Lyric Interventions explores linguistically innovative  poetry by contemporary women in North America and Britain whose  experiments give rise to fresh feminist readings of the lyric subject.  The works discussed by Linda Kinnahan explore the lyric subject in  relation to the social: an “I” as a product of social discourse and as a  conduit for change. Contributing to discussions of language-oriented poetries  through its focus on women writers and feminist perspectives, this study  of lyric experimentation brings attention to the cultural contexts of  nation, gender, and race as they significantly shift the terms by which  the “experimental” is produced, defined, and understood. This study focuses upon lyric intervention in distinct but  related spheres as they link public and ideological norms of identity.  Firstly, lyric innovations with visual and spatial realms of cultural  practice and meaning, particularly as they naturalize ideologies of  gender and race in North America and the post-colonial legacies of the  Caribbean, are investigated in the works of Barbara Guest, Kathleen  Fraser, Erica Hunt, and M. Nourbese Philip. Secondly, experimental  engagements with nationalist rhetorics of identity, marking the works of  Carol Ann Duffy, Denise Riley, Wendy Mulford, and Geraldine Monk, are  explored in relation to contemporary evocations of “self” in Britain.  And thirdly, in discussions of all of the poets, but particularly  accenuated in regard to Guest, Fraser, Riley, Mulford, and Monk, formal  experimentation with the lyric “I” is considered through gendered  encounters with critical and avant-garde discourses of poetics. Throughout the study, Kinnahan seeks to illuminate and  challenge the ways in which visual and verbal constructs function to  make “readable” the subjectivities historically supporting white,  male-centered power within the worlds of art, poetry, social locations,  or national policy. The potential of the feminist, innovative lyric to  generate linguistic surprise simultaneously with engaging risky  strategies of social intervention lends force and significance to the  public engagement of such poetic experimentation. This fresh, energetic study will be of great interest to  literary critics and womens studies scholars, as well as poets on both  sides of the Atlantic.

Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse PDF

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