Lyric Returns in Recent Black British Poetry

This essay considers some reasons for lyric’s return in black British poetics by first taking a broad look at the field, and then by attending to the work of several poets writing since the 1990s but publishing most visibly since the millennium – ranging from an innovative writer acclaimed even by the mainstream, Patience Agbabi, to one whose work has been so new in texture, tone and project that it still evades most poetic maps, D. S. Marriott. It argues that lyric in the general sense of being ‘the genre of personal expression’, which American lyric theorists Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins rightly critique as a twentieth-century invention, has long been interrogated in raced poetry in the UK for its tacit collation of personal and universal – a collation which ironically makes lyric the least personal of genres, in a sense (or in theory). And in fact, recent re-readings of modern aesthetics argue that the really personal was never welcome in New Criticism. So, after postmodernism’s thorough-going investigations of how language overwrites the universalized lyric subject, post-postmodern lyric investigations of subjectivities neglected in such studies are proving increasingly necessary in black British poetry. And in particularly the work of D. S. Marriott, where they point up what even the finest postmodern critiques both missed and disavowed precisely by not taking lyric’s definition at its word – i.e., by not taking lyric “personally” enough.

This essay will consider some reasons for lyric's return in black British poetics by first taking a broad look at the field, and then by attending to the work of several poets writing since the 1990s but publishing most visibly since the millennium -ranging from an innovative writer perhaps too swiftly identified as mainstream, Patience Agbabi, to one whose work has been so new in texture, tone and project that it still evades most poetic maps, D. S. Marriott. I want to argue that lyric in the general sense of being 'the genre of personal expression', which American lyric theorists Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins rightly critique as a twentieth-century invention, 5 has long been interrogated in raced poetry in the UK for its tacit collation of personal and universal -a collation which ironically makes lyric the least personal of genres, in a sense (or in theory). And in fact, recent re-readings of modern aesthetics argue that the really personal was never welcome in New Criticism. 6  As Kwame Dawes argued in an influential 2005 essay, 7 one reason that lyric was for a time left behind by black British poets was its association with white writingwhereas performance poetry, for good or ill, became unmistakably black: Most of the Black poets working in Britain today have emerged through the performance medium -a medium that is seriously aware of voice, idiom, dialogue and popular discourse…. The performative is linked to the language and the language is defined by elements that do not immediately link these poets to the private, arched lyricism of modern British poetry… … The position of the Black poet in Britain has become inextricably linked to the notions of 'performance poetry' and the reductionist way in which the co-opted use of the term has created in many Black poets a desire to either run away from the label, or embrace it with defiance and a kind of statement of race and aesthetics. 8 Intriguingly, it would seem from this description that black performance poetry's focus on the contextual provenance and materiality of language connected it to coeval US Language poetry. Yet the consequences for black poets, given the very popularity and marketability of performance work in the UK, was that 'Black British poets of note' as Dawes calls them, became the establishment within two-branched black writing: 'One is the branch associated', he goes on to argue, 'with what may be unfairly termed 'the establishment', which understands that the nation's poets are those who are published in the right journals and by the right publishing houses'; these poets (among them, in his view, Agbabi and Jean 'Binta' Breeze) ' are often associated with performance even when they have established quite creditable reputations as published authors '. 9 This was true for Linton Kwesi Johnson too, as Dawes laments -frustrated that the great poet himself made clear that his works were far more than 'transcriptions of performance'. 10 Despite the unquestionable gains performance produced in terms of community-creation, it fixed a far too narrow, conventional and confining image of the black poet 'for a long time', Dawes writes: 'that of the 'immigrant' author whose very presence was defined by the idea of otherness, where otherness represented alien and foreign'. 11 How might indigenous black lyric expression proceed from such a non-place, where one's 'very presence' has been defined as being ' other' to others present?
