Lyric apocalypse

 

Poetry, sez those who refuse to include the whole universe of the blues, rock, punk, emo, rap, dap, and other music in the poetry genre, is no longer popular, or read, or used, or culturally central.

I’m doubtful of those claims. Poetry is, I’d contend, what happens when a person thinks – poetry first, logic afterwards.

However, it is true that the lyric – and of a particular type, with the shrinking of the poem to the poet, to the poet’s word, a shrinking from persona to personality – has triumphed over other forms. Pound’s Cantos, Olson’s Maximus poems have their draw and make their mark, but the great influences are confessional, personal rather than persona centered.

That form of lyric has its price: the toll of suicided American poets alone is impressive: Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Jarrell. A lyric apocalypse. Robert Lowell only succeeded in avoiding putting the knife to his own throat by sheer luck: the manias and cruelties of his life are well known.

What I’m getting at here is: a poetry that throws off the mask is, perhaps, a symptom of something going on within the poetic system. Hart Crane’s children, in a sense, lost contact with the endurance at the heart of Whitman and Dickinson, the founding poets. A poetry that measures how much you cannot endure – this is the siren of negation, tempting the sailor to jump.

In “The Rational of Verse”, Poe writes: “Verse originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness.” Poe is writing of the compensatory movement of sound in the rhythms of poetry.

I’d suggest that the birth of the lyric as confession originates in an infant trait studied in depth by the psychologist Katherine Nelson. Nelson was fascinated by the puzzle of infant amnesia – the fact that humans do not remember very much about their first years. In pursuing this puzzle, Nelson came across two academics whose child, Emily, showed great signs of precocity. The parents took to recording their girl’s monologues in the crib, before she went to bed, from the age of 22 months to the age of 37 months – something that would only occur to academic parents. Nelson was surprised to find that Emily’s “crib talk” – the monologue she repeated to herself as she went to sleep – was linguistically more sophisticated than most of her talk with her caregivers and other children. Nelson’s attributes this higher level of discursive quality to the fact that these monologues were not aimed at sleep so much as they were at understanding her “self” – what she had done, what she was going to do, what she felt, etc. As Nelson puts it, the themes of Emily’s monologues concern “what happened” (with its attendant linguistic markers of tense and temporal adjectives), “what is going to happen”, and “what should happen”. Into these person-centered themes she also introduces story themes from stories that are told or read to her.

Our little Emily is, as it were, giving birth to all the forms of poetry – the epic, the dramatic, the lyric – in her monologues. Out of crib talk, Berryman ‘s sonnets and Plath’s lyrics. Helen Vendler wrote that the “lyric is the genre of private life: it is what we say to ourselves when we are alone.”  Emily’s crib talk, in a sense, precedes the private life – an in this sense the lyric does not derive from what we say to ourselves when we are alone, but is how we begin to have a private life that consists of saying things to ourselves when we are alone. The pulse and the heart are coeterminus.

Which leaves the question: why is the poet’s crib talk so risky to the poet’s chances of survival?

Here’s Emily in Episode 1.4 – Nelson divided the monologues into episodes.

1.    Maybe the doctor,

2.    Took my jamas (very soft) I don’t know.

3.    Maybe, maybe we take my jamas off.

4.    But I leave my diaper

5.    Take my jamas off,

6.    And leave them off,

7.    At the doc-

8.    My have get my check up,

9.    So we take my jamas off.

10.  My don’t know this looking all better

11.  (??) doctor, doc,

12.  The boys take back home.

13.  The, and we maybe take my jamas off.

14.  I don’t know what we do with with my…

15.  Maybe the doctore take my jamas

16.  My jamas off cause my maybe get check up,

17.  Have to to take my jamas

 

Talking oneself past the disaster that threatens to swallow us and take our jamas off – that is obviously both one of the functions of the crib talk and of the lyric invocation of existential menace. But lyric understanding might set up that menace, those disasters, all too often to endure, without a countering experience – say, of returning with one’s jamas intact. The “I don’t know” balanced by the “Now I know”, the passage into experience. But if we insist on returning to the I don’t know, that moment full of self’s lack of control –  if such is the movement of the lyric – and if we insist on staying there, in the negative – we might lose our practical ability to get out of it. Or rather, forget our practical ability that has, in the past, gotten out of it.  We lose touch with experience itself.

Only one aspect, of course, of the lyric apocalypse. But one to consider in these dark days.