Lyric Shame

Bringing a provocative perspective to the poetry wars that have divided practitioners and critics for decades, Gillian White argues that the sharp disagreements surrounding contemporary poetics have been shaped by “lyric shame”—an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be. Favored particularly by modern American poets, lyric poetry has long been considered an expression of the writer’s innermost thoughts and feelings. But by the 1970s the “lyric I” had become persona non grata in literary circles. Poets and critics accused one another of “identifying” with lyric, which increasingly bore the stigma of egotism and political backwardness. In close readings of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Bernadette Mayer, James Tate, and others, White examines the social and critical dynamics by which certain poems become identified as “lyric,” arguing that the term refers less to a specific literary genre than to an abstract way of projecting subjectivity onto poems. Arguments about whether lyric poetry is deserving of praise or censure circle around what White calls “the missing lyric object”: an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere, and which is the product of reading practices that both the advocates and detractors of lyric impose on poems. Drawing on current trends in both affect and lyric theory, Lyric Shame unsettles the assumptions that inform much contemporary poetry criticism and explains why the emotional, confessional expressivity attributed to American lyric has become so controversial.

Shame and Modern Writing seeks to uncover the presence of shame in and across a vast array of modern writing modalities. This interdisciplinary volume includes essays from distinguished and emergent scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and shorter practice-based reflections from poets and clinical writers. It serves as a timely reflection of shame as presented in modern writing, giving added attention to engagements on race, gender, and the question of new media representation.

Arguments about whether lyric poetry is deserving of praise or censure circle around what White calls "the missing lyric object": an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere, and which is the product of reading practices that both the advocates and detractors of lyric impose on poems. Drawing on current trends in both affect and lyric theory, Lyric Shame unsettles the assumptions that inform much contemporary poetry criticism and explains why the emotional, confessional expressivity attributed to American lyric has become so controversial.Favored particularly by modern American poets, lyric poetry has long been considered an expression of the writer's innermost thoughts and feelings.

Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance presents the first detailed study of the relationship between poetry and surveillance. It critically examines the close connection between American lyric poetry and a burgeoning US state surveillance apparatus from 1920 to the 1960s. The book explores the myriad ways that poets—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and others—explored a developing and fraught environment in which the growing power of American investigative agencies, such as the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, imposed new pressures on cultural discourse and personal identity. In analysing twentieth-century American poetry and its various ideas about "the self," Lyric Eye demonstrates the extent to which poetry and surveillance employ similar styles of information-gathering such as observation, overhearing, imitation, abstraction, repurposing of language, subversion, fragmentation and symbolism. Ground-breaking and prescient, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, politics, surveillance and intelligence studies, and digital humanities.

Irreverent and provoking, the figure of the 'queer troublemaker' is a disruptive force both poetically and politically. Tracing the genealogy of this figure in modern avant-garde American poetry, Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain develops innovative close readings of the works of Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson. Exploring how these writers play with identity, gender, sexuality and genre, Bussey-Chamberlain constructs a queer poetics of flippancy that can subvert ideas of success and failure, affect and affectation, performance and performativity, poetry and being.

In this book, Elizabeth S. Dodd traces the contours of a lyric theology through the lens of English lyric tradition. She addresses the dominance of narrative and drama in contemporary theological aesthetics by drawing on recent developments in lyric theory. Informed by the work of critics such as Jonathan Culler, Dodd explores the significance of lyric for theological discourse. Lyric is presented here as a short, musical, expressive and personal form that is also fragmentary, embodied, socially located and performative. The main chapters address key moments in English lyric tradition. This selective approach aims to expand the theological gaze beyond the monochromatic features of the traditional canon. It covers Anglo-Saxon hymns, medieval lullaby carols, early-modern sonnets and the prophetic poetry of Romanticism, but also Grime and hip hop, performance poetry, social media poetry and Geoffrey Hill.

This volume deals with the varied forms of shame reflected in biblical, theological, psychological and anthropological sources. Although traditional theology and church practice concentrate on providing forgiveness for shameful behavior, recent scholarship has discovered the crucial relevance of social shame evoked by mental status, adversity, slavery, abuse, illness, grief and defeat. Anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have discovered that unresolved social shame is related to racial and social prejudice, to bullying, crime, genocide, narcissism, post-traumatic stress and other forms of toxic behavior. Eleven leaders in this research participated in a conference on "The Shame Factor," sponsored by St. Mark's United Methodist Church in Lincoln, NE in October 2010. Their essays explore the impact and the transformation of shame in a variety of arenas, comprising in this volume a unique and innovative resource for contemporary religion, therapy, ethics, and social analysis.

A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn. Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging. The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

Sometimes the word “lyric” seems to appear everywhere: either it’s used interchangeably with the word “poetry” or it attaches to descriptions of literature, art, film, and even ordinary objects in order to capture some quality of aesthetic appeal or meaning. Lyric Trade is not yet another attempt to define the lyric, but instead it digs into how poems use lyric in relation to race, gender, nation, and empire. Engaging with poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, and Myung Mi Kim, this book asks: What does lyric mean, and why should it matter to poets and readers? Lyric Trade argues that lyric in the postwar long poem not only registers the ideological contradictions of modernism’s insistence on new forms, but that it also maps spaces for formal reimaginings of the subject.

Reading lyric poetry over the past century. The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading, Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies of lyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric and sexual difference, and comparative lyric. Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.