The 'second branch', as Dawes defines it, sounds similar to the first. It involves the ' ad hoc performance scene': poets who appear on stages in bars and sometimes even 'massive platforms' to perform their work, and 'who develop a following that is often linked to some music scene whether it be hip-hop, reggae, punk or rock and roll'. 12 'They have to do more than read,' he writes; '[t]hey have to establish a presence on the stage, they have to have some theatrical force and they have to connect directly with their audience'. 13 Even Breeze, one of the well-' established', rebelled against these fixed expectations -in, for example, one interview that touched on why her 1991 album, Tracks, ' didn't sell'. Three things interest me most in this interview; it will take me the whole of this essay to explain. But first is what her interviewer reveals with this question: 'The American company that recorded your earlier songs did not want to record the album because they thought your work had become too personal'. 14 Breeze responds by wondering whether 'it was the woman's voice' that was at issue, because her earlier works like 'Aid Travels with a Bomb' were ' overtly political' and disconnected from her own experience as a woman and a mother. 15 Though this particular prejudice mirrors what many female poets were contesting in the 1980s, it targeted black poets differently; here, it seems that when too female and personal, Breeze's work did not seem 'black' enough to her US promoters, which provokes questions about how 'personal-ness' is ' coloured' and read. It seems that the stage presence required of black British poets -the inverse of the non-presence required of US Language poets at the time -derailed some black lyric projects, necessitating instead political/rhetorical stances. It thus diametrically opposed, but also mirrored, the aesthetic production of presence in New Critical lyric, which, as the new lyric studies make clear, quite ironically reacted 'against the Romantic notion of lyric as expression of intense personal experience' -preferring what could believably stand in for it in order to solidify universal sensibilities. 16 But the unspoken requirement for black writers was that their 'lyrics' represent something demarcated 'universally' as different: the ' alien,' as Dawes put it, the 'foreign'. 17 So it is that Patience Agbabi has long attempted to spring such complicated traps through sheer, not-be-refused versatility as well as irony in her work -from her 'signifying' on the term ' alien' in 'Ufo Woman', to her deployments of traditional form ('the sestina mainly and the sonnet', as she describes them), 18 to her rewritings of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (alongside Breeze and others). Though rap, disco, Northern Soul and other music forms continue to inform her work, as a whole it signals 'both a more complex poetics and the cultural shifts in contemporary Britain', as Nicky Marsh writes, quoting Stuart Hall's call for an 'unsettling … hybridization and ' cut-and-mix' aesthetic' deemed 'necessary to the reconceptualization of ethnicity in British racial politics'. 19 Unlike the new 'American hybrids', however, this hybridity was aimed at shifting identity politics. Therefore Agbabi's 2000 collection, Transformatrix, 'has a sonnet at the end and a rap poem at the beginning', 20 which of course by frame undermines the page/performance split -as does the last couplet in my excerpt from its first poem below, which suggests ambidexterity between 'stage' and 'page'. As critic Lauri Ramey notes, the speaker of this volume's first poem, 'Prologue,' 'is a verbal diva to the British literary manor born, which she then remodels to suit herself in the present moment'. 21 Indeed, in this opening poem Agbabi, like a games-caller with her audience, focuses on language as infinitely malleable and constructive of new realities (and you might even hear in it a literal manifestation of Hall's '"cut-and-mix" aesthetic' put into play): give me a page and I'll perform on it. 22 Reading this poem from a gendered angle when it first appeared, at the very start of the 'noughties,' I found it exhilarating in its post-deconstruction constructivism-inexcess, which I related to that of a performance writer in the UK whom I knew Agbabi admires (and who, despite the stereotypes, is not black), Caroline Bergvall. 23 I understood the first lines here as not only about sucking ' dolly mix' sweets, but as inspired by Bergvall's sexually-explicit wordplay around disassembled and reassembled dolls, beginning with the life-sized ones troublingly manipulated by artist Hans Bellmer, and ending with Dolly the sheep cloned in 1996. Dolly the sheep -created by herself, so to speak -seems appropriately invoked in Agbabi's book, whose title refers to a womb (given the etymology of 'matrix' as she notes it), and whose overall project she describes as ' a celebration of my own creativity'. 