The Self as Multiple: John Beer's Essay on the Political Lyric Gathers Nathaniel Mackey, Bhanu Kapil, Melissa Buzzeo, Tyehimba Jess

Quite an essay in Spoon River Review: John Beer writes about the political lyric as he finds it in Blue Fasa, by Nathaniel Mackey; Ban en Banlieu, by Bhanu Kapil; The Devastation, by Melissa Buzzeo; and Olio, by Tyehimba Jess. An excerpt:

What connects these books for me, as part of a significant tendency in contemporary writing, is their commitment to addressing political issues through lyrical means, in ways that tend to expand notions of both the political and the lyrical. With regard to politics, for instance, Mackey, Kapil, and Jess all reference, in ways more or less explicit, the kinds of state and extrajudicial violence that fall under the traditional label of “political.” All four authors, moreover, center their writing on the claims of people subject to racialized or gendered marginalization. Here I must acknowledge that the framing of the discussion thus far reflects inevitably the subject positions of the writers whom I’ve cited. In other words, the very idea that a private utterance could be divorced from public ramifications (or that those ramifications might best be captured through their potential universalization) might only seem compelling to those for whom their status as a public actor was not continually threatened by violent breach. The history of twentieth century African American poetry has its own recurrent aesthetic rifts, but the trouble traced above around the Millian private/public split is not notably one of them.

A further feature they share, and one that to my mind most fundamentally captures the way in which lyric and politics come together in this writing, not as synthesized but as inherently mutually informing, is their sense of the self as multiple, as other to itself and often confounding to itself. Politically, one might say that it is this embrace of unknowingness, of continually coming across and coming to terms with new patterns of fascination and aversion, that underwrites the possibility of a noncoercive community. Aesthetically, one might say that this vision of the self as not altogether present, as temporally unfolding, is the truest vision of the lyric as what gives voice to subjectivity—a subjectivity that evades that mythology of the steady speaking subject which has proven so tempting a polemical target. This lyric self is overcome by the desire to expression, and also haunted by the limits of linguistic expression. It’s for that reason, I suspect, that these four writers have recourse so often to non-linguistic, even non-representational, forms of expression: that for Mackey and Jess, writing aspires to a form of music, while for Kapil and Buzzeo, it ventures toward a form of gesture.

Find it all at Spoon River Review.