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13 - Genre Crossings: Rewriting ‘the Lyric’ in Innovative Black British Poetry
- from PART IV - NATIONAL, INTERNATIONAL, TRANSGLOBAL
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- By Romana Huk, Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame
- Edited by Deirdre Osborne, Goldsmiths, University of London
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)
- Published online:
- 05 September 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 October 2016, pp 225-240
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Summary
In the US, the twenty-first century is powered, in poetic terms, by what its central literary journal recently named ‘the new lyric studies’. It focused fora on the return of interest in lyric as a genre, while millennial poetry anthologies argued that, after long rule by ‘Language poetry’ (America's powerful avant-garde defined, in part, against lyric writing), we had entered an era of the ‘post-avant’, and that poets of all stripes were returning to lyric in new-century work. There are connections between this phenomenon and the burgeoning use of lyric in the work of black British poets. The reasons for having (to a lesser extent) sidelined lyric for a time are different for the latter, of course, and the reasons for re-exploring it are as various as the poets who will be treated here. But they add up to more than the pendulum swing that in part accounts for lyric's return stateside, where primarily aesthetic concerns drive the mix-and-matching of modes dubbed the new American hybridity. This chapter will consider the differing reasons for lyric's return in black British poetics by first taking a broad look at the field, and then by attending to the work of several poets publishing most visibly since the millennium – ranging from innovative writers acclaimed by the mainstream, like Patience Agbabi, to those whose work has been so new in texture, tone and project that they still do not appear on many poetic maps, like D. S. Marriott. I want to argue, as I have in the past, that lyric, in the general sense of being ‘the genre of personal expression’, as Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins describe it in The Lyric Theory Reader, has always been crucial to raced poetry in the UK because it queries that tacit collation of the personal and universal – a collation that ironically makes lyric the least personal of genres, in a sense (or in theory). After postmodernism's thorough-going investigations of how language overwrites the (‘generalised’) subject, post-postmodern lyric investigations of neglected subjectivities are proving increasingly necessary in black British work.
18 - Women's “spiritualities”
- from PART IV - LINEAGES, TIES, AND CONNECTIONS
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- By Romana Huk, University of Notre Dame
- Edited by Linda A. Kinnahan, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh
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- Book:
- A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry
- Published online:
- 05 June 2016
- Print publication:
- 20 June 2016, pp 289-304
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Summary
Like the word “feminisms,” the possessed word in this chapter's title is necessarily plural, though our copy-editors may well be forced to take it out of both scare quotes and lower case where it belongs. Indeed, as our stylesheet suggests, they may do similar things to words that gesture toward “God” in what follows. But problems with, and scary distance from, language (and possession, too) are at the very heart of women's spiritual struggles over the course of the last century. As Fanny Howe put it in 1991,
“God” scares me, and that's a fact. It also scares me to imagine that I might be seduced by the tones, turns and musics of a poetic tongue which is arranged to create a false idol, an illusion…. Silence is the only effective and terminal antidote. Before that, it may be the case that the prose line is the least apt to succumb to falsehood. Much of my writing has been an effort to rearrange, rewrite the word “God” by filling up pages with other names. I don't like the word “God” because of its Roman weight. But when I write, I rewrite that name, and then what I write, if it is written well, becomes not a new “God” but a new person, a human face. If a face does not gaze back at me from the page, there is only paper and wood, the static object empty of divine spark. The human face in repose and silence is the face I see, when what I have written approximates the unspeakable.
This very clear, if complex, prose-poetic passage speaks volumes about the concerns and experimental strategies that have connected women poets reinvestigating inherited spiritual resources for what survives of them after modernism's seismic challenges on so many fronts – scientific, philosophical, psychoanalytic, anthropological, etc. – in addition to those posed by themselves: half the population overwritten by such resources for millennia but suddenly voluble, ready even to “rewrite that name,” the word for divinity.