Performance & Materiality
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Our contemporary experience of lyric is often on the page or screen, but the long history of lyric expression in inextricable from performance and material objects. Lyrics as sung words have complex trajectories in all cultures—set to music and instrumentation, but also sung or chanted (individually or in groups), intoned in call and response, recited, and echoed. Lyric performance is often a full-body enterprise, engaging dance, drama, and ritual actions. To think of how lyric moves in and across cultures is also to investigate the media in which poems are circulated—not only books and manuscripts, but also in ephemeral letters and postcards, flyers and graffiti, paintings, ceramics, film, radio, social media. |
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Cup with Rooster and Poem, 19th century, Yale University Art Gallery. These rooster cups contain written poems. The vessels represent a fusion of styles and the incorporation of variously coloured pigments in Chinese ceramics was representative of Qing trade (with Europe and others) and dynastic expansion. |
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Poem in Shikasta script, 1779. Yale University Art Gallery. Shikasta, a Persian calligraphic poetric style, "favours beauty over legibility" -- an aestheticised, highly symbolic form of poetry. |
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Ragini Deva Gandhara, from a Garland of Musical Modes (Ragamala) manuscript, 18th century. Yale University Art Gallery. Written early 19th c, inspired by the Persian poet Hafez, 12 nameh - books of poetry, symbol for a stimulating exchange and mixture between "Orient" and "Occident" -- exchange: Germany/ Middle East, Latin / Persian, Christian/Muslim. |
featured titles
Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages
by Seeta Chaganti
University of Chicago Press, 2018. What is it like to experience poetry through the body? Chaganti argues that for premodern audiences, poetic form emerged as an experience mediated through a culture of dance – one that engaged the irregular forces of virtual motion generated by the dancing body. She reads medieval poems through artworks, paintings and sculptural depictions of dance, suggesting a new way of reading these works—and a new theory of embodied lyric encounter.
Writing Better Lyrics: The Essential Guide to Powerful Songwriting
by Pat Pattison
Writer’s Digest Books, 2009 (2nd ed.) [first pub. 1992] A beloved how-to book on writing song lyrics, now in its widely-influential second edition, Pattison’s approach to song reminds us of lyric’s earliest manifestation—as words set to or for music. “Lyrics” in popular parlance simply mean “the words of a song.” This book is an invitation to embrace the affective, playful, sometimes sentimental, sometimes corny, but always intensely expressive quality of song-making.
Poetry in a Global Age
by Jahan Ramazani
University of Chicago Press, 2020. One of the foremost living critics and theorists of contemporary poetry, several of Ramazani’s works are part of this MRC. In this book, he explores what lyric poetry can tell us about globality and the crossing of the boundaries of national literatures. Lyric, he shows, has much to say about world literature and politics; it tackles war and migration, climate change and ecocriticism, translation studies, tourism and the remaking of cultural geographies. “Even when poetry seems locally rooted,” he writes, “its long memory of forms and words, its connections across centuries, continents, and languages, make it a powerful imaginative resource for a global age.”
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (fourth edition)
by Roland Greene et al eds.
Princeton University Press, 2012. The major reference work for poetry and poetics across a wide range of literary traditions, this encyclopedia cuts across multiple historical periods and is the go-to source for students and scholars. Now in its fourth edition, its history of publication tracks an intellectual and political expansion of our understanding of what poetry is, making it an increasingly heterogenous compendium of sometimes competing visions of poetics as a field.
The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries
by Roland Greene & Stephen Cushman eds.
Princeton University Press, 2016. A selection of essays culled from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, this anthology provides a survey of the history and practice of poetry in over 100 literary traditions from across the world with an emphasis on non-Anglophone and non-Western contexts. Originally envisioned as The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries (1996) and renamed twenty years later, the reshaping of this volume highlights a scholarly reimagining of the diversity of global poetic contexts.
West-Eastern Divan
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Eric Ormsby ed. & trans.
Gingko Library, 2019. In 1814, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read the poetry of the fourteenthcentury Persian poet, Hafez of Shiraz, and was inspired to write his own divan (a collection of short poems) as a dialogue between German and Persian literary traditions. This collection, known as the West-Eastern Divan [West-östlicher Divan] was first published in 1819 and has since become an emblem of world literature, understood as a conversation between cultures.