Animal

by Dorothea Lasky

Overview

Constellating four central topics—ghosts, colors, animals, and bees—in highly attuned prose, Dorothea Lasky explores the powers and complexities of the lyric, “metaphysical I,” which she exposes as one of the central expressions of human wildness. In deceptively simple language carrying profound insights directly to readers—with a sense that is at once bold and subtle—Lasky serves as an encouraging guide through the startling, sometimes dangerous, always exhilarating landscapes of feral poetic imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940696911
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Series:	Bagley Wright Lecture Series
Pages:	136
Sales rank:	1,162,723
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of The Wild Wind in the Space of the Word, published in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series from Wave Books (Wave Books, forthcoming). She is also the author of several full-length collections of poetry, including Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007), and is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013). She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has been educated at Harvard Universityand Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Every Name in History is I.
–Nietzsche

Poems are gifts that we give to the wind. The best gift that a poet can give is to allow their I to be its own cool animal. An I that is a wild thing, a mercurial trickster that resists all definition, that is so close to a self (or the self)—and so far away from it at the same time––that the reader can’t help but see a real self in it. An I that is a self who makes so many contradictions, who manipulates the reader and their expectations to such a degree that the reader is left feeling both full and empty after having encountered it.

In this brief compendium of four lectures, I will talk about poetry and its relationship to ghosts, colors, animals, and bees. In each of these discussions, I will be thinking of poetry a least a little through the lens of an idea I have termed, the metaphysical I. Although the idea is never named within these lectures, it affects them, as it is the crux of my poetics. It functions as a ghost haunting this book.

The metaphysical I is not a new idea really, just maybe a new term. I define this I as a wild lyric I, one that has no center and has no way to predict where it will go. An I in a poem that is a shapeshifter. A persona that uses unexpected language and imagery, that is inconsistent, frightening, funny, and beyond the Idea of a singular self.

I started thinking about this kind of I because I think that oftentimes a contemporary reader of a poem will conflate the I of the poem with the I of the poet (despite the fact that we have been taught in school not to do so).

This always frustrates me. Because when we reason out genre distinctions clearly, the I of a poem is always a kind of performer. The I of a poem necessarily wears a mask and is an actor. Upon its birth it has been given the holy task of acting both like and not like its real self. Always the I of a poem is the main eulogist at the memorial of what it wanted immortality to be while it was still a living thing.

As readers, we know that the greatest distance possible between the I and its author is in a work of fiction and that the closest relationship between the I and its author is in a work of nonfiction. There often seems to be a moral obligation that the I of a nonfiction piece, such as a memoir, be 100 percent truthful. Sometimes this can have even legal ramifications, too. But, no, the I of a poem is not the I as it would be in a memoir.

If you are a poet, these are such tricky things to consider. Should the I be the poet? Should it not be the poet? We poets always have to make this hard call. Knowing that even when we make an I so clearly not ourselves, someone will assume this I is us anyway. Or if they know us as live persons, will put their idea of us on our poor little I, an I in a poem with no bodily form to buffer it, just trying to make its own way.

Lorca, in his writing on the aesthetic of duende, discusses how when a piece of written art is good or real, it has soul. And that a soul is a kind of demon. That a piece of art is authentic when the demonic is at play in it, when it has gone to the other world and brought a spirit back to inhabit it. And so that when you are experiencing a piece of art with duende in it, you will feel delight and disgust when you encounter the demonic. And that without a little demon, a poem is not a poem at all.

It makes sense. After all, without a demon, how else to make the top of your head blow right off?

There is a sense in Lorca’s idea of the duende that a poem’s persona is infinitely strong to handle this demon. That the demon becomes a live alphabet, an actual freakish live wire that the I of a poem must encounter, control, manipulate, beautify, handle, and you know, just deal with.

This I (not the demon, but what has to control the demon) of the duende is what I am concerned with most in my poetics. I am concerned with the part of the demon that has to know itself and control itself. That is so much the puffed-up essence of the personal, it can harness all fragmented senses of self and use them whenever it needs to, to go beyond it. I am talking about an I that is so powerful it can truly become a universal I.

In this book, what I mean to distinguish in thinking about poetry is what we think of as duende and also what isn’t duende. I mean to suggest that poetry could think of itself as having a new sense of the I. Because while duende is the power core of the I, stripped down to its essence in a sort of erasure, an I is the use of this power to become a trickster, a thief, a demon, a little thing, infused forever with purely the occult.

In their shapeshifter-ness, poems with a metaphysical I play with their relationship to their reader in a way that is manipulative. They do so in a way that we oftentimes refer to as postmodern. Although this volleying relationship has happened long before the Postmodern age, (which is an age I don’t believe in, in case you were wondering).

Nevertheless, poems with a metaphysical I are postmodern in that they remove the fourth wall, the veil of safe performative distance between the persona and the reader. They make evident that the persona of the poem sees you. They may act at times as if they don’t realize you are peering over their shoulder, but at some point they let you know they know. All of this they do through an ever-changing display of human emotions through an I that takes on a never-ending stream of costumes, to make beautiful the many moods and their hot and awful divinity, to conflate both hate and love.

Poems with a metaphysical I are the kind that I am interested in. I myself write my own poems out of necessity, summoning as much bravado as I can. And maybe I do this because when I started writing poetry my I was a tiny I that I had to blow the root upon myself to become big.

Because we all start small. One cell, one poem, one word, one utterance into the dark. The point of it all is to go beyond that beginning, to become something else, whatever that poem may be.

Because we all end small, too, but that’s another story.

And maybe the I in my own poems is still very small, but I promise you that when I’m gone, my I is going to be as big as this whole room. If you are reading this, poets, here’s my battlecry for you to be big, too.

Begin.

Table of Contents

Contents

An Introduction

Poetry, Ghosts, and the Shared Imagination

What is Color in Poetry or Is It the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word

The Beast: How Poetry Makes Us Human

The Bees

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Hers is a consciousness under siege, but not at the expense of great compassion and even humor. If her poems sometimes seem like they’re yelling, it’s as if they’re yelling only to you, seeking whatever kinds of justice poetry can ask in the ways only poetry can."—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

"Lasky’s voice is hypnotically primal, resulting in inexplicable, yet palpable desire."—Publishers Weekly

"A starchart of loneliness. . . . In these intensely sad poems, I feel like I’m not so much gazing from Lasky’s POV but just adjacent, maybe hovering just outside her space-orbiter-cum-isolette, peering in through the double Corningware panes. Peering in at her peering out."—Joyelle McSweeney, Lana Turner

"Don’t look for daintiness nor defeatism in Lasky’s weighty lines but rather fierce, quick-witted associations that make space for one woman’s power to name her world."—Major Jackson, Academy of American Poets

"In her poetry, Dorothea Lasky does the work of naming for us, saying it as is, but in language and music that gets at the visceral and drags it, wet and sticky, to the surface. She takes power back."—Kimberly Ann Priest, NewPages

"She will force you to acknowledge the blackness of the blood pumping underneath your skin or the claustrophobia of loneliness, but she will not allow you to forget there is light, and that it can exist in knowing another person."—Rain Taxi

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