Lyric As a Genre Among Other Genres / Reading Lawrence Giffin Through Steven Zultanski

One to note at Jacket2: Steven Zultanski reviews "tricky book" Christian Name (Ugly Duckling Presse 2012), by Lawrence Giffin. Why tricky? "[I]t’s the kind of book that seems to do one thing and then actually does another." Zultanski also knows what the book is not: "...[I]t avoids being a stylistic exercise in post-Language writing by eschewing a focus on medium-specificity and instead commenting on explicitly articulated subject matter; it avoids being a commentary on its explicitly articulated subject matter by tying that subject to broader philosophical questions; and it avoids being an aestheticized philosophical meditation by aligning its philosophical questions. . . ."

Otherwise, the collection is "about a topic: the 'feral-child' Genie, who was kept in isolation by her family until age thirteen and then submitted to years of experiments and study and exploitation by researchers looking for clues to language development." Lest you find that "just some intellectually banal postmodern bullshit":

In fact, the poems pretty frequently veer off into areas of concern that are not easily connected to Genie’s story, like depression, religious faith, and the rhetoric of cults. It’s not that you can’t tie these things back to Genie (which, of course, you can), but that many poems seem aimed at intentionally incongruous topics, such that it becomes a challenging interpretive game, which I’m not going to play, and I assume most readers will not play, to fit them all together. What’s more, the poems often become so caught up in their tortured syntax and layered discursive registers that it becomes difficult or impossible to say exactly what they are “about.” Here’s a stanza from “A Childish Passion for Balls”:

Your thoughts turned to low clouds. They are meat agape. And sprechen veritas. They are wheelchair effervescence in orthopedic declension, hands across my America that have a little tea service.

And here are the opening lines from one of the longest and most complex poems in the book, “We Laid It Down. We Got Tired.”:

Not more or less deprived of ground regardlessly given by a syphilitic’s tube of concealer, I still have my likes, my dislikes, caryatids of fecal columns grown thin and winded with righteous authority, that is, by my need for speech.

You could tediously close-read these lines and perhaps make something of them. We’re all adept at pulling out words and phrases and treating them like keys to the poem. But I think that it would be more fruitful to read Christian Name more broadly, in terms of its genre: the lyric. Before doing so, I would like to say a few words about the lyric as a genre, and not as another name for poetry. The lyric is a malleable set of techniques, stylistic devices, and ideas that can be used to create certain literary effects. That is all. It has no privileged relationship to the body, no privileged relationship to the “self,” and no privileged relationship to poetry as such. Historically, it is occasionally seen as the dominant mode of poetry, or the most poetic of poetic genres. This is the case today, and has been the case more or less since Romanticism. But equating the lyric with poetry as such naturalizes it and elevates a few of its specific literary effects to the level of ontological description: as if the difference between self and other could be best rendered by a certain kind of line. The lyric is a genre among other genres, as poetry is an art among other arts.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s unimportant or extinct: even if this naturalization is a historically specific lie, it is nonetheless an operative lie...

Find out why at Jacket2. And you can actually read Giffin's "We Laid It Down. We Got Tired." and his own thinking on the poem, at Poetry Society of America.