24 Transformatrix is, in other words, constructive of new realities 'transformed' and re-'mixed' by and in the poet, if minus some of the troubling sense of external manipulation that haunts Bergvall's work. All Agbabi's speaker needs is to be given that word -which, like the sexual knowledge gained via Edenic transgression, makes her works multiply: 'I wanna do poetic things in poetic places,' as one line has it above. Blunt desire -in part for self, 'me manifest' -expressed with blunt verbal power -anaphoric 'Give me's' -thoroughly thrills here, perhaps in part because, turning to the second point of interest in Breeze's interview, 'it's about time', according to her, for black women's poetry to 'get much more sexual'. 25 Though speaking of Caribbean women's work in particular, Breeze's thoughts echo those of postcolonial artists more broadly in querying the constraints against such expression. As poet-critic Donna Aza Weir-Soley put it in 2010: More than a century's worth of internalized censorship is due to 'western discourses' that have 'grossly misrepresented and impugned' black women for being ' over sexed', when 'in reality … many were in fact sexually guarded -so that no one would get the impression that the stereotypes had any basis in fact'. 26 Agbabi's poetry has been at the forefront of what Breeze calls for, in order to upstage and white -of authorial power and unperturbed 'poetic licence', as Agbabi seems to reclaim it above. One can certainly reread her poem as a 'sly double-voicing' of the Caliban trope in black writing. 30 Here, fed both Prospero's European language and 'licence', this high-tech black 'Eve on an Apple Mac' having a 'rap attack' promises to exceed the original snake in her 'subtle' undoing of all ' creation'. Yet such claims of ' archetypal', alternative knowing also 'return' black poets to outsider -or 'foreign'status, and the task of speaking for one's race.
But in the title poem that closes the book, the speaker's positioning is rendered in more intimate, lyric relation -if with the sonnet form itself, which is transformed into a dominatrix. 'I wanted to subvert the feminist vision of the sonnet as corset', Agbabi told Ramey; 'I think constriction can give you freedom'. 31 What exactly is Without her, I'm nothing but without me She's tense, uptight, rigid as a full stop. 32 Asserted as 'nothing' 'Without her' -meaning the dominatrix, a stiff-upper-lipped representative of British formality -the speaker nonetheless distinguishes herself in this painful/pleasurable meeting between writer and 'uptight', colonizing form which seems locked, too, in panting desire for 'transformation'. Images of violence longed for yet threatening to one's very bones -or 'vertebra[e]': one's structuring spine -are reciprocated by the speaker's self-description as 'slim as a silver stiletto', which cuts both ways as a seductive heel and an Italian dagger (as well as a word drawn from the Latin stilus, meaning a thin Roman writing instrument). And both require the other for things to 'flow' -so the intimate transgression that connects, in ABBA near-rhymes, end-words like 'wish' and 'flesh' in a whispered, excitingly clandestine 'sh' relation finally erupts in that orgasmic 'me' -ee, free -sound unmatched by the last line's unrhyming and silencing end-'stop' illustrating what happens without 'me' and such release, such relation. Although a trickster-like capacity for upending authority remains here, the very intimacy of this 'relation' so related suggests the necessary co-production of transformative freedom gained. It also suggests a new necessity to augment the public/political role of black British poets with such 'lyric' investigations of 'private' desire -here for the other as self-constituent -and for polarity-popping transgressions of raced 'lines'. 33 And yet, as Heidi Safia Mirza argued in 1997 in Black British Feminism, declarations of freedom from past structures in favour of unfettered self-re-invention ' engage in the risky business of strategic tactical cultural re-inscription which makes the hegemonic discourse of race, class and gender imperceptible'. 34 Something of that may be true here in Agbabi's sonnet -in large part because its writer's dilemma and delight are seemingly universalized. And indeed, as she herself puts it, 'From the form [the audience] wouldn't know' she's black. 35 In other words, her reasons for returning to lyric seem at times to involve its purported, traditional transcendence into universality -even though that illusory power caused radical poets in the US to abandon it for some time, and black poets in the UK to question its ' arched' representativeness of (white) subjectivity at home.
Along the spectrum from Agbabi's new uses of lyric is the surprising turn to it by poets read as far more experimental, such as Anthony Joseph and David Marriott.
Joseph's work, according to two of our most important poetry critics, Michael Thurston and Nigel Alderman, displayed 'textual strategies' at the start that were even more ' aggressively difficult' than Marriott's; 36 and as Ramey writes, 'no group is more consistently excluded' in black British poetry 'than those who are formally innovative' -the result being that discrimination within the field has over time worked to reinforce 'racial and cultural stereotypes'. 37  Certainly some might find this to be 'lyric' exploration renewing itself for a new era.
