The Body
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Song is breath: a vibration that sweeps through the body and produces somatic effects. The sound of lyric is first sensation and rhythm; its images erupt from and call forth the body’s senses. Lyric poetry, whose craft is so close to the physical feeling of phonic enjoyment, draws from the phenomenal experience of the human body, articulating forms of consciousness, feeling, intimacy, pain, and pleasure. The poetry of eroticism and suffering, of tactile discovery and medical vulnerability, of heat, cold, and “rain, wild rain” grounds lyric in the body itself. |
featured titles
Poetry and the Fate of the Senses
by Susan Stewart
University of Chicago Press, 2001. A classic study of lyric’s central role in our culture, Stewart’s book insists on the importance of the senses in the making and reception of poetry. Poetry’s purpose, she argues, is “to counter the loneliness of the mind, or to help it glean, out of the darkness of solitude, the outline of others. Poetry…makes tangible, visible, and audible the contours of our shared humanity.”
How Can You Write a Poem When You Are Dying of AIDS?
by John Harold, editor
Cassell, 1993. One of the first volumes of poetry to chronicle the experience of the AIDS epidemic among gay communities, the poems collected here resonate with us once again in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This anthology also reminds us that lyric expression gives voice to communal suffering: constituting unexpected solidarities, and forcing us to hold the suffering of the body sharply in view. It is not surprising that poetry has become a powerful therapeutic tool in medicine and healing.
Cultivation and Catastrophe
by Sonya Posmentier
Lyric poetry often voices the entanglements of the natural world with human culture; Posmentier’s book explores how it becomes the form of Black literary response to environmental change, whether the legacy of enslaved labor, forced and free migration, or the destruction and displacement brought by natural catastrophes. Tracing the links between poetry, African-American and postcolonial studies, this is a probing study of literature, environmental and racial politics.