Alison, you sound like you are in the same boat as me. I am thinking
dump the verse novel, too (expletive) difficult! I use Bakhtin, The
Dialogic Imagination, and also Genette, Narrative Discourse, as manuals
or tools which can help, especially since I am not a natural writer with
talent to spare. Expensive book but Bakhtin may be worth checking out?
That's where dialogic and monologic come from. 

Now to the question: first think of philosophers as messengers who
simply tell us what thought is and Kant does this basically by an
empirical study of what scientists and artists are also thinking. Now,
to Postmodernism which claims that all is fluid and can move into
various categories, that there is no outside and no general things or
unity etc etc. So it is claimed that Aristotle and Kant are old school
and need not be bothered with and as a result we have this so-called
Postmodern which couldn't be more an application Kant's moral law
grounded on Aristotle then one could be if these two writers were read
and followed to the letter. More often then not being Kantian today
rests on not reading Kant. (I am not suggesting one should read Kant, of
course.) 

What both Aristotle and Kant do is understand that thought was based on
the idea of categories which are fluid and this seems accurate for their
times. This is also what Postmodernism also claims and as such is the
general dominant mode of thought, although it would more accurate to
describe Postmodernism as a reactionary political ideology which makes a
general and highly orthodox claim to be the most recent futuristic mode
of thought. What successful artists in these dire times for real thought
do, since we live in thought, which is to say thought is not inside us
as humans but that we live in an environment called thought, is use what
McLulan, of global village fame, called an anti-environment which allows
artist to arrive at real thought. So Kant is not telling us what to do
but rather provides an explanation of the way we can tell ourselves what
to do and not even know we are doing this and as such not begin to
think. Again, something like an anti-environment can get us out of this
obscure paradox. Now, to put everything into categories is a general
plural way to limit thought to a select few elite thinkers such as poets
since if everyone started to really think in a conscious way then
governments would fall all over the World. Postmodernism is an ideology
that insists on the use of categories to limit both thought and what
poetry can do and it does this by way of an illusion that all the
different categories which we are encouraged to search for are fluid and
open and by also opposing what it considers to be elite or privileged.
This way of thinking spreads like a virus which you can just as easily
catch from an engineering student studying her mathematics textbook
sitting next to you on a bus as from wherever else, boundaries to
categories being fluid. Hence categories are considered as universal
plurals excluding any other mode of thought since everything must be a
category. (It need not be Postmodernism that does this, just as so long
as whatever can do this. Aristotle's categories are used to do this by
opposing Aristotle and as such losing an anti-environment, also. It is
very tricky, beware. Also, universities act as breeding grounds for this
rather nasty virus which spreads across the globe.)

This is where lyric runs into trouble and as such becomes trapped within
an application of moral law, since lyric is considered as a category of
writing. Readers apply this moral law without always understanding this
is what is happening. A word of warning, you don't need total awareness
but only a small dose in selected ways. (Total awareness risks psychosis
and serious injury, also.)

So, for me, lyric is not a category of any sort whatsoever but a mode of
writing or a way of writing which is always a mode and never a category.
What happens when lyric poetry is introduced into novels is that it
seems to go flat. This explains that strange sort of flatness verse
novels written in a lyric mode seem to have. Also, with verse novels, it
breaks a moral code implicit in the categories which allow lyric to have
only one name and hence it can appear that lyric is also inside novels
to varying degrees or elsewhere, categories being plural and fluid allow
this. Lyric then is a single voice in one dimension which is so highly
abstracted that any apparent object which emits signs that it is an
object, like a cat, for example, loses it objective appearance and
becomes a spiritual essence which is a single monologic voice which has
a 3 dimensional feel to it. The way in which language poetry privileges
voice as a category by way of refusal also goes flat by linking lyric to
writing which by nature is dialogic. What happens at this limit of
lyric, where it meets dialogic language, is very interesting since this
is a liminal region so while the term dialogic lyric may say something
of what has happened to get to this region this strictly speaking is not
lyric but rather some new and novel mode comes into existence. What is
difficult here is not to think lyric as a category of language in the
way language poetry seems to set out to do. So voice also cannot be a
category but a mode. What voice does is carry affects as well as being
affects and which even in the most flat language poetry is still voice
being carried as affects and is affect. There can be a play of plural
and singular here, as well. Modes are never fixed unlike categories
which are fixed no matter how fluid a claim is made that suggests
categories are fluid relative to each other. (This is the basis of
postmodern relativism which scientists argue quite correctly against.)

