Short Wave Reception

A response to MPalmer, for a course.

Looking for what is looking: In “Aura, Still” Robert Kaufman says that “modern lyric ambition stands as a, or even the, high-risk enterprise for literary art.” Baudelaire, who was audacious enough to pursue this ambition made “the lyric vocation confront the ostensible destruction of its own historical pre-condition.” What is suggested by this initial conjecture (and by the crucial placement and function of Baudelaire’s practice), is that the lyric poem stands at the edge of a the literary frontier—as a medium, it is always putting its own definition at stake; as an “abstraction,” it remains conceptual, free from assigned representational qualification, as a force that draws away…  Whereas the genre of the novel and the essay, and by extension the sundry poetic forms (sestina, free verse, sonnet) have defining parameters, the lyric is, in contrast—for the lack of a better expression—a state of mind. As it “must work coherently in and with the medium—language—that human beings use to articulate objective concepts […] while explor[ing] the most subjective, nonconceptual, and ephemeral phenomena,” the lyric poem simultaneously calls attention to its own history and to the expression/condition of the “self” in an attempt to renew it. Perhaps, though, these are things that we already know.

What seems to be a more fertile inquiry then, is to see how these poets come to terms with their craft, and what perchance is the force that binds them to it. In “Analytic Lyric?” Matthew Palmer highlights language’s immeasurability, how in the 20^th century, the perception of the sign has come to involve “a certain amount of slippage, loss, and accretions around it” At this point (in our conversation), finding a sticking definition of “lyric” seems to be a task of comparable impossibility. Palmer is at a crossroads halfway thru his essay. He recognizes how one can find a social purpose in the practice of lyric as “the condensation of lyric emotion and focusing it then on the mechanics of language […so as to] renew the function of poetry” and yet he must come to terms with his own impulse to pursue the lyric “as simply an indulgence.” If not to renew or further the function of poetry as a linguistic or political tool, then why write? (One might–I might–ask the same question to the critic.)

For Palmer (and Spicer), the dilemma of finding a definition for lyric becomes as trivial/impossible as establishing concrete, universal meaning in language and it’s the “investigatory aspect” of conversation that takes place between poets over time (between cultures, histories, languages) that makes lyric practice meaningful. Howe finds narrative in non-narrative (“I thought I stood on the shores of a history of the world where forms of wildness brought up by memory become desire and multiply”) and Celan, from a past language and culture destroyed by fire, reconstructs human speech.

What if, we as readers begin “looking for what is looking,” and do indeed find “indifferentiation” (Howe)? Or is that what we have already found? And how valuable is this negative space—this “economy of loss”? Does it lend to the lyric punch, its force forward, of being able to construct a concrete abstraction out of the objective/conceptual?