Week 8: Political Lyric

This week’s lectures:

 Black Lyric (Henry Ivry)
 Climate Lyricism (Henry Ivry)
 Calamity Form (Alex Campbell & Tom Emanuel)

Week 8: Political Lyric

Core Poems:

Audre Lorde: ‘Power’ (Link), 'Coal' (NAP: 1935)

Claudia Rankine: 'Chapter 7' Citizen: An American Lyric . ( Link) CN: Racism

Julianna Spahr: ‘Turnt’ (link), ‘Transitory Momentary’ (Link)

Layli Long Soldier: excerpts Whereas (link), 'Resolution 6' (Link)

Diane Di Prima: ‘Revolutionary Letter 1’, ‘Revolutionary Letter 7’ (Link)

Sean Bonney: excerpts Our Death (Link), 'Letter in Turmoil' (65), 'A Note on my recent
poetics' (70), 'What teargas is for' (73), 'On Throwing Bricks' (74-5)

Critical:

Min Hyoung Song, Climate Lyricism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022) pp.1-15
(Moodle)
Anahid Nersessian. ‘Introduction’ The calamity form: On poetry and social life.
University of Chicago Press, 2020, pp.1-22 (through library)

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest
external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock
experiences of our daily lives.” (Lorde, ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’)

In preparation for the final assessment, I would like you to pick one quotation from
the secondary reading and pair it with a poem and please post this in the
discussion forum, prior to Wednesday if you can. Again, you may find the
secondary reading dense this week, so please come to the seminar with any dense
sections underlined and we can discuss.
Political Lyric (some prompts):
– As you read the poems for this week, think about our discussions of the personal
individual ‘I’. How does this connect to a collective ‘I’? How does a lyric become

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 political? For a critical understanding of ‘personal is political’, read:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24365010.
– In our discussions of the purpose of the poetic ‘I’, what is the impact of the collective
lyrical ‘I’? Think about the forms we have studied so far – what do you think poetry
(political lyric) offers us? Pay particular focus on Rankine’s use of ‘you’ (“I they he
she we you”).
– How are the affective and the poetic inherently connected in the highlighted
poems? How do the elements interact with each other to create meaning through
language, form, and reader response?

Critical Quotes:

‘Climate lyricism thus names both an active mode of making (trying to write literature that is
relevant to an understanding of the environmental troubles plaguing the present) and an
active mode of attending (making sense of how literature, regardless of its manifest content,
might have something relevant to say about these troubles).’

‘In opposition to such lines of thought, I single out the lyric because it is a mode of literary
attentiveness with special properties—such as compression of expression, a heavy
investment in apostrophe, the careful observation of what is observable in language, a
probing of what comprises the human—that many writers are taking advantage of, and
remaking, in productive ways. I focus especially on what I call a revived lyric (inspired by
Hoa Nguyen’s poem “Up Nursing”), which is not concerned with the spotlighting of an
individual “I” or the exploration of a profound psychic interior, with which the lyric is often
associated, but focuses instead on the space between a first-person speaker and a second-
person addressee.’

(Min Hyoung Song, ‘Climate Lyricism’)

‘The Calamity Form, too, is attracted and allergic to historical analysis. I’m extremely wary of
any attempts, including my own, to say that a poem is about something, or capable of giving
information on it. Obviously there’s a contradiction here: on the one hand, I want to say
these poems tell you nothing; on the other, I want to say that they tell you what it is to know
nothing, under social conditions where the knowing of nothing becomes instrumental to the
reproduction of unlivable life. But contradictions, as we know, are not sinkholes. When we
investigate them more deeply, when we walk around their borders and extend their edges,
we find that they hold the only way forward.’

‘The Calamity Form keeps time with the nonreferential effects of figurative language, and
thus with the notion that works of art have an ontology distinct if not wholly divided from
other kinds of things in the world. This relieves them of having either to prove or be
rationalized by the soundness of large-scale explanatory models. It also gives them a peculiar
kind of hold over categories like explanation or even just aboutness, in a way that is doubly
vexed when the work in question claims to be thinking hard and important thoughts about
history or, to use Engels’s term, human society.’

(Anahid Nersessian, ‘Introduction’, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life)

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The following prompts for the poems are only here to help you engage with the poem
beyond a surface level – you don’t need to go through all of them for the seminar but
choose at least 2 poems and engage with them through the given prompts and note down
your reflections/understandings.

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric [Chapter 7]

“And still a world begins its furious erasure—

Who do you think you are, saying I to me?

You nothing.

You nobody.

You.

A body in the world drowns in it—

Hey you—

All our fevered history won’t instill insight,

won’t turn a body conscious,
won’t make that look
in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing

to solve

even as each moment is an answer.”

Prompts

 For Rankine, the material/corporeal experience is intertwined with the emotional

(historical, individual, and collective) experience – how does Chapter 7 (poetic
techniques, syntax, language) reflect this poetic position?
 How is the corporeal invoked in the poem? How does it impact your affective
response? – note shifts and effects on breathing, emotion, form. Close read: “I can
hear the even breathing that creates passages to dreams. And yes, I want to
interrupt to tell him her us you me I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an
ending (261)”.
 How does Rankine create meaning and movement through her use of multiple
methods and mediums (such as photographs, art, experiences, memories) to
interconnect the historical, poetic, imaginary and political in this text?

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 As the ‘you’ is overwhelming situated in the poem, in your reading, who is being
invoked here through the ‘you’?

Audre Lorde: Power

 Lorde once said to Adrienne Rich in an interview that the poem Power “came out
without craft” (107). Do you agree or disagree with her statement? How does the
poem navigate between craft and meaning – do you think the poetic form of
lyric/free verse allows poetic control beyond ‘intention’?
 Think about another quote from Lorde: ““At this point in time, I believe that women
carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches as keystone
for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of
poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that,
too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover
their desperate wish for imagination without insight.” [‘Poetry is not a Luxury’]
 What does syntactical arrangement do in ‘Power’? How does she subvert
traditional/expected poetic syntax through her language and poetic structure?
 Close read the first and the opening stanza of Power; tell me your thoughts. How
does the opening and the closing of the poem relate to one another?

Sean Bonney: Our Death

 How is the ‘I’ functioning in Bonney’s poetry? Where do you situate between the
individual and the collective?
 Discuss the hybrid form of Bonney’s poetics; how is he playing with the prose poem
form? What is the function of these blocks of text and how does it intertwine with
the lyrical?
 How does Bonney work situate itself with the emotional overflow of lyric we
discussed last week? Does it play with narrative? Why or why not?
 How are the titles of the work functioning and how do you interrogate the title of
Our Death in relation to the poems looked at for this week?

Things to Consider in Our Class Conversation

 How do the poems utilise or present the ‘I’ in reference to the overarching thematic
concerns? How does the position of the ‘I’ shift and progress throughout the poetic
text – what shifts can you observe? Note them down.
 Write down three poetic techniques used in the poems, which interact with the lyric
‘I’ or ‘you’ – a subject position – to create meaning? What is their impact in the
poem? Think about the potential of the lyric form as elucidated by Song.

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