So, lyric poetry is a single voice lyric which is both general and
univocal. So looking inside a novel we would not be able to find a thing
called lyric, unless we revert to it being a category rather then a mode
of writing. Again, modes cannot be categories (difficult to understand
and explain quickly. This idea can be found to an extent in the
Australian linguist, MAK Halliday, who is concerned with the mode of
language and not the categories of language such as speech and writing.)

In mathematics area of topology there is a demonstration of how one
dimension takes on the appearance of three dimensional space, called
Reimann space, from memory? If math can do it, poetry should have no
trouble making all sorts of 3D spaces from just one dimension.

Lyric has no ground and is only absolute deviation and also always
outside novels. Novels need more lyric because of the two different
relations novels and lyric have to time. Lyric is more concerned with
eternal time whereas novels are more toward ephemeral changing time of
often short orders of events. Lyric is then more then novels as an
outside force which also affects novels. What happens during a long era
of strong lyric poetry such as the one now beginning to end is that
novels appear to take on a more 3D and full appearance. This also
concerns the modern idea of eternity which Rimaud introduces in Season
of Hell which is the end of the fixed and unchanging finite idea of
eternity presented by Aristotle which is why Rimaud says so much for and
goodbye to Aristotle in his letters. This modern eternity is change
itself which we are inside as change in itself and as such appears as
unchanging and immobile. Lyric poetry links with or resonates with this
eternity and as such any poem which is a true lyric poem will always be
new. A true lyric poem can never be old unless this is a new oldness. As
poets who write lyric poetry know, true lyric poems are rather rare. In
between write novels or do exercises, maybe?

The flat lyric in language poetry is important because it sees an end to
an era. Like the rather strange flatness in verse novels this is some
strange liminal region. It is also interesting to note the flatness of
the large recent so-called postmodernist novels along with this flat
lyric style. 

Too much energy needed to go on.... except to say this is not a
conscious process itself but lyric appears unconsciously as if my magic
or miracle. It can begin by meditating on an object rather in the way
that an art photographer meditates on the object they wish to photograph
to get to the abstracted spiritual essence of their subject which
appears in an art photograph only as a miracle. Subjectivity can also be
created in this way which links again to novels which have characters
that begin as an absolute deviation creating body and subjectivity of
characters in novels. Also, dialogic refers to all novels and is built
into the language of novels at a saturated level where everything
becomes dialogic in novels. Hence again a lack of lyric in novels and a
need for novels to have lyric outside as more lyric. Bakhtin is commonly
misunderstood as category instead of mode. (Also, not dialog as in in
plays.) More lyric is an outside force wrt novels, basically. 

Note: This contains original thinking so please take care with
attribution. Also, I have not given bibliographic references to isolate
whose original thought is involved... Chris Jones










On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 19:30 +1100, Alison Croggon wrote:
> Ya lost me there, Chris! I was just curious to know what you meant by
> "lyric". I mean quite specific qualities, but they are quite possibly
> not be the same as those you mean (I have never been able to read more
> than a page of Kant). Maybe this - part of an essay/poem/meditation
> online here - might be useful in establishing/not establishing some
> common ground?) -
> http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_5_2001/current/special-feature/croggon.html
> 
> I just can't equate lyric with "moral law"! No matter how I try...
> Maybe after the fact and before the fact, but in the process? How? And
> how can you be writing lyric that is illegitimate? Who says? Some dead
> philosopher?
> 
> I am writing a novel too. I don't know if it is lyric or not, but I do
> know it's disobedient. It is both dialogic and monologic, but I don't
> feel that voices are denied anywhere. There are voices insistently
> turning up and interrupting what I think it's supposed to be and maybe
> the only moral law I can find in the process is that I have to listen
> to them, whether I understand why or not. Either that, or not finish
> the damn thing. Whether anyone else wants to listen isn't really my
> business, but nobody can tell me I can't do it.
> 
> xA