The publication of Denise Riley’s elegy “A Part Song” in February 2012 marked the return of a major British poet to a readership that craved her distinct voice. Following the publication of her Selected Poems by Reality Street in 2000, Riley seemed to have turned exclusively to writing philosophical prose. She explored the anxieties of identification and the promiscuity of the “lyric I” in Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000); inner voice and language as a “bearable ekstasis” in a book co-published with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Force of Language (2004); and Stoicism, the affective nature of language and the unconscious, and the ironic recuperation of harm in Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005). These works reflected on the conditions of being a poet, and included some poetic specimens of her own within them, but no more poems came into view.
Riley held an important symbolic position as one of the few feminists working within the experimental British poetic community, and her recusal was felt by many (though Riley herself never publicly expressed it as such) to be a response to that community’s hostility. Certainly, her poetry had long been obsessed with exits. “When it’s time to go,” published in her most important collection, 1990’s Mop Mop Georgette, considered reasons to flee poetry’s “aggressively uncontrolled schadenfreude” which “reads a personal threat in everywhere,” while “professional unhappiness / taps on its wristwatch.”1 The poem’s title recalls “Time To Go,” attributed to J. H. Prynne in the English Intelligencer, in which the wristwatch-tapping realist is revolted by sows in a field, whose munching pleasure inspires “technical disgust” and musing about how a pig’s ear could make an admirable “female wallet.”2
Riley’s confrontations with such misogyny began in her youth. In the autobiographical essay “Waiting,” published in 1985, she recalls the impact of reading The Second Sex and A Room of One’s Own at age sixteen and secretly joining the Abortion Law Reform Association, before escaping her repressive Catholic school through a scholarship to read English at Oxford (she left after a year and went to Cambridge to read Philosophy and Art History).3 Later, as a single mother, she joined an activist community of socialist feminists in London. Her classic study of the post-war ideology of infancy and mothering, War in the Nursery,4 exemplified the historical turn in second-wave feminism. The project’s practical aim, as she explained later, was to inform campaigns for childcare provision in the 1970s.5
Her first collection of poetry, Marxism for Infants,6 reflects these struggles and mixes utopian political fantasy with the realities of poverty, insecure employment and housing, sexual discrimination, patriarchy, and the infamies of single motherhood. Though built from precarity, the brevity, clear and simple diction, and use of stanzaic forms in her poetical structures make them feel precisely sturdy. They can also become claustrophobic. The space of the poem is crowded with personal circumstances, political interpellation, malicious inner voices, and theories of the lyric as the “animals of unease.”7 The speaker rattles around nervously inside this “breathing cell” which simultaneously protects and imprisons her.8 Riley grew up being told that she was fated for the women’s prison: “you had heard that there was one, Holloway, and that was for you. [. . .] Your cell was already waiting for you. How could you endure the time? You rehearsed word games in preparation for your confinement.”9 The legacy of this threat can be felt in poems which consist of punishment and play.
Contained in the poem, the speaker of Riley’s poetry often reaches out to the reader with explicit desperation. When she finds herself “stood in dread / at home encircled by my life,” it is lyric which promises “to crack my separate stupidity.”10 Lyric’s ambivalent companionship stands in for a new reality of impersonal solidarity, because lyric — no matter how confessional — reveals that all affect, all our sense of ourselves as passionately original, is grounded in shared language. As she writes in Marxism for Infants,
the speaking, the desire to hear
the hearing, the desire to be spoken
is thus sweet massy a diffused
glowing extension11
All too often, however, the lyric address is unanswered or resisted, as in these lines from “A shortened set”: “Are you alright I ask out there / straining into the dusk to hear”; but “Am I alright you don’t ask me.”12 Having offered up all the enticements of its virtuosity and honesty, the poetry regularly expresses its disappointment with the reader’s failure to respond. Carefully theorized reciprocities of rhetoric and care disperse in the failing light.
