Dec 6, 2005

yamas Naropa...

today i attend the final class of my Naropa career...
...next semester is thesis semester which means NO campus hours...just lot's and lot's of trolling away under the bridge of my desk trying to articulate and answer that questions for the ages..."what IS the Analytic Lyric...?"

for now i'm going with lyric of contention a la Silliman via Temblor...

ACTS in contention...

kalioraxi!!!
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2 comments:

House Press said...

Yes, what is an analytic lyric? Send it along!

1:08 PM
John Sakkis said...

the title of my thesis proposal is "The Analytic Lyric: ACTS In Contention"

here's what David Levi Strauss had to say in his editor's note to ACTS 7/ Analytic Lyric..."This issue of ACTS is being sent out under the sign of "Analytic Lyric," a term which at this point must be followed by a question mark. That is how the term appears in one section of a talk given my Michael Palmer in Iowa city last year ["Lyric Practice (Analytic Lyric?)," printed in Pavement 7]. Michael begins with a discussion of Jack Spicer's work (esp. After Lorca), goes on to Holderlin ("No sign/ Binds") as an early enactment of
"the anxiety of signification" and "the problematics of self-expression," and then focuses on "two poets who are important to this notion of an analytic lyric"--Edmond Jabes and Paul Celan, both of whom work toward "the hope of recovering the meanings of words in a time when words have lost their meaning." Michael proposes the relevance of this work to contemporary practice as a radical renewal of certain aspects of the lyric tradition:"...the taking over of the lyric concentration on the code itself, on the texture of language, which is something that's always been an intense focus in lyric poetry...taking over the condensation of lyric emotion and focusing it then on the mechanics of language...and using that then in the case of Jabes and Celan, among others, like Cesar Vallejo, as a critique of the discourse of power, to renew the function of poetry"

Benjamin Hollander's approach to the Analytic Lyric is perhaps a tad less elusive..."a critical interpretation of a text can itself constitute an analytic lyric rather than simply a normative or explicative approach to a work: an analytic lyric (by which i mean a writing) that can inhabit a site where poetry and the methods of examining it converge in a critically informed music; a writing moved to a dramatic and participatory lyric gesture by the occasions and/ or poetic texts which provoked it. These kinds of writing remain outside the canon of the critical establishment--primarily because they break down the status of the expository, essay form as the singularly adept critical method--and they represent the work of such seminal figures as Robert Duncan (The H.D. Book), Paul Celan (The Collected Prose) and, more recently, Susan Howe (My Emily Dickinson)."

let's not even get into the irony of writing an expository essay ABOUT the analytic lyric when the analytic lyric as Hollander espouses challanges the status quo of the expository essay form (blame it on The Kerouac School...)

also, a useful way to think about Hollander's 'complementary sense' of the Analytic Lyric is to reverse it to Lyric Analytic...in other words, an analytic that functions as lyric about or into a lyric (book)...

an excerpt from Holander's review "I Think I Understand Alan Davies' Name"

(how it appears on the page)

"NAME
Alan Davies
This
$5.00

If the words from the start say Name Alan Davies This, if they mean this book, if they mean it will name him by his words from the start--and they do--we start to. Perhaps any given name asks as much to start with, if only silently, if only to accept it on the order of a vacant dare for now. This one does. And we do."

maybe this helps...?

4:49 PM

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