Poetry and Dialogism

Hearing Over

M. Scanlon, C. Engbers, M. Scanlon, C. Engbers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137401274
• eBook ISBN: 9781137401281
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Linguistics

These essays extend an ongoing conversation on dialogic qualities of poetry by positing various foundations, practices, and purposes of poetic dialogism. The authors enrich and diversify the theoretical discourse on dialogic poetry and connect it to fertile critical fields like ethnic studies, translation studies, and ethics and literature.

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Introduction: Hearing Over

Mara Scanlon

The poet Paul Celan wrote, “The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an Over-against. It seeks it out, speaks toward it” (Selected 409). Claiming for poems an inherent addressivity—an awareness of the listener or interlocutor, and an anticipation of other voices, minds, or responses—Celan challenges what has become a commonplace contemporary assumption about the genre of poetry (or, more precisely, about the personal lyric, which is often taken as poetry’s default form): that it is private, that it is primarily for and about self-reflection and self-expression. But what if Celan’s became our new model for reading lyric or, indeed, all poetry? How would we think about the poetic speaker or voice, the forms and traditions of poetry, the personal and sociopolitical purposes of poetry, or the ethics of poetic address and of reading practices? What would this new poetry look like—or is it the poetry we’ve known all along?

The tradition of poetics that Celan’s assertion interrogates is frequently traced back to the powerful influence of the Romantic poets, who turned to and established the lyric as the vehicle for personal expression, theorizing poetry in language that is still frequently invoked—the unmediated “cri du cœur,” or Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.”¹ John Stuart Mill’s significant and oft-cited theory of poetry, worth reading at some length if only for being what Virginia Jackson has called “the most influentially misread essay in the history of Anglo-American poetics” (9), insists that poetry’s central core is personal emotion and that putting such emotion into language will not, or must not, modify or mediate it; but he also insists, importantly, that the reader or listener is not only secondary to the poem but even unwelcome there, a lurking or intrusive presence whose acknowledgement, accommodation, or response actually transforms the utterance itself from poetry to mere “eloquence”:

Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols, which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action.

All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy [ . . . N]o trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself [ . . . W]hen he turns around and addresses himself to another person; when the act of utterance is not itself the end, but a means to an end—viz. by the feelings he himself expresses, to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief, or the will, of another—when the expression of his emotions, or of his thoughts tinged by his emotions, is tinged also by that purpose, by that desire of making an impression upon another mind, then it ceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence. (348–49)

Mill’s figure of the poetic reader or listener as an eavesdropper onto what the poet rightfully tries to conceal is affirmed nearly 125 years later by the prominent literary theorist Northrop Frye, who says that the “poet [ . . . ] turns his back on his listeners” (250), and arguably has been an underlying truism of considerable literary criticism.

This volume’s founding assumption is that we must listen again to what poetry is saying, by whom and to whom, not by lurking at keyholes and around corners, but by taking as a given the possibility that poetry may be dialogic and engaged rather than monologic and private, that it may even be heteroglossic in its truest sense, containing different or even clashing discourses without muting them in some singular and finalized “soliloquy.”

The direct or indirect addressivity of a poem, and the responsiveness of its real or projected readers or listeners—what William Waters has called “the written word’s demand for encounter, for real relationship, presence, even intimacy” (“Answerable” 147)—are only some of the ways that we might conceive of a poem’s dialogism, the traces of its awareness of the Other (mind, voice, text, ideology, being, utterance). “Dialogism” is not a term that is employed narrowly; though it may or may not play out in speech acts attributable to separate speakers (what we might more narrowly call dialogue in a play or novel, for example), all understandings of dialogism include the idea of some sort of exchange (of ideas, of words) between two or more identifiably separate beings or articulations.² Dialogue may thus be traceable between voices, allusions, or discourses in a text (not simply juxtaposed, but impinging upon or shaping one another to some degree), or in the production or reading practice of the poem (for example, the reader’s response to or answerability for it, including possibly the way in which the poem anticipates, demands, or even enacts that response). It may be based less in voice, allusion, or citation than in a fundamental representation of, orientation toward, or response to otherness, as indicated by theorists such as Martin Buber or Emmanuel Levinas, or it may be traced in rhythm, intonation, form, or other poetic devices that encode or signal such otherness or exchange.