For Riley, there is a political and psychoanalytic urgency to being heard. She cites Lacan citing Freud: “To make yourself seen reflects back to you, but to make yourself heard goes out toward another.”13 The need to be heard as a ground of solidarity, the anxiety about being seen as a condition of narcissism, can also be weighed against the visual and aural aspects of her verse. Using rhyme, song lyrics, and meditations on the voice’s worming passage through the ear, Riley’s poetry constantly amplifies the aurality of lyric. As she told Romana Huk, her habitual quotations from popular music are also tied to a strongly visual instinct: “I was trying to see if I could rope in the power of the banally and heartbreakingly universal qualities of those lines, but also juxtapose them with as vivid a visual line as I could work in with them — to combine musicality and colour into one bright patch.”14
Speech is vividly embodied in Riley’s poems: the speaking woman combines a “head turning and the voice beginning,” “the voice repeating a phrase which the mouth shapes,” “the mouth and the hand together encircling the words”; “I hear my voice run on / in the red heart of an ear, an ear coils round me . . .”15 Speech is a form of physical contact. It is a living, “sexed thing.” The tongue, a strange and encumbering member like “a swan’s neck / full and heavy in the mouth,” intrudes. Lyric does, too, swindling the writer with a false sense of autonomy, when all she does is edit language’s forceful priority: “Words race across me in polyphonic brigades, constantly swollen by the forces of more inrushing voices, and I can put up only a rear-guard censoring action.” “I” become “a vehicle for words from elsewhere, much as a ventriloquist’s dummy or doll is made to speak vicariously.” These words are heavy, intrusive, and the lyric they arrogate is “marked by echo, repetition and distraction.”16
Riley’s lyric is also powerfully visual, dwelling on colour’s affective properties, depicting what a bandaged eye sees, or responding to paintings by Samuel Palmer, Ian McKeever, and Gillian Ayres. It dreams of abandoning poetry for painting — “let’s just run something red and stinging rapidly down the page, shall we”17— and pulses with visual imagery: the “wound, taproot in its day, its red blossom in light”;18 the “jampacked rivers red with thickset fish”;19 “eye drape of sugar pink.”20 However striking, these images are not achievements Riley seems to trust. When imagery muscles in and “sentences come fast, give me no grief,” the speaker fears “that their whole tone is false and that their flow slid out / of some cheap ease machine.”21
To understand why Riley so regularly retracts the visual splendour of her verse, we must examine the figure of whiteness into which her images get cancelled. Whiteness marks the receding horizon of commonality. The common is visualised as “my great colourlessness,” achieved by diving “into the broken brilliant world / and float[ing] in it unindividuated, whitely.”22 Whiteness is what you’ll find if you “[g]o on working around my hairline with a blade”:23 the bone which proves me human. It is why the “Poor snow” is so “restless”: its “grey and violet / trillion souls” “can’t / find whiteness.”24 It is the “snow graphics” which allow the speaker in “A shortened set” to navigate. It is the unviolated paper. Whiteness is all colours in light, but none in pigment. It represents the absorption of the particular self into the common, akin to the process of deletion which Riley says characterizes her lyric writing. It is also an anti-poetic fantasy of eliminating the restlessness of the imagination.
Another anti-poetic device Riley uses to halt the rush of imagery is the apothegm. The poems often veer into statements of “formal tenderness” or violence, their “bland authoritative tone” the legacy of “stiff grief” and “years of reworded loss.”25 This creates a tidal instability in the lyric. Refusing the “okay life whose feeling / was kept collared and pinned down,”26 the poems rage for the “closeness just not found in a true human love.”27 Then, drawing back in embarrassment, they mask their passions with sententiae. The reader is solicited, but also immediately shut up by rhetorical questions with ready answers: “I think that’s it. As I must think it is like this for you — / it is, isn’t it. Don’t tell me that edge that I never believe.”28 These vacillations of tone and affect, disclosure and withdrawal, reflect the difficulty of writing an impersonal lyric through personal reflection. She described the challenge to Romana Huk:
I end up trying to use bits of personal life relatively
impersonally, by taking snippets which could be
from any life marked by needs and disappointments
and longings, and trying to give these full weight
and full presence, but not by individualising them
so completely that I’m telling a personal narrative.29
The personal life thus commemorated would be available to any appropriation.
