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Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo was a guest speaker at both of the 'Rethinking Lyric Communities' workshops, held in Oxford and Berlin in 2022, which lie at the root of this volume. With immense generosity, Capildeo shared with the participants their reflections on lyric, translation, and community, based on their own poetic practice and engagement with the work and words of other poets. This conversation emerges from and expands on those dialogues.
This essay outlines a series of parallels between queer critiques of community and the concept of lyric detachment in modern poetics. It suggests that this shared suspicion of community can provide one starting point for a reconsideration of how 'counterintimacies', as described by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, are figured in queer poetry. In order to illustrate this, it examines interactions between lyric tropes and homoerotic practices in Carl Phillips's poem 'Hymn'.
This essay places Jen Bervin's 2008 artist book "The Desert" in conversation with lyric theory. It argues that Bervin disrupts the lyric as it has developed since the nineteenth century, restoring its suppressed materiality and contesting the imbrication of the lyric in colonial practices of land use. By doing so, the essay argues, Bervin restores the social world of material production and communal labour on which the lyric depends.
This chapter examines the refusal of privacy in Simone White's 2016 collection "Of Being Dispersed". Writing within the lyric mode, White's defiantly public subject draws attention to the lyric's generic proximity to liberalism, in which individuation is a precondition of recognition and race is thus read as an identity rather than the effect of a social process. By comparing White's book with George Oppen's 1968 poem 'Of Being Numerous', I argue that 'dispersal' names the condition of a racialized subject whose individuation is not in the first place given, whereas 'numerousness' names an aspiration to move toward assembly from an original interiority.
Recent years have seen a campaign to advance the status of Kaaps, the language spoken by the coloured community of the Cape Flats but long considered a dialect of Afrikaans. An important element in this endeavour has been the publication of lyric poetry in Kaaps, which is read both by members of the community, who can identify with it as a form of protest but also as a source of pride, and by middleclass white readers, who may gain from it an enhanced appreciation of the culture of this community.
This chapter explores the different types of communities produced in Loy's works, with a focus on her theorization of modernist poetry in the essays 'Modern Poetry' (1925) and 'Gertrude Stein' (1927), the pamphlet 'Psycho-Democracy', the poem "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose" (1923–25), and the sequence 'Italian Pictures' (1914), showing that Loy considered the questioning of types of collectivities and communities a fundamental element in the production and reception of modernist art and literature. Through the investigation of Loy's multilingualism, poetics, and style, the chapter argues that the insistence on the ephemeral, precarious, and shifting temporality of textual communities is the result not only of Loy's presence within mobile, transnational expatriate groups but also of a feminist stance that refuses participation in patriarchal or oppressive forms of togetherness, aiming instead to imagine possible alternatives.
Despite the seeming liberalism of Khrushchev's 'Thaw', limitations were still placed on the Soviet arts, and the era witnessed the emergence of a parallel form of underground or unofficial culture. This essay considers a number of vocal works by composers, including Gubaidulina and Schnittke, who experimented with a cosmopolitan range of literary texts, as well as with a more radical musical language. In doing so, these composers not only established a lyric community at home but also engaged with their counterparts in avant-garde circles in Western Europe.
What happens when songs or lyric poems, composed at particular moments, become state anthems, performed again and again across generations? This essay addresses this question through the extraordinary figure of Rabindranath Tagore, who, despite his radically anti-statist vision of community, composed songs that became the celebrated national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
Memorability, shareability, and repeatability are interrelated characteristics often ascribed to lyric poetry in current theory, sometimes with an emphasis on the transnational potential of its circulation. This article approaches this question of shareability not in terms of diction or form, as is usually the case, but of gesture. Drawing on Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, gesture is defined as both historically situated and transferable to different contexts, but whether or not to re-enact a particular gesture in one's own context is a political decision. After examining how a sonnet by Andrea Zanzotto addresses the lyric gesture of exhortation offered by a Petrarch sonnet, the article goes on to explore the potentiality opened up for the formation of gestural communities by the suspension of action in the lyric.
Millay repairs Baudelaire
(2024)
I present a contrastive reading of Charles Baudelaire's "L'Invitation au voyage" and Edna St Vincent Millay's 1936 retranslation, "Invitation to the Voyage". Baudelaire's poem is prefigurative and metapoetic: it models and theorizes gendered mechanisms for controlling its readership. Millay translates the poem both from French into English, and from Baudelaire's misogynist poetics of control into a self-reflexive and open one. Millay repairs Baudelaire's poem. The divergence between the two is paradigmatic for a deep rift in Western literary and cultural spacetimes, separating two starkly different poetics and two very different subject positions, one assimilated and scripted, one self-reflexive and unrepresentable. A brief look at approaches in retranslation theory that land on different sides of that rift frames the essay.
