O Muse! Bitch, Please

In this interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen talks at length of appropriation and subverting pejorative language, stereotypes, etc. to assert authority and identity; we see this happen frequently in her work, particularly with the idea of the Muse: classically confined to the idea realm, the Muse, though the source of inspiration to the male writer/artist, cannot create of her own volition. The Muse is summoned when the male poet needs inspiration, and she delivers; however, she is isolated in her role as supplier, not doer. (Interesting male/female inversion there; also interesting to think of Mullen’s alignment of “muse” and “drudge” [menial worker.]) Sometimes the Muse is the beloved—however, she is never the author, she is never the poet; she is always objectified.

So Mullen removes the Muse from her pedestal and hands her a lyre (or a mic in a jazz bar, maybe?) which is where this gets really interesting. Why song? Here’s what Mullen says in her intro to Recyclopedia, which includes 3 of her books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge:

When I wrote Muse & Drudge, I imagined a chorus of women singing verses that are sad and hilarious at the same time. Among the voices are Sappho, the lyric poet, and Sapphire, an iconic black woman who refuses to be silenced. Diane Rayor had translated surviving fragments of Sappho’s ancient Greek poetry into an American idiom that sounded to my ear like a woman singing the blues. So Muse & Drudge, in a sense, is a crossroads where the blues intersects with the tradition of lyric poetry, as well as a text for collaborative reading and an occasion to unite audiences often divided by racial and cultural differences. Parts of this poem have been set to music by composers T.J. Anderson and Christine Baczewska. While many readers perceive Muse & Drudge to be a more insistently “black” text than the other two, I have written all of these works from my perspective as a black woman, which I believe is no less representative of humanity than any other point of view. (xi)

So there’s a glimpse into Mullen’s inspiration for Muse & Drudge, but my question lingers: are the sonic and/or rhythmic similarities from Sapphic translations the only reason behind the choice of song? Nope—so what do you all think Mullen’s up to? In her two other books in Recyclopedia, she writes insistently in the prose poem form—but in Muse & Drudge, we get quatrains. I like the line breaks—the space lets the simultaneously razor-sharp and punny paronomasia smack—and the speed by which she moves from critique to sympathy, all the while pushing pressure on different speech patterns and calling our attention to the embedded – isms in our speak. Besides allowing some breathing room, the format feels song-like, and the rhythms, rhyme, and refrain emphasize that more. Look here:

up from slobbery
hip hyperbole
the soles of black feet
beat down back streets (144)

She plays with syncopated rhythm and rhyme, and her alacrity is impressive, to say the least. Same question, though: why song? (Token grad school disclaimer:) If they are songs? If they’re not songs, what are they? Lyric poems.? So by writing lyric poems, what commentary is happening there (concerning the Muse, the woman, audience, the performative aspects of lyric, something else)? What is she thinking about concerning the roles of each? Is she thinking about them in the same way (song—blues, specifically, and the lyric)?

What is Lee Ann Brown up to? Her songs have a more folk song—y, hymnal quality, but seem to be doing some similar work to Mullen’s poems. Form is obviously huge to both of these poets (Brown says, “everything/ like the form/ is changed.”) Thoughts? How might these poets’ work inform our thinking about song and rhetoric? How are their songs and poems similar or different to Toomer’s and Notley’s? Or Sidney’s? How are these women subverting—or reclaiming, or something else—these forms?

In The Pines

While reading In the Pines, I couldn’t help but think about the Mackey essay, specifically this passage on page 88:

“… the quintessential source of music is the orphan’s ordeal – an orphan being anyone denied kinship, social sustenance, anyone who suffers, to use Orlando Patterson’s phrase, ‘social death’… Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where in back of ‘orphan’ one hears echoes of ‘orphic,’ a music which turns on abandonment, absence, loss… Music is wounded kinship’s last resort.”

