poetry

For a moment in time, a generation ago, apostrophe became for some scholars the embodiment of the lyric gesture itself. In Jonathan Culler’s words, apostrophe signals “not a moment in a temporal sequence but a now of discourse, of writing,” typified by the poetic “O.” Long the neglected step-sibling of lyric apostrophe, chiasmus (“a crosswise placing” from the Greek letter chi) embodies the boustrophedonic turns of repetition and reversal, which also might be seen at the heart of the lyric. Where apostrophe involves a turning away to address an absent person, thing, or idea, chiasmus seems to turn inward—to sound, form, image.

“One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge[…] Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own).

NeMLA Annual Convention - Baltimore, MD 23-26 March 2017

Lowell himself left us some well-known misgivings about his accomplishments: the mere “snapshots” of his “threadbare art” in “Epilogue”; the “memorized . . . tricks” that “somehow never [left] something to go back to” in “Reading Myself,” which I’ve played on in my own title. He was nevertheless the dean of American poets when he died, suddenly and far too young, in 1977. Through the last decade of the 20th century, though, and since, it seems, at least arguably, that his star has been declining. For our conference in his centennial year (and even in the month of his birth), this session proposes at least a modest reassessment of Lowell’s career and achievement. It seems like a good time.

A reviewer of Claudia Rankine's Citizen writes, "One problem with writing poetry about political or historical issues is that poetry proves a terrible method for transmitting information."  This is an assertion we have encountered before.  Regarding Ezra Pound's Cantos, Donald Davie writes, "Whatever more long-term effect Pound's disastrous career may have on American and British poetry, it seems inevitable that it will rule out (has ruled out already, for serious writers) any idea that poetry can or should operate in the dimensio of history, trying to make sense of the recorded past by redressing our historical perspectives. . . .