In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, philosopher Alva Noë posits that underlying the innate human urge to make and experience art is not the pursuit of an object (noun), but the engagement of a process (verb). Specifically, that art-making is a form of research.
Most artists would agree, I think: the product may be what’s prayed for, but the process is what’s lived. What strikes me as novel in Noë’s approach is to frame art-making and the urgency that instigates it specifically as an essential kind of research, a vital practice of investigation into ourselves and the world. “Art provides us an opportunity to catch ourselves in the act of achieving our conscious lives, of bringing the world into focus for perceptual (and other forms of) consciousness,” Noë writes, in response to which I think: likewise. That is, migraine may be unwelcome and it may not mean, but it is a means of research into the range of us.
“The law is on the side of the normal,” says Virginia Woolf, and who would argue? In pain or ill, “we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.” But desertion by means of conscription insists we join up as much as we leave behind. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, our novel rations comprise not only our altered perception but our altered relationship to language, too. “In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality … with the police off duty, we creep beneath … and the words give up their scent and distill their flavor.”
Intralanguage, extralanguage, words that give up their scent. Poetry is a genre “in which the rules of language and narrative can be subverted,” The New York Times helpfully explains on the occasion of basketball star Kobe Bryant’s retirement announcement via poem. “Poetry is the place where language gets to be as strange as it actually is,” says Mary. Poems are things made of language striving to uncover, engage, even reinvent the way language works and thereby the way it works on us—to reveal and flourish via malleability: language’s, ours.
In the conversation of contemporary American poetry, no word is more frequently used or less conclusively defined than lyric, which is sometimes an adjective, sometimes a noun. Attributed multiple and often contradictory meanings over the centuries, these days, it speaks variously to immediacy, intensity, intimacy, subjectivity, and the expression of revelatory thought or feeling in burstlike or fragmented form. Sometimes it’s understood as the voice of the poet talking to herself under the normal conditions of an individual’s private, fractured thoughts; sometimes as the personal expression of a fictional speaker; sometimes as the performance of the mind in solitary speech. Or some combination thereof. Coherence and cohesiveness can be characteristic, but so, too, dissociation and fragmentation. We say lyric leap, lyric voice. Do we say lyric mind?
“Sappho is simultaneously losing composure and composing herself, falling apart in the poem and coming together as a poem that seems to speak, with heightened eloquence,” writes Longinus in the seventeenth century of the Archaic Greek poet widely considered to be the wellspring of the Western lyric tradition. “From this accidental peculiarity of ancient writers, the criticks deduce the rules of lyrick poetry, which they have set free from all the laws by which other compositions are confined, and allow to neglect the niceties of transition, to start into remote digressions, and to wander without restraint from one scene of imagery to another,” writes Rambler in the eighteenth century. In the late twentieth century, Richard Fineman proposes “a new model of lyric subjectivity in which the divided subject of modernity ‘experiences himself as his difference from himself.’” Sound familiar?