(Not) Final Thoughts

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been

As a somewhat interdisciplinary project, “Transgeneric Narratology” suffers from problems of focus and scope. It would be impossible for me to offer a representative review of either narratology, with the companion critical movements of rhetorical criticism and narrative theory, or the rich tradition of criticism that comes from the multiple competing movements of the contemporary lyric poetry scene. At the beginning of this project, I hoped that the detailed tools of structural analysis offered by literary theorists in narratology, narrative theory and rhetorical criticism could give me a vocabulary and thought structure to apply to some of the more contested spaces in lyric poetry’s discourse. I felt that at a minimum, using more precise language to describe the logic-structures and reader responses of lyric poetry would be a useful addition to the craft discourse in poetry—a discussion among practitioners about how poetic effects are achieved. This has certainly been the case, as work by both Brian McHale and James Phelan have offered me highly insightful critiques of several lyric methods such as negation and focalization. But as I discovered the work of James Phelan, I found the discourse of rhetorical criticism, and those who problematize it as ‘ethical criticsm,’ began to address fundamental concerns that I have as a poet and critic.

Although Claudia Rankine has asked the poetry world to move past using her as an spring board into the conversation about ethics and the lyric subject, in my mind there is no more explicit or polarizing example of the tension between ethical reading/rhetorical criticism and its rejection than the wide-ranging reaction to her 2011 reading of Tony Hoagland’s poem, “The Change.” Hoagland is a generally respected member of the contemporary academic poetry scene with high status as a conference participant, well-respected university tenured faculty, well –published award winning poet who commands high reading fees and judges multiple literary awards every year. Rankine, although she has achieved some of these same accomplishments, has a slightly more marginal status—judging smaller prizes, teaching at a smaller school, less publications, reading at conferences but not as a keynote speaker. At the Associated Writing Programs conference of 2011, the academic literary world’s largest annual conference, Rankine read a statement about her reaction as a woman of color to Hoagland’s poem, “The Change,” in which a white speaker admits that he bases his sympathy of two women in a tennis game on their race.

The criticism of a major poet’s work as racially offensive, at the United States’ biggest creative writing venue, got a lot of attention from poets. On social media and blogs, on literary journal’s websites and in their editorial pages, in graduate writing program lounges and tenured faculty offices, a discussion blazed. There were multiple readings of the poem itself, and ad hominem attacks on both Rankine and Hoagland. Ultimately, there seems to be an intellectual stalemate between what I’ll grossly oversimplify as two camps. One, something like a neo-aesthetic “art for art’s sake” camp, suggested that it was inappropriate to judge poetry on the basis of “political correctness.” They screamed censorship and they argued that the convention of withholding judgment of a poet based on their poetry is necessary to allow poets the freedom to create challenging art.

A second group, empowered by the more political forms of literary criticism, argued that literature creates cultural mores and effects the people who read it, sometimes for the worse, as Rankine described her personal reaction to seeing a woman of color, with whom she identified, being subjected to the speaker of Hoagland’s poems’ prejudice. Thus it isn’t just “fair game,” but actually crucial, to critique art according to the ideology that forms it. Aesthetics are ideological, the second group argues. To allow for an aesthetic moral cop-out is simply to naturalize the ideology of the dominant at the expense of exoticizing or politicizing the aesthetics of the non-dominant.

With my background in feminist literary criticism, this debate struck a major cord with me. How many times had I been involved in discussions on social media, in classrooms, or at conferences, where a feminist poet (particularly Adrienne Rich, always poor Adrienne) would be held up as an artless political didactic when the structure (if not the message) of the poem being discussed was very similar to the work of a different poet who was supposedly more literary? It seemed to me like aesthetics was an excellent camouflage for privilege and prejudice.

After the feminist poet Adrienne Rich died this year, The Nation ran a review by Angie Mlinko of Rich’s last book, Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012. You’ll be hard-pressed to find the title of the collection on the first page of the review, because it is mostly concerned with a retrospective on Rich as a poet whose politics gave her formerly “formal and elegant” poetry a “newfound stridency.” Mlinko argues that by relinquishing her “inheritance” as a “daughter of Auden and Yeats” that Rich made her poetry more political than literary, influencing a generation of activists but not of writers. The aesthetic grounds on which Mlinko objects to the stridency of Rich’s poetry is its lack of “play,” “negative capability,” and “indeterminance,” forgivable perhaps of “enduring poets” like Blake, Shelly, and Yeats who “have had compensating visionary virtues,” but not of Rich. Marjorie Perloff, that postmodern language poet and theorist, is invoked to suggest that Rich’s “rhetoric is inherently conservative. This claim is an arresting reversal of the usual terms—“art for art’s sake” is supposed to be quietist; “feminist art” is supposed to be revolutionary” and indeed, Mlinko critiques Rich both coming and going. Here we are at the vortex of conflict in art—in which aesthetics and ethics collide and create this awkward two –pronged attack on revolutionary poets. On one hand, Rich is too revolutionary by abandoning the poetics of the male canon of poets. In the same essay, she is too conservative because she does not accept the indeterminancy and play of ethically and politically motivated postmodern poetics.

Where is all of this going? I had hoped that my studies in narrative theory would give me some tools to use when approaching the main problems of feminist poetics, particularly that battlefield of the lyric, but I didn’t expect the conversation to address it directly. The aesthetic reaction to how poems are read has a similar function in creating values around how poems are written, and in the following pieces by rhetorical and structuralist critics, I found a good bit of material on how one could create texts with features that result in very specific emotional effects that are desirable to feminist poets. Mlinko, Angie. “Diagram This: On Adrienne Rich. “ The Nation Jan 29 2013. Web. http://www.thenation.com/article/172513/diagram-adrienne-rich?page=0,0

Research Question: Once we are convinced by Phelan that ethical reactions are a part of reader’s response to texts and that they are created by rhetorical choices made by the author, then we can enter the ongoing debate of what ethical feminist texts should be (such as in Armantrout’s essay), while seeking to understand textual examples of features that such responses. In the work that critics trained in narrative theory have done on lyric texts, they have offered readings of several textual structures that might be useful to feminist poets in order to locate their discussion of abstract values in specific textual practices.