About the Model Research Collection

 

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about lyric thinking

 

All cultures have shortish, first-person poems that reflect an experience of the world—in the West we have come to call this “lyric,” a term that goes back at least to Horace, but is certainly centered by Petrarch. Is this a term that can be used to describe poems in non-Western languages, in traditions that do not have a name for lyric? Can poems speak to each other and to readers across linguistic divides? Do poems matter in the real world, in the roughness of political struggle and the poignancy of social belonging? These are some of the questions I think about and that this MRC seeks to foreground.

Many of us are familiar with famous English poems—poems we know to be canonical, like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or politically and nationally crucial, like Langston Hughes’s “Let America be America Again,” or poems that we turn to for emotional comfort or pleasure. Some of us may write poems we would call ‘lyric’ and wonder if they are any good; and some of us enjoy poems performed, whether that takes the form of the pop ballad or the slam poetry competition. 

But often in academic settings, lyric poetry is the province of high-aesthetic analysis, while popular songs belong to cultural studies or history. My project tries to get away from the old divisions between aesthetics and politics, between formal consideration of poetic devices and figures and national literary traditions, to ask: what is it like to experience a poem? What happens when we give ourselves over to the distinctive first-person view of the lyric—and ask: what kind of thinking is possible through this poem? What kind of connections or experience of the world does this poem open up that I had not seen/felt/thought about before? 

When we speak of “poetry” we often refer to that distinctive, almost undefinable lyrical quality of language that captures an encounter with the world in a striking image, an unforgettable phrase, a resonant line. Snatches of popular songs, nuggets of quotable wisdom, evocations of beauty, reflections on emotional intimacy or meditative thought—the subjects of the lyric poem run the gamut of human experience and appear in every language and culture across the globe. As an aesthetic object, the lyric is paradoxical in scope. Unique and particular, lyric speaks in the first-person voice and is deeply rooted in personal contexts; often difficult to translate, its nuances are sometimes near-impossible to grasp across deep cultural divides. And yet, at the same time, lyric also makes claims to the universal, speaking of timeless themes that defy historical contingencies as it seeks, repeatedly, to engage our most fundamental human feelings. 

The word “lyric” itself derives from the Greek lyrikos, a term referring to songs sung with a lyre, but in modern English, it has come to be associated more generally with the words of songs (“lyrics”), and with modes of emotionally-charged writing. Scholars still heatedly debate how to define the “lyric,” and whether this word, which emerges in a European context, can even be usefully applied to poetic forms from other parts of the world. One method—which I pursue here—is to take a multi-dimensional approach of lyric—as a kind of short poem, or a style of language or art, but also—most importantly—as a distinctive, first-person point of view on the world.

To trace the presence of lyric poetry in the world and to investigate its pervasive impact on the articulation of feeling, thought and sensation, on different cultural practices, disciplines, and media, is to think expansively about the place of literature and art in our lives. Not merely the province of literary scholars, lyric poetry thrives in various social contexts (marriages, funerals, religious services, ritual ceremonies), myriad places (at parties and readings, on the internet, in the club pounding danceable ballads, in group therapy rooms), and in a variety of textual forms (scrolls, ceramics, letters, albums, scrapbooks and children’s books, in addition to manuscripts and volumes of poetry). This Model Research Collection explores a multifaceted understanding of the lyric—from the material cultures of lyric production and dissemination, its performance and transmission across different audiences, to its cultural functions and political impacts, its philosophic claims and ethical aspirations. 

Some Key Ideas:
-    Global scope
-    Cross-disciplinary: literary works but also books on religion, anthropology, medicine, refugees 
-    Poetry as art but also as politics 
-    Centers subjectivity, selfhood, identity
 

 
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