I know, just by titling this piece — “What Is Lyric Poetry?” — you’re thinking, no, you’re not. You’re not. You’re not going to do this.
Yup. Doing it. Sort of. What follows is less “What Is Lyric Poetry?” and more what I like about poetry. And, what I don’t like. But I’m not going to say which is which.
Lyric poetry is intrinsically autobiographical because it’s the imprint of the poet’s mind. It’s what the self evaluates.
Because it’s autobiographical, lyric poetry is tethered to its cultural predicament. And to its historical conditions. It’s a masked posture. This is why, in addition to the physical geographic border of a specific language (meaning, French or English or Russian or Dutch or Arabic, and so on), we have national poetries. With particular, peculiar, and predominant national literary histories. In other words, we have selves of poetries. We have veils of poets.
Form is essential to lyric poetry. And, form is dynamic not traditional. I say this as known formalist. Or, more accurately, as an informalist. C. D. Wright is more of a formalist than Jack Gilbert. She’s at least as formal as Anthony Hecht. Side B? Form confines a poem to its era. All the same, it’s the contemplation inside a poem that allows it the potential to be timeless and to feel contemporary even into the future. Wisdom. Insight. Metaphor. Trust. This is one reason Henry Timrod now seems terribly wretched and Walt Whitman remains terribly brilliant.
Very little new happens in lyric poetry. Or, new ideas come, you know, but only so often. We should confess this to ourselves every time we try to write. Oh, there’s adaptation, there’s distortion, there’s refinement. It’s easy enough to imagine, say, some movement called the New Beats or the New Agrarians. The Neo Dub-Step Imagists. But “neo” is more about resurgence and reinvention. Revival. Which is not to diss the fabulous paint job.
Contemporary American lyric poetry could be a lot more sensual. More foreplay. More cooking. More blood. The novelists are killing us on this score. We’re putting all our sensuality into form. Then mass producing it. I mean, c’mon. Thought outlasts form. Somebody, please, sauté some garlic with butter. Move a lock of hair behind her ear. Stab someone.
Lyric poetry must nourish. Must delight. Must spiritualize. Must mythologize. Otherwise it’s science without God.
One recurring flaw in a lot of lyric poems today is that they are possessed of too much consistency. From the experimental to the conventional, they aim for balance. They fetishize their paradigm, their case in point, their specimen. They overly narrow the context of their metaphor. Poised imbalance in lyric poetry is the riskier, and greater, achievement.
America’s poems (poems, not poets) could stand to be a little more scandalous.
When we say a lyric poem is boring what we mean is it contains too much silence. Or not enough.
A single lyric poem can be amazing. But to understand the poetry of a particular poet, you’ve got to read their entire body of work. Then, for decades to come, somebody has to vouch for it. Then the future has to discover it anew and value it as theirs.
Pure poetry is poetry spoken in a language you don’t know. Without knowing the meaning of the words in the language, the words come across as pure sound, pure rhythm, pure melody. That’s why trying to write pure poetry in your own language is so seductive. Impossible. And necessary.
That’s enough. That’s ten observations about lyric poetry. More to come another time.
Now, it’s your turn. What is lyric poetry? Throw down your answers in the comment section below. The barn door is open. Be definitional — and with good cheer. Remember: “Allah favors the compassionate.”
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21 responses
My gut tells my ears this is dead on, and the hum of me agrees. This is me, smiling. Thank you.
As John F. Kennedy, Jr. said: “Poetry limits arrogance and cleanses corruption.”
Chicago Manual of Mojo
Weren’t no editor tinker Jazz
or mess with kitchen stories,
so bring home bacon, stir
your pot, dish it smoky, fat
when you mix home words
to find your juju, sing
your soul, get it dark
as night and hot as hell.
Tell it like it is, my friend.
Get it in their dreams.
Nothing can top Emily Dickinson’s empirical definition: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Lyric poetry doesn’t interest me, which probably means that’s what I write. The Lyricist Lounge, where hip hop poets first chilled ensemble, that was lyric poetry! Hart (Lorenz) Porter (Cole) the Gershwins — lyric. We call the words of songs lyrics and they all have Choruses and when the choruses *don’t repeat* — is that Poem? Ask Dylan (Bob). Though (Dylan) Thomas was a lyric poet for sure, because, as I learned as I was learning Welsh — Celtic verse is a much more lyric tradition than Anglo-Saxon/Engliah…
Somewhere between feeling something that got me going and then coming home to watch “Duck Company,” a piece of America & the World comes out of me and makes itself a poem about the insuperable–we/you. But that’s me. Maybe you don’t watch “Duck Company.” In 21st c now, the lyric comes through a whole system of stuff to be finely tuned neo post-blues.
Lyric comes from lyre. Music is a predominant feature, which can be accomplished by rhythm or rhyme. Narrative isn’t necessary; neither is sense. I know that, traditionally, a lyric concentrates on feeling, but if you’re seeking the foundation of the form, the only essential element is sound.
Lyric poetry is poetry that tells the truth. Not sure I would go as far as to say that it is autobiographical, but I would definitely agree that it is an imprint of the poet’s mind–but so is narrative poetry. Nietzsche said that the poets lie too much, but that couldn’t be less true. Lyric poetry (and narrative) (or should I just be saying “contemporary poetry”?) is poetry that gets at something true about life, and gets at it in its own way, not bothering with the actual factual details that traditionally make up “truth.”