But getting at last to the third thing I found interesting in Breeze's interview: it was her refrain about being 'schizophrenic' -'that's a word I use a lot', she laughs, in good-humoured reference to her own history of mental illness. But she 'think[s] the whole Caribbean is naturally schizophrenic', 43 not only due to its censored sensual sensibilities, but also to the near-necessity for its writers to manage two-to three- Marriott's recent work also explores 'the foundations of identity', particularly since his 2006 volume, Incognegro -yet by radically rethinking it, rather than reasserting control over it in ways that seem formally new, but depend on old paradigms of 'poetic licence'. Rethinking lyric most importantly in terms of content has long been at the heart of his work, though even our finest contemporary critics seem to have missed that; as I suggested earlier, some argue that because his poems have long-tended to 'begin at the left margin of the page', 'his sentences are complete and grammatical', and his speakers are ' even … content to call themselves 'I,' he has seemed less 'innovative' than Joseph. 46 His work may indeed be said to be more 'lyric' The alarming singularity of the affective economy disavowed even by the most wellmeaning respect for ' difference' and ' others' is, as Wilkinson writes, what Marriott's work insists we see, and see ourselves in -is, I want to say, key to his work's startling new vision of 'universality'. In other words, his lyric registry is of the imbrication of all subjectivities in a continuing history of violence whose ' cost' is still borne only by its sufferers, ' cost-free' as it is for others -even those who take up 'political allegiances' against it -selectively disinheriting as that economy's operations continue to be. In Marriott's work they pre-empt triumphant self-expression, like Joseph's, though lyric response to even the lacunae they still produce exposes the entanglements, power perversions and resultant unresolved psychic injury which, he laments, has no name by which it might be confronted; I think again of Breeze's continual references to 'schizophrenia', lacking as she does a dedicated word. But in Marriott's nightmarish vision such operations bind us all, and not in conscience's 'moiré' displacements -here of self-castigation into self-congratulation -but rather in a tsunami of still-unprocessed, gathering violence that masks itself in all discourse.
It may find itself revealed most visibly in racist state responses to crises like Hurricane Katrina, which Marriott's work has ever since 'remembered' and mourned, but it courses too through all our internalized responses, our supposed 'private' lives and intimacies -even love, one of Marriott's recurrent studies.
Yet this poetry is not irremediably negative, as Riley claims -quite the contrary.
Not only is it rhythmically beautiful, and often comic, but it thinks through the psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas that Riley would deny it in order for the poet to, in part, play analyst to his own 'lyric' expression. No bookish knowledge is needed to hear this happening in the work; its dreamscapes-cum-theatre -whose roles the poet himself plays out, as his sometimes-inserted initials remind us -open up articulately enough to our analysis, too. We're just not allowed to remain outside the work. references Hurricane Katrina, but also all real and mythical floods that leave us exposed or threaten to annihilate -is far less world-denouncing than Eliot's. It's also less devastatingly destructive than Dabydeen's erosive ocean waters in Turner, whose self-implosive final line, 'No mother', follows hundreds of lines of his speaker's suspect attempts to re-imagine one for a stillborn cast off a slave ship -i.e., to fictionalize for it a nurturing past. Marriott's work, on the other hand, honours another kind of fictionalizing or imagining: the kinds we play-act with one another (rather than foist upon one another); for him they express not only yet-inchoate desires which might change social relations, but they also, potentially, reveal the roots of psychic injury and thus enable its transformation. Such ' art' is, as such, even re-possessive of ' civic space', as he puts it in his prose: 'not a refusal of the world, but its repossession from the irreality in which it normally exists'. 