The above passage helps me to begin thinking about In the Pines and its relationship to song.  The book seems to be an orphan’s song, a song about absence, loss, and fragmentation (of self, community, and language/literature).  These issues are introduced right away, in the poem’s first pages.  Here the poem’s “speaker” claims she is “the new species: no one.”  She says, “Kill it/for the human/area is over.”  So it would seem that the speaker is, in a way, orphaned from the species – she is part of a new species (called “no one”) – maybe she is not human or more than human… (Here I’m reminded of the Kaluli boy who, leaving the human, is transformed into a bird through song/loss.)  Calling the new species “no one” seems to me to be a really complex enunciation of loss that I doubt I can fully unpack – but something seems to be going on here with the fragmentation/absence of self that occurs in language, which the term “no one” seems to evoke.  (Pronouns themselves are shown to signify an absence and are often shown to be inadequate throughout In the Pines and Notley is often casting aside the “I’s” and “you’s” and “he’s” and “she’s” as poor modifiers for members of the new species.)

Furthermore, In the Pines is a self-proclaimed orphan of literature – orphaned because it is cut off/different from what has come before.  In both the Kaluli myth and In the Pines this orphaning leads to a transformation (in the myth the human becomes bird and in Notley’s book writing is “changed completely”) and this experience is best communicated through song.  The speaker describes In the Pines as “almost a story or a poem but it’s really a song because it’s ripping me apart.”  So again, we have a complex enunciation of fragmentation and loss tied directly to song.  In the Pines needs to be a song because only song, a thing orphaned, can break the bonds of literary kinship and transform into something new, changing writing completely.  Also, only song can attempt to enunciate the fragmented self, the self ripped apart.  What we’re left with is fragmentation and multiplicity, both structurally/formally and in terms of meaning, I think.  

That the book is called “In the Pines” seems to be yet another enunciation of how song transforms the anonymity and absence of the new “no one species" into multiplicity and plurality - because “In the Pines” is the title of an old American folk song and folk songs are these anonymous things passed along from voice to voice to voice to voice.

As far as my question goes: I thought I’d first get a discussion started above, though I’m aware the above paragraphs are rather unfocused/rambling…  If you feel inclined, please respond with your own two-cents and add to the discussion I’ve tried to start, or feel free to answer one of the questions I've listed below:

1. Let’s think some more about the plurality evoked by Notley’s book.  In a way, Notley seems to be playing with the conventions of lyric poetry.  The speaker is not the univocal, monolithic lyric “I”.  Instead the speaker is “no one,” a term which captures both absence and plurality.  "No one" can signify an absence of someone but also, if we emphasize the word "one" as a numerical value, the term can mean "not one" or not singular.  Can we draw some political implications from the way Notley is perverting the lyric convention? (Is Notley as anarchic and badass as I suspect she is?)

2. How is womanhood represented or absent in In the Pines? 

3. Mackey describes poetic language as “language owning up to being an orphan, to its tenuous kinship with the things it ostensibly refers to.”  How is Notley’s language owning up to it’s own tenuousness?  (Some close readings of certain passages or poems would be cool here.)  But why expose such tenuousness?  Why question the referentiality we all take for granted in everyday speech?  Rather than trying to fulfill some (impossible?) desire for freedom from signification, can we interpret such questioning as an act of resistance?  Against who/what? 

4. Can we talk more about genre and form?  Is In the Pines really a song?  Is it a lyric poem?  Is it prose?  Does it contain any narrative(s) anywhere?  Why/why not?  Why is the book broken up into different sections?  How are these sections working together?  What happens when Notley moves between verse and prose?

5. [Insert your own question here]

 

I'm a little confused (though that's nothing new)...

So, I'm not entirely sure if I should be commenting on Joe's post (which I would really like to) or be writing a new post to bring us back to Sidney for our upcoming week's seminar (which I'm a bit more loathe to do, for while I love medieval literature and the origin of the lyric with the literature of that time period is a blissful topic to me, I recognize few would share that sentiment). So, I'm just going to try to comply with what I think Cathy's email was asking and post an itty-bitty question to take us a half-step back, and then it'll be over and done, and we can go back to Joe's arguably more interesting material.

