A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

“is best equipped to raise feminist issues” (Armantrout 1992, p. 39, 40); Rachel Blau DuPlessis likewise associates epiphany with the sexist “foundational cluster” of conventions that underlie lyric, proposing that the genre uses literary aesthetics to sanctify repressive gender ideologies by positioning the female as the revelatory object in a matrix of representational scenarios that link “the sublime, scenes of inspiration, the muse as conduit” and “transcendence” (DuPlessis, 2001, p. 29) with gendered structures of power.

      Timothy Yu, tracing the marginalized history of the Asian American literary avant-garde, observes the racialization of the mainstream lyric epiphany, as well; Asian American poetry that “fits comfortably into what some critics have called the ‘MFA mainstream’ of the 1980s and 1990s, with its emphasis on personal voice, epiphanic insight, and loose verse form,” he writes, “has allowed Asian American poetry to become an acceptable part of the multicultural curriculum, a transparent conduit for those neglected stories that some have asserted it is the job of minority literature to tell” (Yu 2009, pp. 73–74).

Demonstrating the reverberation of these critiques across critical and poetic discourses, White charts the emergence of the “lyric shame poem” in the 1990s, a trend marked by the topos of embarrassment about the lyric speaker’s own impulses toward epiphany. Robert Hass’s poem “Interrupted Meditation,” for example, emphatically interrupts and defers “what wants otherwise to be a shimmering epiphany-cum-symbolic description,” White writes; she describes a situation in which we come to see “self-effacing refusal of epiphanic and meditative convention as itself a convention” (White 2014, p. 215, 228). It seems significant that the major practitioners of the 1990s lyric shame poem whom White cites—Robert Hass, Charles Wright, and James Tate—are straight, cisgender white men. The concentration of lyric shame poems within this demographic suggests that their authors are on some level aware that their cultural positions frame the significance of their epiphanies to their readers; they seem to recognize that avant-garde critiques of the epiphanic mode target poets whose uses of epiphany can be read as consolidating existing arrangements of cultural authority and privilege. From Hejinian’s characterization of “the coercive, epiphanic mode…with its smug pretension to universality” to Yu’s framing of epiphany as a signature expressive practice through which minority literatures slid smoothly into the white-dominated literary establishment of the 1980s and 1990s, critiques of the epiphanic mode have cemented its association with a dominant aesthetic order (“mainstream lyric,” monolithically conceived) that they identify, in turn, with the dominant social order.

The facile identification of poetic forms with fixed political meanings, however, has been widely decried and persuasively debunked in contemporary poetry criticism, from Mutlu Blasing’s Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry (1995) to Cathy Park Hong’s “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” (2014).² Blasing proposes that the story of poetry after modernism in terms of “the heroic drama of a central agon between the forces of reaction and progress – with its farcical repetition in the current competition between New Formalists and the Language poets – assumes…that early modernist and postmodern poetry alike pose avant-garde oppositional challenges to the cultural establishment”; “the plot of this politicized scenario of liberation,” she observes, “turns on technique: poetic techniques are seen to carry ideological freight, and specific sociopolitical, ethical, and metaphysical values are thought to inhere in particular forms” (italics mine, pp. 1–2). It is this persistent confusion of technique and value that frames the current critical status of epiphany. Like any other literary technique, the epiphanic mode has no inherent politics. This much is evident in the fact that the epiphanic mode that has seemed to some so pretentiously smug and arrogantly authoritative can signify quite differently when it presents challenges to “mainstream” lyric conventions and when it originates from positions of vulnerability rather than sites of apparent cultural power.

Indeed, while poets who are impervious to or unpersuaded by the critiques of recent decades continue to write poems of personal epiphany, configurations of the epiphanic mode have recently emerged that denaturalize its prevailing identification with aesthetic closure, consolidation of the autonomous, expressive lyric voice, mastery, atemporality, and escape—associations that, when ruptured, reveal how epiphany’s historical claims to cultural power also uniquely qualify it within poetries of resistance. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a book that challenges a number of conventions associated with lyric poetry, runs on numbing, repetitive annunciations of national and personal betrayal and bewildering revelations of racist dehumanization and devaluation. As I have argued elsewhere, the book’s dysphoric moments of insight—which enervate rather than ennoble, inhibit rather than enlarge understanding, and reveal and surprise despite repetition—lay bare how literary history has demoted epiphanies of injustice in poetry and elevated triumphant epiphanies that reinforce narratives of social progress.³ In the very different register of her jagged textual collages and prose paratexts, Susan Howe manifests archival epiphanies of female absence and erasure. Catalogued alongside expansive textual traces of male voices, the appearance of mute domestic objects provoke sudden recognition of the historical record’s smooth repressions: “Often by chance,” Howe writes, “via out-of-the-way card catalogues….a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy” (Howe 2014, p. 18). It is in the sanctified wilderness of archives that are also colonial, patriarchal sites of “acquisitive violence, the rapacious ‘fetching’ involved in collecting” (Howe 2014, p. 43) that material fragments—partial manuscripts, objects of unknown provenance, miscellaneous emblems of otherwise unrecorded lives—make the incoherence of historical narratives “compiled by winners” (Howe 2015, p. 4) perceptual and felt, however ephemerally. Howe constantly invokes the terms of mystical revelation to describe her adventures in the archives, but both the textual sources of her epiphanies and the poetry she generates out of them are defined by the tenuous coalescence of “fragmentary knowledge” rather than sudden annunciations of Truth. Committed both to the “Utopian ideal of poetry as revelation at the same instant it’s a fall into fracture and trespass” (Howe 2012), Howe deploys semantic ruptures and graphic inscrutability that dislocate any facile connection between epiphanic experience and epistemological certainty.

      This shift of epiphanic origins away from sources in the landscape or private interiority to sources in language, history, and identity distinguish such recent permutations of the epiphanic mode and indicate its distinct affordances to poets urgently concerned with the subjects of life, death, and cultural memory at the margins. Importantly, these poets—who may openly embrace or resist association with the lyric tradition—continue to be drawn to the vertical, metaphysical valences of the epiphanic mode, whether they ironize and critique epiphany’s aura of transcendence or set out to claim its power, leveraging epiphany to gain access to the cultural authority that the epiphanic mode has infamously accrued. In disparate ways, M. NourbeSe Philip’s and CAConrad’s works speak to the serviceability of epiphany to contemporary poets who position their art in opposition to existing arrangements of cultural power. Demonstrating epiphany to be a far more flexible literary mechanism than oppositional rhetoric has proposed, they can help flesh out the impoverished picture of epiphanic poetics that emerges from pervasive critical identification of revelation with “mainstream” normativity and political complacency.

      “On their surface [my] poems approximate language poetry,” writes Philip; “like the language poets I question the assumed transparency of language and, therefore, employ similar strategies to reveal the hidden agendas of language. In my own work, however, the strategies signpost a multifaceted critique of the European project.” Referring to the massacre that took place upon the slave ship Zong, in which roughly 150 slaves were thrown overboard to their deaths to enable the collection of insurance money for the lost “cargo,” Philip identifies her work’s positioning of English, particularly written documents of English law that authorized human bondage, as the target of her critique: “The language in which those events [on board the Zong] took place promulgated the non-being of African peoples,