Riffing on Geoffrey Hartman's criticism in the wilderness, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., titled his introduction to the 1984 collection Black Literature and Literary Theory “Criticism in the Jungle.” Yale deconstruction, meet tropes of blackness. When a Gates-edited issue of Critical Inquiry (plus several additional essays) appeared two years later in book form as “Race,” Writing, and Difference, the encounter he helped broker between poststructuralist theory and race studies had its battle cry. Race was not an essence but an inscription, a signifier of instituted difference. The literature produced under its auspices was to be read as a series of marks and markers calling for complex formal analysis, not merely as an index of the humanity or condition of its writers. In retrospect, it appears that all this was a gambit in the embourgeoisement of African American literary studies. Twenty years on, Gates has started a company that does racial DNA searches—what he calls “roots in a test tube”—and produces books and television specials on black celebrities' racial genealogies (Lee B1). No scare quotes about it, race now gives you access to Oprah and her people. Call it criticism in the Vineyard.

My title is meant to pose a real question. It's an old question, but it is worth asking why the anxiety betrayed by the question has been around for so long, and especially why it has spiked in recent years. The question expresses a worry that nobody reads much poetry, or that few people do, or that the right people don't at the right times or in the right ways. So it's a real question to which it's difficult to give a real answer, since the sane response to such anxiety tends to be either “You're right to worry, since nobody reads poetry these days” or “Don't worry; lots of people do. You just haven't noticed.” In her 2006 address as outgoing president of the MLA, Marjorie Perloff gave a little of both responses. “Out in the world beyond the academy, individual poets are warmly celebrated …,” Perloff told her audience (654). Don't worry, in other words. On the other hand, do worry, since that “beyond” means that those gathered—that is, literary critics, members of the MLA, all of us in that room or reading this journal—have not noticed such warm popular celebrations because we are the ones who don't read poetry these days or who don't read it in the right ways. “A specter is haunting the academy, the specter of literature,” Perloff warned us, turning worry into revolutionary foreboding (658). We sat back in our seats, reassured. Oh good, we thought, poetry is about to make a comeback.

When I began my career in higher education in the early 1980s, English departments at elite, historically white colleges and universities typically only had, at most, one faculty member of color. With a few notable exceptions, that person was usually the only one in the department to teach or conduct research on topics that engaged questions of race. Now, almost thirty years later, the study of race has assumed a more prominent role in academic life. Not only is it increasingly common to find clusters of scholars working on race in English departments, but scholars of all races and ethnicities are engaged in the study of race. Moreover, scholars of color are no longer assumed to focus on works of literature and culture produced by people of their own racial or ethnic backgrounds. Generally speaking, we have moved beyond the expectation that academic specialization follows phenotype.

Marjorie Perloff's 2006 presidential address may be most striking in its call for a return to a conventional definition of the literary as the ground of disciplinary training. If the profession of literary study in the contemporary academy is in a state of crisis, Perloff argues, it is largely a result of the ways literary scholars have undermined and contaminated the core of the discipline, adopting a “governing paradigm” for scholarship and teaching from other fields, including anthropology and history (654). “It is time to trust the literary instinct that brought us to this field in the first place,” she counsels, “and to recognize that, instead of lusting after those other disciplines that seem so exotic primarily because we don't really practice them, what we need is more theoretical, historical, and critical training in our own discipline” (662). One could respond that this position, with its suggestion that the solution is mostly a matter of self-fashioning in the discipline, understates the broader pressures in the university as a social institution. But in what follows I would like to take up a different, smaller concern: Perloff's hostility to interdisciplinarity.

When i first started teaching as a volunteer instructor in the college program at san quentin state prison in 1999, I used to imagine writing an article about what I was experiencing to submit to PMLA. The thought of that article took on an almost therapeutic function; it became a mental structure for processing what was often, from the beginning, an intellectually and emotionally overwhelming experience. At the time, it seemed natural that sharing what I was learning with a few thousand stranger-colleagues was the most reassuring thing I could imagine. Only in retrospect do I find this a strangely moving illustration of what it means to me to be a part of an intellectual community. I would never have imagined back then that the editors of PMLA themselves would one day initiate an entire special issue on this topic.

Lyric studies has been new before. Many students of lyric will remember Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker'S 1985 COLlection of essays, Lyric Poetry beyond New Criticism, as a previous occasion for reevaluating the course of lyric studies. Hošek and Parker's ambitious volume measured the distance between New Critical and later theories of interpretation: “structuralist and post-structuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, semiotic, reader-response” (7). Features highlighted by then-recent theory—the difference dramatized by intertextuality, for example, or the impossibility, as opposed to transparency, of many putative forms of address in lyric—revealed what had been repressed and implied by Western academic assumptions about poetry earlier in the twentieth century; Hošek and Parker gathered an ambitious representation of such modifications of canonical lyric reading. Familiar units of Western literary vocabulary such as “apostrophe” continued to be used, but observation of their destabilizing causes and effects and reflection on their inner contradictions helped to break the illusion of the verbal icon's centripetal force. Parker notes in her introduction that the question “What would enable future work on the lyric?” remains as open as ever at the end of their project (16). So now that another twenty-two years have passed, how is lyric studies differently new, as gauged by the 2006 MLA convention's focus on lyric?

“Race,” Writing, and Difference was published as a special issue of critical inquiry in Autumn 1985 (12.1). Responses to the essays in the special issue appeared in the journal's autumn 1986 number (13.1). The University of Chicago Press published both parts as a book in 1986. Since then, it has become the best-selling book version of a special issue of Critical Inquiry in the history of that splendid publication. And I believe that this occurred because its contributions simultaneously reflected and defined a certain pivotal moment in the history of both literary studies and the larger discourse on race, bringing the two fields together in a way that had not been done before. At least, that was the goal of editing it in the first place.

One doesn't get too many teaching moments like this: I am standing by the water fountain outside our classroom. One of the students taking a break from the final exam in the course in Dante's Divine Comedy looks up at me from the fountain and says, “When I read this stuff, it's like I'm out of here.”

Poetry is alive in our culture, but in its own world: Never have there been so many poets and poetry readings, books, journals, and online sites. Poetry has certainly seemed threatened, though, in schools and universities, where literary studies focus on prose fiction—narrative has become the norm of literature—or else on other sorts of cultural texts, which can be read symptomatically