A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

A Companion to American Poetry - Группа авторов


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“is best equipped to raise feminist issues” (Armantrout 1992, p. 39, 40); Rachel Blau DuPlessis likewise associates epiphany with the sexist “foundational cluster” of conventions that underlie lyric, proposing that the genre uses literary aesthetics to sanctify repressive gender ideologies by positioning the female as the revelatory object in a matrix of representational scenarios that link “the sublime, scenes of inspiration, the muse as conduit” and “transcendence” (DuPlessis, 2001, p. 29) with gendered structures of power.

      Timothy Yu, tracing the marginalized history of the Asian American literary avant-garde, observes the racialization of the mainstream lyric epiphany, as well; Asian American poetry that “fits comfortably into what some critics have called the ‘MFA mainstream’ of the 1980s and 1990s, with its emphasis on personal voice, epiphanic insight, and loose verse form,” he writes, “has allowed Asian American poetry to become an acceptable part of the multicultural curriculum, a transparent conduit for those neglected stories that some have asserted it is the job of minority literature to tell” (Yu 2009, pp. 73–74).

      This shift of epiphanic origins away from sources in the landscape or private interiority to sources in language, history, and identity distinguish such recent permutations of the epiphanic mode and indicate its distinct affordances to poets urgently concerned with the subjects of life, death, and cultural memory at the margins. Importantly, these poets—who may openly embrace or resist association with the lyric tradition—continue to be drawn to the vertical, metaphysical valences of the epiphanic mode, whether they ironize and critique epiphany’s aura of transcendence or set out to claim its power, leveraging epiphany to gain access to the cultural authority that the epiphanic mode has infamously accrued. In disparate ways, M. NourbeSe Philip’s and CAConrad’s works speak to the serviceability of epiphany to contemporary poets who position their art in opposition to existing arrangements of cultural power. Demonstrating epiphany to be a far more flexible literary mechanism than oppositional rhetoric has proposed, they can help flesh out the impoverished picture of epiphanic poetics that emerges from pervasive critical identification of revelation with “mainstream” normativity and political complacency.

      “On their surface [my] poems approximate language poetry,” writes Philip; “like the language poets I question the assumed transparency of language and, therefore, employ similar strategies to reveal the hidden agendas of language. In my own work, however, the strategies signpost a multifaceted critique of the European project.” Referring to the massacre that took place upon the slave ship Zong, in which roughly 150 slaves were thrown overboard to their deaths to enable the collection of insurance money for the lost “cargo,” Philip identifies her work’s positioning of English, particularly written documents of English law that authorized human bondage, as the target of her critique: “The language in which those events [on board the Zong] took place promulgated the non-being of African peoples,


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