Joe brings up a fascinating idea that I'd like to explore: the function of the bridge. I'm actually pretty excited about this after reading Boulton's brief introduction, because she discusses the lyric insertion (which we see in Arcadia) as a "disruption." Not only are we considering form and space and prose versus lyric here, but the actual movement of the story; the narrative is chronological and moves toward a conclusion while the song "concentrates on a single moment" (181 in our coursepack). This disruption is so obvious to us that it hardly need be pointed out; Mandy actually mentioned that she usually skips songs when they show up in the middle of stories. (Don't feel guilty. I used to do that too. Then in middle school I started reading Brian Jacques--please don't judge--,and I realized how much the song was often essential to the story, and I've forced myself to read them ever since.)

Is it possible though, (and I'm really excited about this, so I'm going to get a bit histrionic), is it just possible that it can act as a bridge in the narrative when nothing else would do? How and to what extent? Why? How might this be accomplished in the brief example Sidney gives us in Book 1? Do you think he successfully reconciles this disruption in his format of the Eclogues? Do the Eclogues themselves bridge the Books successfully?

Cane and being Between...

Hey peoples. Something that I have been privately trying to do lately concerning our class readings is make connections between the literary/musical works we are covering and the disparate and compelling theoretical pieces we have encountered this semester. I realize that making this "theoretical"/"literary" dichotomy has its own problems, but I'm still doing it. While moving through Cane, I realized that something was looming constantly in my mind: the bridge that we read of in Michel de Certeau some weeks back--an idea that I am very grateful we encountered through this class. To refresh our memories, de Certeau writes that "Stories are actuated by a contradiction that is represented in them by the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority," later stating that "The bridge is ambiguous everywhere: it alternately welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy." Furthermore, de Certeau characterizes the bridge as "a transgression of the limit, a disobedience of the law of the place, it represents a departure, an attack on a state, the ambition of a conquering power, or the flight of an exile; in any case, the 'betrayal' of an order. But at the same time as it offers the possibility of a bewildering exteriority, it allows or cause the re-emergence beyond the frontiers of the alien element that was controlled in the interior, and gives objectivity...to the alterity which was hidden inside the limits..."

I know that the above is a lot of quoting to set-up my question, but I think there is a lot to talk about in connecting this week's reading and de Certeau's thinking. In what ways (and how) might we envision Jean Toomer's Cane as effectively (or uneffectively) working as a "bridge" of sorts? Some things to consider might be the unique format of the work itself (the difficulty people have in pigeonholing it as a certain genre), the author's shifting position of self-identification (and the racial divide constantly riding the work), the literary-historical timing of Cane, the physical locations described in Cane, etc.

As a way of sidestepping the possibility of each of us saying the same thing, I'll offer some other questions in sort of a grab-bag format:

*What other of our "theory" readings do you see having compelling application to Cane, and can you give us an example (Frye, Walker, Freud, et al)?

*We have talked at length about the ethos constructed in an artist's life experiences. How did reading the introduction to Cane influence your reception of the work and the role/situatedness of the author?

Sidney's always been my hero...

First let me say I must admit gratitude that our re-entrance into our blog discussion after our panel presentations is based on a novel. Nothing quite as wonderful as a plot to keep the mind engaged. …And, just a thought… with that in mind, how might we argue the importance of text and context when addressing song?
…But before I digress too much from my principal questions:
Before the beginning of the eclogues, in chapter nineteen, we are presented with Dametas’ awkward little song of self-celebration after Dorus’ slays the bear. In this song he gives thanks to Pan, somewhat mirroring the invocation of both Dorus’ Muse and Thyrsis’ “my god Pan” in their singing match. How does Dametas’ song (the first we see in Arcadia) set us up for the (potentially arguably) more dignified eclogues? The eclogues begin with Dorus and Thyrsis’ competition to prove their verbal virtuosity; however, this skill is to be proven by their ability to create in their audience the stirrings of compassion—he who expresses the depth and praise of his love with the greatest skill by eliciting the greater sympathy will prove the winner. How might this speak to song, as we have studied it, and how might the invocations play into this? Certainly, compassion may be played upon by presenting the necessity of man’s call on a higher power. How and to what extent is this power (in this case deity) an “other” or outside of the imagination of man, which is so greatly prized in a defense of poetry or song? How and to what extent might Thyrsis’ “balance[ing] the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature” (Sidney’s Defense of Poesy) in his verses complicate this?