But in any of these cases, what is interrogated at its essence is the pervasive, central assumption that poetry is fundamentally one of two things: in lyric poetry, an expression of subjective, personal, isolated experience, a transcendent and self-sufficient cri du cœur; or, in epic poetry, a normalizing, impersonal, authoritative treatise or record which, guided by its confident cultural mandate, will not accommodate others’ voices and needs. Ironically, of course, these models of lyric and epic poetry are oppositional and create a reductive binary between two primary poetic modes, and yet both are functional, widely accepted, and used to combat the suggestion that poetry may be dialogic. In addition to the strict parameters for lyric poetry established by critics like Mill and Frye, the most notorious naysayer of poetic dialogism, and particularly epic dialogism, is the Russian social, linguistic, and literary theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, who insists that, although the poet may be aware “as a human being surrounded by living hetero- and polyglossia” of the relationship that exists between discourses, “this relationship could not find a place in the poetic style of his work without destroying that style [ . . . ] and in the process turning the poet into a writer of prose,” which echoes Mill’s discussion of (lyric) poetry and eloquence very closely (“Discourse” 285). In both cases, to become dialogic is to become something else, something that is ill-defined but is fundamentally not-poetry.

A few thinkers who have most meaningfully examined the possibilities for a truly dialogic poetry may be used to represent some of the established arguments for including the genre in dialogic criticism. To date many have done so by engaging Bakhtin’s logic and his wider theories of language and being. David H. Richter, for instance, in his foundational 1990 article “Dialogism and Poetry,” reviews Bakhtin’s strictures against the genre, which in some texts Bakhtin dismisses as inherently monologic (preferring instead the revolutionary, dialogized, and social genre of the novel) but in others seems to accept. Nevertheless, as I have also noted, literary criticism using Bakhtin has been completely dominated by analysis of prose, turning Bakhtin’s own limitations into a working maxim. Drawing on Ralph Radar’s methodical and rich 1976 essay, “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms,” Richter considers the possible relationships between the poet or self and the speaker in various poetic traditions, weighing for each the extent to which the self may be represented as other, as an objectified or decentralized being in dialogic relation to the reader or other voices/centers of consciousness in the poem. Employing Bakhtin’s terminology for language that is dialogized, double-voiced, or resistant, Richter concludes that Bakhtin’s own discussion of “poetry” is less authoritative than a “word with a loophole” or a “sidelong glance.”

Also endorsing the application of Bakhtinian theory to poetry in his 2002 essay, “Catullus and Bakhtin: The Problems of a Dialogic Lyric,” William W. Batstone argues that Bakhtin inherited a definition of the lyric, strongly enforced by Romanticism, that assumes the genre expresses the poet’s meaning without mediation, a transparent expression of private emotion by a coherent self (as seen clearly in the Mill quotation above), and this consistently limited his thinking about the lyric. Batstone suggests a fundamental rethinking of this logic based not in the dramatized voices or intertextuality of the lyric but in the theorization of the very self, which for Bakhtin is an entity formed interpersonally and “inhabited by the voices of others.” Therefore, the lyric is dialogized in its consciousness, where the self that is assumed to be its core is characterized by an emphasis on “irreducible noncoincidence between the voices which inhabit us and ourselves” (104).³

Michael Eskin’s work is the deepest theoretical reckoning with dialogism and poetry, and his interest in the ethical underpinnings of this discussion align closely with my own. His monograph, Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam and Celan (2000), does also contend with Bakhtin’s literary theories; reviewing Bakhtin’s strong dismissal of rhythm/form as a monologizing force and of poetry as aligned with repressive sociopolitical forces, Eskin provocatively suggests that we can read Bakhtin’s utterances on poetry much more positively if we take as our starting point the fact that all language is inherently dialogic⁴ and that the Bakhtinian reference to “poetry” indicates writing that submits to authoritative discourses or insulates itself from the social world, rather than a particular genre. Polyphony is possible in certain poetic utterances, though it is necessarily more difficult to achieve than in the novel because it must overcome formal homogenizing forces. But, says Eskin, the result is that poetry is finally more ethical, because the poet is answerable for all aspects of the utterance; poetry “turns a person’s indelible existential answerability for his or her acts (including speech acts) into one of its artistically constitutive moments” (388). Importantly and uniquely, Eskin expands the theoretical basis for the field beyond Bakhtin, focusing richly on Levinas, arguably the other primary theorist of dialogism, and including two poets, Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan, as fundamental philosophers and practitioners. Deeply invested in ethical relations, the four men discussed by Eskin provide models for thinking about dialogism as a fundamental, even pre-linguistic, dynamic or stance of being; an essential way of understanding self–other relations (including those between author and reader); and a manifestation of that way of being or interacting in and between textual or oral utterances, including translation and—or even most fundamentally—poetry. Far from conceiving of dialogism as a separable lens one might apply to poetry and/or poetics, then, Eskin’s book discusses them fluidly and at times indissolubly. In addition to its dense philosophical work on these primary figures, Eskin’s work shows starkly how limited dialogic literary criticism has been by relying too singularly on Bakhtin, an inadequacy that our volume also redresses.

