric as a mode of self-expression, and we see it from Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” to T. S. Eliot’s “impersonality of the poem” (a modernist response to the personality of the romantic poem); from the rise of the confessional mode at mid twentieth century (a response to modernism’s commitment to the impersonal) to the avant-garde Language poets’ repudiation of epiphanic lyric and expressive voice in the 1970s and 1980s; more recently from the “lyric meets language”¹ revival in innovative and so-called hybrid² poetries of the 1990s and early 2000s to more recent eruptions such as the New Sincerity and the veneer of the unedited or artless voice in the first-person poems of Tao Lin, Ish Klein, Tina Brown Celona, or Nate Pritts (to name just a few); and from the highly wrought syntactical bravado of Jennifer Moxley, Timothy Donnelly, and Geoffrey G. O’Brien to the conceptual writing that Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin have declared Against Expression (2011).

Critics like Jackson and Prins have thus effectively joined with their antilyric counterparts among poets in lamenting not just the omnipresence of lyric but the collaboration of scholars in what Jackson and Prins understand as the de-historicizing and de-socializing process of reading everything as if it were a lyric (and thus turning everything into lyric). ³ The mistake, as Prins puts it, is that “[o]nce we decide that most poems are lyrics (or once that decision is made for us), we ... lose sight of the historical process of lyric reading” in which “the reading of lyric produces a theory of the lyric that then produces a reading of the lyric, and that hermeneutic circle rarely opens to dialectical interruption” (qtd. in Jackson 11). The lyric genre that, according to Jackson, is “identified with an expressive theory” is a distorting lens to be sure, but aside from the fact that, contra Jackson and Prins, lyric actually is and has been a continual harbinger of “dialectical interruption” (10) in poetic discourse, it’s a lens that I argue provides an extremely useful distortion. In other words, I mean to perform the kind of lyric reading that Jackson and Prins think is a mistake, and I will be making that mistake repeatedly throughout my book. For it’s precisely in distorting the recent history of American...