This idealization of the dissolved self is thrown into question by “A Part Song” and the long essay on the same theme, Time Lived, Without Its Flow.30 These texts also propose a different explanation for Riley’s silence in the late 2000s. They were written following the sudden death of her son Jacob. Riley found herself questioning many of her philosophical conclusions: “I’d believed that thought is made in the mouth, is often discovered only through speaking aloud. Now on the contrary, to my own astonishment and embarrassment, my mouth was bluntly refusing to pronounce the phrase that waited clearly if silently voiced in my head.”31 More than any impersonal solidarity constituted by a sharing of language or cerebral extimacies, mourning makes you feel like are occupying “two lives” at once: “you feel that the spirit of the child has leaped into you. So you are both partly dead, and yet more alive.”32
“A Part Song” resembles Riley’s earlier lyric vacillations, shifting deftly between a myth and banality, despair and irony, from Orpheus to the “bother” of suicide, Persephone to the dead’s urge “to press their chinos.” This “song” of parting is broken into twenty prosodically various parts which culminate in the admission:
She do the bereaved in different voices
For the point of this address is to prod
And shepherd you back within range
Of my strained ears; extort your reply
By finding any device to hack through
The thickening shades to you, you now
Strangely unresponsive son [. . .]33
In these lines (echoing Eliot’s working title for The Waste Land) the bereaved mother becomes Echo — voice evacuated of its body and “condemned to repetition,”34 balancing the narcissistic gaze with its unheeded address — which Riley had long advocated as the figure of writing itself.
The loneliness of the unrequited speaker has been the consistent tragedy of Riley’s poetry: “Insane with loneliness I wring / the tissues of the air to force / the full words that would answer me.”35 In its final quatrains, “A Part Song” does extract an answer to the speaker’s call. Echoing “Lycidas” and The Tempest, the dead listener begs for quiet:
O let me be, my mother
In no unquiet grave
My bone-dust is faint coral
Under the fretful wave
The dead want silence; to remain in life is to make sound. This songlike refrain reminds us of the poem’s opening apostrophe: “You principle of song, what are you for now.” This is the work of elegy: to rediscover the idea of poetry, beginning with its practice. Throughout her writing life, Riley’s readers have been listening intently and answering the call of her principled and original lyric voice. Her work teaches us that to make song is to resist death.
1 Denise Riley, “When it’s time to go,” in Selected Poems (London: Reality Street Editions, 2000), 59.
2 The English Intelligencer, 2nd ser., 8 (July 1967): 403–04. The poem is not included in Prynne’s Poems.
3 Denise Riley, “Waiting,” in Truth, Dare, Promise: Girls Growing Up in Fifties Britain, ed. Liz Heron (London: Virago, 1985), 248.
4 War in the Nursery (London: Virago, 1983).
5 “Historical Passions: Reflections in the Archive?,” in History Workshop Journal 44 (1997): 238.
6 Marxism for Infants (Cambridge: Street Editions, 1977).
7 “A shortened set,” Selected Poems, 40.
8 “Well all right,” Selected Poems, 66.
9 Waiting,” Truth, Dare, Promises, 242.
10 “A shortened set,” Selected Poems, 42–3.
11 “the speaking, the desire to be heard,” Marxism for Infants (1977), n.p.
12 “A shortened set,” Selected Poems, 39.
13 The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 109.
14 “In Conversation with Romana Huk,” PN Review 21.5, no. 103 (May–June 1995): 17.
15 “Ah, so,” Dry Air (London: Virago, 1985), 48.
16 Force of Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 20.
17 “Well all right,” Selected Poems, 67.
18 “Knowing in the real world,” Selected Poems, 54.
19 “A drift,” Selected Poems, 68.
20 “Milk Ink,” Selected Poems, 104.
21 “A drift,” Selected Poems, 69.
22 “The ambition to not be particular speaks,” Dry Air, 54.
23 “Cruelty without Beauty,” Selected Poems, 70.
24 “Poor snow,” Selected Poems, 63.
25 “Cruelty without Beauty,” Selected Poems, 70.
26 “Red Shout,” Selected Poems, 75.
27 “Cruelty without Beauty,” Selected Poems, 70.
28 “So is it?” Selected Poems, 73.
29 “In Conversation,” PN Review, 17.
30 Time Lived, Without its Flow (London: Capsule Editions, 2012).
31 Ibid., 38–9.
32 Ibid., 14.
33 “A Part Song,” London Review of Books, 34, no. 3 (February 2012): 14.
34 Selected Poems, 110.
35 “Two ambitions to remember,” Dry Air, 56.