Pages That Sing
A Review of Sign and Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition
What is poetry? What is voice? These are the questions that editors Philip Brady and Shanta Lee ask in Sign and Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition, a wide-ranging new poetic anthology published by Etruscan Press. Sign and Breath features 49 writers from a wide variety of literary and artistic backgrounds. Each contributes “a single page that sings,” followed by an interview with one of the editors. In the anthology, sonnets and free verse, spoken word performances and documentary poems, persona poems and translations live together under the umbrella of voice. Brady and Lee thus encourage writers and readers alike to think about poetic making as an open-ended inquiry into aesthetic experience. This vision liberates the writers to speak capaciously about voice, whether through experiments in craft and performance, reckonings with literary and political histories, voicings of deeply held personal experience, or some combination of these things. Other genres of lived experience are never far away, either. The poetry is often in conversation with dance, song, musical score, meditation rituals, and shared practices of faith.
It is not surprising, given the subject matter, that the “lyric,” the “lyrical,” and the idea of “lyricism” should appear throughout the anthology. In their commitment not only to voice and address, but to performance and song, the editors broadly continue the work of Jonathan Culler’s critical volume Theory of the Lyric (2015). Culler’s book emphasizes lyric’s close relationship to ritual—meaning, the genre’s relationship to rhythm, repetition, and sound—in ways that align the genre more with song than with confessional verse. In representing voice as a ritualistic device that sets people in rhythm together, Brady and Lee’s curative work exceeds the self-expressive concerns with which lyric poetry is often conflated. The editors are most interested in poetry’s capacity to represent “the music of what happens,” as Brady, quoting Finn MacCumhal, puts it (19), where one must be as attentive to the environment as to voice, and where oral traditions, in which “poems did not belong to a certain person,” matter as much as singular voices do. The ensuing conversations are reminders to readers to see poetry as an embodied practice centering on the interconnectedness of bodies and breath. Genre and form are still important, but they are not the principal points of access here. For this reason, Sign and Breath is meant for many audiences, from casual poetry enthusiasts to creative writers to scholars of poetry and poetics. Because the interviews delve into each poet’s writing process, the interviews will be especially illuminating for students and practitioners of writing.
Another way to describe the poems across this anthology is that they seek out lyric intimacy as an encounter, or what Lee often calls “entanglement,” rather than as an expression of singular personality or personhood (20). Dwelling in the “failure” of personhood, as Bruce Bond asserts in his interview, is essential to understanding a poem as distinct from story and character (34). At times, the writers and the editors associate such a reach toward personhood with the hard-to-define term “authenticity,” which recalls more conventional definitions of the lyric. But Bond helpfully associates that reach with a “horizon,” rather than a singular ideal about what a poem is and should be. Bond’s short poem called “Peacock” encapsulates the idea that taking stock of personhood can be a failure, a horizon, and an entanglement at the same time. In remembering the loss of his friend and fellow poet, Geoffrey Hill, Bond channels Hill’s words. “I cannot write of Nobody,” Bond writes, approximating Hill’s voice, because there is “No one to narrate this.” Here, in the compressed space of one page that sings, another poetic voice scrapes away at the limits of narration. As it does so, Bond notes that Hill’s writing
turns
from an image of the self as peacock to praise the bird’s
bare corrosive scream. I cannot speak for no one. I try.
As Hill’s remembered voice turns into praise for a “bare corrosive scream,” uttered by the very bird whose plumage signifies lyric self-absorption, Bond’s own voice breaks through differently. Here, he acknowledges the limits of fully remembering the voices of others: “I cannot speak for no one.” But it’s that trying and failing to do so that gives his verse its most powerful voice.
Where Bond’s poem stages voice in an elegiac register, other poems engage in performative speech acts that account for deeper histories of social, political, and historical entanglement. Shara McCallum writes “May 2018: for my grandmother,” a dramatic monologue that speaks “to the dead and for the dead” (37). In her interview, McCallum explains that her work with the monologue makes it possible not only to reflect on histories of enslavement and colonization, but also to imagine different worlds for the personas who emerge from such histories. At other times, voice can be polyphonic, as Diane Raptosh shows in her documentary-influenced double sonnet signifying “a kind of earth-voice, as a disruption and remix of the words from . . . white supremacists” (143). In his own contribution, Philip Metres stages “Cell/(ph)one: A Simultaneity in Four Voices,” a poetic performance meant to be voiced by four separate voices at the same time. Metres’s poem seeks to “interrogate the monological aspects of a lyric,” and to thus “surprise us with the kinds of noise that we encounter in daily life,” from everyday phone messages to a message from a Guantanamo prisoner to his wife (212). As Lee puts it, performance invites “improvisation and permission to create a different kind of edit” with each iteration, making voice a source of dynamic interplay between each performer and audience (148). Writers in this collection are emboldened to play with what Claire Bateman calls the “tonal surges and undercurrents” (46) of everyday life on both page and stage.
At other points, poets conceive of voice through the poetry of witness, which accounts for the suffering not of the poets or speakers themselves, but of those around them. In “The Origin of Fear,” for instance, D. M. Aderibigbe bears witness to a teenager’s suicide attempt. “When I think of voice,” Aderibigbe explains in his interview, “I think of power” (77). Aderibigbe carefully uses the voice of another imagined young person to “make sure the speaker is learning about this subject at the same time as my reader.” By unpacking a moment of traumatic experience through lineation, image, and metaphor, he makes voice a subject of incomplete knowledge that speaks truth to power across time, place, and experience.
All the poets in Sign and Breath create entanglements in which voices can be made more fully heard, visible, animated, complicated, and thus more grieveable. Our grieveability, to paraphrase Judith Butler in Precarious Life (also in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, the work she subtitles “American lyric”), is the very thing that makes us addressable, whether in a poem or otherwise. Celebrating people, as poet Tim Seibles suggests more optimistically, also illuminates the possibilities for making a “vibrant general citizenry” thinkable (43). This anthology shows that both sentiments can be true, and that they are indeed deeply related. At a moment in which it might feel impossible to imagine such a citizenry, poetic voice can be an important source of collective memories that are also wellsprings for hope.
Melissa Parrish is Assistant Professor of English at Smith College, where she teaches postwar American literature. She is completing a book manuscript, titled Situation Normal: Emergency Poetics and the Rise of the National Security State, which explores the way contemporary poetry reveals and resists the U.S. national security state’s prominent role in shaping public emergencies. Her writing on poetry and the politics of crisis has been published in Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Women’s Writing.
