Hi Carrie,That student’s notion of an opposition to the ‘lyric’ mode, as Tim’s reply suggests, probably has to do with a perceived hostility on the part of the avant-garde towards the personal.As Andrew Duncan baldly states it in a review of Conductors of Chaos:“Much of the politics of contemporary poetry is the struggle around the importance of the personality. Anthony Mellors, editor of fragmente, has drawn attention to: "what I see as a generaland abiding epistemological division between the largely anti-modernist mainstream trend in poetry publication/attention and the continuing tradition of experimental work inspired by modernismand the objectivists in particular."..... I would prefer to qualify the word epistemology: the knowledge in question is not so much of the outside world as of the processes of consciousness,especially as governing relations between the self and other selves. The mainstream approach is to take feelings, and awareness generally, as sacrosanct, merely unquestionable: a great swathe ofthe radical and experimental wing is pursuing a project of criticizing the immediate data of awareness, so as to find out the truth, and so become less selfish and more authentic in behaviour towardsothers.”(I find the basic premise of Mellors and Duncan very questionable, and the conclusion that avant-garde practitioners are somehow working to become “less selfish and more authentic” even more so, but it’s useful to have the dogma so bravely and baldly expressed.)
Your sense of ‘intensely lyrical’ poets within that tradition may be looking at other ‘lyrical’ effects, acoustic, descriptive, etc.? In other words there are a range of qualities associated with the word ‘lyrical’ that inevitably create confusion. But also the field is so huge that there are always going to be counter-tendencies and reactions.
JamieIn a postgraduate student's work, I've recently seen "avant-garde aesthetics" posited in opposition to poems that are "intensely lyrical" in contemporary American poetry and would be glad to hear others' thoughts. My own first response was the recollection of numerous "intensely lyrical" poets among Britain's "avant garde," if it can be so called. What say you?Yours,
Carrie