“Which is not to diss the fabulous paint job.”
Oh, David. LoL.
I used to think of lyric poetry as language italicized, it was that intense. Now…I don’t know. Where the inside meets the outside, that line of demarcation, electric, one hopes, memorable, one hopes, succinct (sometimes), beautiful ditto…I know it when i see it!
Echoing Greg above, I can’t separate lyric from lyre–that is, from music. Hence, we regard some prose as lyrical, which I think refers to its musical quality rather than how personal or emotively intense it is. Still, I realize most of us would hesitate to call doggerel lyrical even if it clearly has the pleasure of sound and rhythm games going on, so our use of “lyrical†today does imply some seriousness of thought and feeling.
I tend to think that lyric poetry has to do with a hyper-personalized treatment of time. How does the mind move through events, and breathe in between the reordering of what’s real? (Sharon Cameron’s book about Dickinson first got me thinking in this direction. And Dickinson is, for me, the patron saint of lyric time.)
That said, though lyric poetry is true to an individual breath and the quirkiness of a particular mind, I don’t agree that it is necessarily autobiographical.
But I agree about scandal! risk! On the whole, the contemporary poetry reader (should such a thing exist without having to say the contemporary poet) is not willing to embrace failed poems, even if they are failing in more interesting ways that the poem with the good paint job.
I’ll start with “poised imbalance. . . impossible and necessary” and continue the Dean Young vein with a definition of lyric poetry as “assertive force and contradiction.” In which case, I agree, David. More cooking. More dynamic form. Lyric poetry must be the place where word and image become one.
Good poetry is spellcasting, not annotation. It is the enjoyment of echoes. It dances on verbal bones. It is the provocation of birdsong, not the proclamation of divinity. Writing, like breathing, should inhale the accident of gasses surrounding the body and exhale a subtle and idiosyncratic air, the production and release of which expresses an essence of existence.
Laura Mullen’s DARK ARCHIVE demonstrates my notion of contemporary lyric poetry at its finest. Her tapestry complicates “facts” of form, history and autobiography exponentially, creating a universal text loaded with sensual, actual, personal and slippery specificity that at turns anchors itself in and is destabilized by the (un)familiar/ what we can(not) know. Her glorious invocation of Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is but one of many echoes that whisper, overlap and collide in what I experience as a pressure cooker. Tension breathes, destruction hovers, and boundaries linger as question marks, like a Berndnaut Smilde cloud room.
There seems to be a contemporary movement against many qualities of lyric poetry. Poets are generally discouraged from using foot and meter and rhyme scheme in their work. This makes sense in some ways, since any set of rules or constraints will seem aged and possibly irrelevant if they’re wielded to simply create less-successful reproductions of previous works. Innovation is needed to properly reintroduce the lyric poem to a modern audience, but if poets are regularly dissuaded from including lyric qualities in their works, it’s unlikely that innovation will ever have a chance to flourish.
Feeling, music, a map of the individual mind, the speaker speaking as much to herself as to “you.” I suppose that’s lyric poetry. Pretty valued over rigorous is a definition that pops into the snarky side of my mind.
We need beauty (today, December 15, perhaps more than otherwise) as a counterforce and as a recharing. However, we also need intellect and rigor in poetry. Blood, perhaps, as it’s put in the essay.
We need a dialogue in poems between the lyrical and the intellectual. Feeling and thought at odds with one another, duking it out. We need poems that illustrate how those conflicts within us might help us toward a new, complex understanding. It should feel uncomfortable, invigorating. Like the hot skin of someone who just stepped out of icy water.
@ Elizabeth Bradfield: While I agree with you about the value of poetry of the intellect, I don’t see it as opposed to lyric poetry but rather to narrative or confessional or conversational poetry. I think rigorous thought, expressed in profound sound, is the very SOUL of lyrical expression!
Every time I read “I know, just by titling this piece — “What Is Lyric Poetry?†— you’re thinking, no, you’re not. You’re not. You’re not going to do this,” I think “titling” should be “tilting.”
Lyric poetry is an attempt to directly transmit the poet’s filter, to reverse engineer the mystical. It is voiceless, and at its best abandons the poet’s self altogether. Lyric poetry, by definition, is incomplete, which is not the same as failure. It is a desperate grasp, a reach toward the essentially inexplicable mysteries of human existence. Lyric desires, yearns, to get beyond the self, beyond place and time. Lyric poetry is an interrupted autopsy.
Lyric poetry, to me, just in the sense of the word ‘lyric,’ evokes song and/or music. In this, I think, lyric poetry attempts to draw in the reader through the attraction of musicality. Maybe not the structure of music, per se, but the pathos and presentation of music, which is comprised of some some personal drama (not in the cliche, but in the personal turmoil, I should say). So think ‘music’ and for the formation (form) through ‘sound’ rather than spilling out all over the page. I think the predicament contemporary poets are in today is the risk and need for ‘difference’–taking the old and revising it through new lenses. Yet I would offer to take the ‘concept’ of a lyric poem and just roll with it, knowing that you have an idea in your pocket that is somehow guiding you into strange territory.
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