In addition to these theoretical arguments for analyzing dialogism and poetry, foundational critical work has emerged in the field, work to which the essays in this volume will substantively add as well. For instance, Don Bialostosky has made significant contributions to the dialogic study of Romantic poetry in Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments (1984), among other works, and usefully expands our understanding of Bakhtin by drawing deeply on the writings of other theorists in his inner circle of intellectual companions, especially Valentin Voloshinov. Claiming that for these thinkers the very foundation of dialogism is poetic, Bialostosky offers a dialogic reading of the tonal orientation, formal attributes, and social interactions of speaker, hero, and listener in Wordsworth’s lyrics. Donald Wesling’s book Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry (2003) begins with a chapter in which he helpfully places Bakhtin’s genre theory in historical context and ventures a definition of a “poetics of utterance,” followed by a series of readings of diverse international poets through that lens. Interested specifically in the clash of social discourses, including its presence in the inner speech of the self, Wesling’s book is notable, too, for its sustained discussion of rhythm as a dialogizing function in poetry.⁵ Other critical work in dialogism and poetry has been strong but more scattered, with some notable examples being Lynn Shakinovsky’s interesting article on the complex “hidden listeners” that dialogize Emily Dickinson’s poetry; Catherine Ciepiela’s richly developed examination of the tensions between lyric voice and social language in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem “The Pied Piper” and, by extension, other lyrics; and Michael Macovski’s discussion of the complex Romantic “I” in terms of “the idea of consubstantial voices” (15) and the agonistic addressee in Dialogue and Literature.⁶ In essential work that effectively combines dialogism with other critical discourses, such as in “Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity,” Jahan Ramazani rethinks the ways in which we have read Euromodernist and postcolonial poetry as necessarily and always adversarial, positing instead two kinds of poetic dialogism: that between literary traditions and cultures, and that within hybrid, polyglot poetry itself, especially that of poets in the developing world who attempt to “break through monologic lyricism” to express a world in which cross-cultural dialogism or hybridity is, more than a literary device, a foundation of experience.

Jacob Blevins’s edited collection, Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre (2008), is a recent volume in the field dedicated to exploring the construction of the lyric voice and subjectivity. Blevins posits, in the introduction to that book, an inherently dialogic construction of selves and all forms of address that can illuminate, for instance, poetic encounters between speakers and addressees, between allusive texts, or between lyrics and the dominant cultural ideologies of their time. This collection is impressive for its historical sweep, considering lyric poems in the Western tradition from ancient Greece through American jazz poetry of the twentieth century. Despite its very specific title, the volume contains several essays that are only marginally engaged with theories of dialogism and not at all with Bakhtin, but that nevertheless do register what we might call agonis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Hearing Over
• 2 Dialogism and Monologism in “Song of Myself”
• 3 Aesthetic Activity in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms
• 4 Lyric Ventriloquism and the Dialogic Translations of Pasternak, Mandelstam and Celan
• 5 Robert Lowell’s “common novel plot”: Names, Naming, and Polyphony in The Dolphin
• 6 Poetic Address and Intimate Reading: The Offered Hand
• 7 Hasidim in Poetry: Dialogical Poetics of Encounter in Denise Levertov’s The Jacob’s Ladder
• 8 Reading the Process: Stuart Hall, TV News,
• 9 Dialogic Poetry as Emancipatory Technology: Ventriloquy and Voiceovers in the Rhythmic Junctures of Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge
• 10 Zehra Çirak and the Aporia of Dialogism
• Index