The Self in the Song: Identity and Authority in Contemporary American Poetry.

Abstract

Provocative recent scholarship has sought to revise, historicize, and challenge a commonplace of reading lyric: the illusion of personal encounter in the language of a poem. The work of lyric theorists has enriched and complicated potential answers to a persistent question: what do we encounter when we read a poem? In The Self in the Song, I argue that the work of Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, Derek Walcott, and Charles Wright articulates similar questions and offers complex and resonant responses. I demonstrate the remarkable skepticism with which they portray the self, as an idea with political, philosophical, geographic, and theological implications. In poems that enact and foreground their own poetics, they enact complex theoretical concerns about the artificiality of the speaking “I” and the belatedness of the self with regard to language. Moreover, I read their poetry as heralding and exemplifying the emergence of our complex contemporary poetics from an historical moment in the 1970s and 1980s when the work of poststructuralist theorists and practicing poets came into productive conversation, often centered around the question of the apparition of the self in literary language and its philosophical and political implications. The lasting influence of that contact demonstrates that the opposition of “experimentation” to “tradition,” as articulated by the Language Poets and other historical poetic avant-gardes, is another false binary among many that have oversimplified the multifaceted history of American poetry. Although the four poets I consider have received varying degrees of scholarly attention, they are almost unanimously considered exemplars of what Charles Bernstein has dismissively called “official verse culture,” both in the praise of its cultural arbiters and in the oppositional avant-garde critique of that culture. I read their work in and against these contexts, also using my reconsideration of their poetry as an opportunity to call for a fresh approach to the complexity of the illusion of personal encounter in the lyric poem, for new avenues to perceive the variety of writing and thinking across the spectrum of poetic practice in the United States, especially as we seek to understand what we mean by authority and identity in poetry.