Silent songs? or Fryes with that?

Maybe you want ketchup, maybe vinegar, maybe mayo for your F's so I'm asking a few questions below; take your pick. Though I do hope you'll address the last question (i.e., mention an individual poem or two).

(I will save my questions on Hollander for class but feel free to discuss his essay; his ideas on refrain might be pertinent to the below.)


Northrop Frye associates lyric on the one hand with music and on the other with the "pictorial," which (it seems) can refer either to the visual appearance of the poem or to the imagery it uses. He uses the words "babble" and "doodle" as shorthand for the two "boundaries" of lyric. (As a poet, I can't help feeling slightly infantilized. Goo ga.)

Between these boundaries is "purely verbal" "cantillation," or chant (rhythmic speech). We might read the title of the section of Anatomy of Criticism I gave you, "The Rhythm of Association: Lyric," as a reference to his attempt to locate the crux of lyric at the crux of music and image. (Elsewhere, he calls lyric "the union of sound and sense," which sounds like it doesn't map onto "music and image" but perhaps does if we understand "image" to refer to language's representational aspect.)

I'd like to know whether we can figure out how song would differ from lyric for Frye.

Couldn't we locate song at the crux of music and sense, just as we can for lyric? (Argue with me.)

Can we think about the difference in terms of genre -- which for Frye has to do with the relationship between author and audience? Here are Frye's definitions of the two genres I think are pertinent to this discussion:

* epos - presents "author/minstrel as oral reciter" with audience listening -- author speaks directly to audience
* lyric - "characterized by assumed concealment of the audience from the poet and by the predominance of an associational rhythm distinguishable both from recurrent metre and from semantic or prose rhythm" ["overheard"]

Perhaps he'd say song would count more as "epos," because in song, obviously, there's a performer and an audience.

A lyric poem that calls itself a song, then, is what?

A song without audience? A silent or silenced song? (Argue with me.)

Could there be a relationship between the silencing of the performative aspect of song and what Frye calls the dreamlike paronomasia (wordplay) of lyric?

Do any of the lyric/song poems in the coursepack offer a way of thinking about performance and/or audience that we might relate to Frye's definitions of epos and lyric? do they support his definitions? refute them? complicate them?

Doctor, heal thyself

I am thy poster for this week. I've had meetings and students in my office all day and now am taking a batch of students to the Drop Inn Shelter in Cincinnati, so won't have the question up by 5; I will post it first thing in the morning unless I can do it later when I return from Cinci. In the meantime, to aid thy reading of Frye:

from the glossary to Anatomy of Criticism:

EPOS: the literary genre in which the radical [fundamental] of presentation is the author or minstrel as oral reciter, with a listening audience in front of him.

LOW MIMETIC: A mode of literature in which the characters exhibit a power of action which is roughly on our own level, as in most comedy and realistic fiction [this is opposed to HIGH MIMETIC, which refers to literature in which the central characters are above our own level of power and authority]

LYRIC: A literary genre characterized by the assumed concealment of the audience from the poet and by the predominance of an associational rhythm distinguishable both from recurrent metre and from semantic or prose rhythm.

MODE: A conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters in fictional literature, or the corresponding attitude assumed by the poet toward his audience in thematic literature. Such modes tend to succeed one another in historical sequence.