Poetry, Politics, and the Lyric Subject

Who or what writes poetry? What is poetry's source or origin? And who or what makes history? Who are the agents of politics and who its objects? This book seeks to think these two sets of questions together, in an attempt to look differently at what both poetry and politics 'make happen' (to use Auden's phrasing), as well as to consider what a political or poetic 'happening' might actually be. In this endeavour, Daniel Katz examines several paradigmatic sites where these questions become especially fraught or interesting: Yeats' response to the Easter Rising and Neruda's to the Spanish Civil War; the uproar over André Breton's texts defending Louis Aragon from prosecution for his poem 'Red Front'; African-American Beat poet Bob Kaufman's re-elaboration of Surrealism and Dada in the 1950s; Robert Duncan's 'revisionary' reworking of Pound's legacies in the context of queer poetics and 60s radicalism; Michael Palmer's striving for new forms of engaged poetry in the 1980s; and more recent work by Denise Riley and Juliana Spahr, in the context of both feminist and Marxist thought. As the book's sub-title indicates, this study is guided and haunted by Jack Spicer's reflections on the 'big lie of the personal', and their implications for formulations of both lyric and political subjectivity and agency. Throughout, Spicer's thought provides a subterranean through-line leading from the 'impersonality' of T. S. Eliot to the 'transpersonality' recently explored by Denise Riley.