54 Yet In Neuter's comic epigraph ominously warns of the difficulties involved in this hopeful enterprise. After a metapoetical address to himself -'Now DS' -it asks: 'Don't you know better than to mess with Mister In-Between?' Which of course recalls the refrain from the hit song of 1945, 'Accentuate the Positive', whose 'sermon' (so-described) in its opening lines directs us to 'latch on to the affirmative', ' eliminate the negative', and above all, intriguingly as well as repeatedly, not mess with Mr. In-Between. Bing Crosby most famously performed it in black-face, playing up its black sermon's rhythms and illustrating everything Marriott fears -i.e., that any authentic black response to black oppression has long been co-opted and turned against itself, into whiteness sermonizing as black to preach that 'Jonah in the whale' and 'Noah in the ark' also accentuated the positive despite being at best quite literally in those discomfiting spaces 'in-between'. Such socially enforced repression to produce the civic 'irreality' of accentuated positivity leaves raced lyric little to say; so instead of an answer to the question in the epigraph, we get the mute etymological root of ablative -'taken away' -when offerings of heartfelt signs, or oblation rather than ablation, is what the whole of this volume looks and longs for, even as obliterating floods threaten to annihilate us all. ('Accentuate the Positive' was, by the way, first heard in the Paramount film, Here Come the Waves). Indeed, this volume seems to suggest that the 'in-between' is a space so guarded by the powers-that-be because it's one to conjure with -meaning, to conjure signs in, between words like 'positive' and 'negative', and between people, all playing with signs as provisional, helpful objects, transitional objects, that can move silenced trauma into exchange. Therefore Marriott, who early on, during the driest moments of Language poetry's poststructuralist angst, expressed concern about 'signs [being] taken for signifiers' rather than 'wonders' -as Homi Bhabha more productively re-described colonial texts that undergo hybridization in his famous work by that title -seems to have coupled for his own use Bhabha's early and ground-breaking visions with those of Winnicott's playful practices. 55 Winnicott, in search of the repressed 'true self' (which would otherwise remain buried, infantile, unable to express itself, or assert itself, which he viewed as a necessary form of aggression), entered and honoured the chaotic and conflicted world of each child he treated -encouraging, for example, the famous self-named 'Piggle' to invest her soft toys and other transitional objects with her own names (and therefore desires and inchoate fears), and allowing himself, too, to be named by her while 'playing' with her in their mutually-created, improvised theatre. Such imaginative enactment of new relations through evolving creation of signs works via trauma's ex-pression and, as a result, transformation: its recognition by another, its memorialization in story, and its collaborative rewriting in play.
Therefore this volume's nightmarish sign-making and role-playing which invites us into it might best be seen as driving toward the sources of trauma, simultaneously inner and shared-historical, 'the stink that reveals the kill', imagined from In Neuter's start as a cave filled with dead black boys 'stretched out in the ashes' -yet surrounded by treasure awaiting discovery. 56 The 'positive' is, in other words, right away located cheek-by-jowl with the 'negative', both buried; and the painful but joyful lyric ' art' of ex-pressing them is suggested by the volume's opening lines, 'I danced, with my shirt soaked and bones broken I danced because the pain made me smile'. On this first page, a lyric poem in stanzas of growing length therefore appears, cheek-by-jowl, alongside horrifically violent prose in which our dreaming speaker is lynched/crucified: 'left … for hours hanging from my arms'. We learn here that, like a Christ harrowing hell, he'd tried to ' exit the gates' of that subway-cum-cave with the dead black boys he sees there 'in the ashes' -the latter a sign inextricable from genocide in post-Holocaust history, and evocative of total annihilation without recourse to recovery, burial and memorialization. Re-playing the many familiar, shared texts that arise to become re-signed, or transitional objects repurposed toward that end, our lyric speaker takes on an 'heroic' role, if we recall the telling of Christ's successful harrowing of hell and saving of all the only-seeming dead -but also a vulnerable, The imagined, shared, Arab-Israeli 'script' in the boy's imaginative theatre would somehow pre-empt by sheer speed -and indeed substitute for -an emotion like 'hatred' in his vision of his fellow children's collaboratively renewed 'signs' accompanying his self-delivery as that ' demanded sacrifice'. Though 'perverse', certainly, as he himself calls it, this acting out is of perversion by its etymological meaning, too -meaning a 'turning around' to end up in between his own self-sacrificial self and his deadly 'master', and going against (by legal definition) the direction of accepted 'judgment' to effect an outcome of his own and 'shift social discourse'. Because in this poem whose title focuses on precisely that, the boy's is an imagined triumph in impacting power-discourse at last: 'murals of me scrawled on noticeboards, … on mud and cement, and out of these combinations, written down in ashes and blood, my most perverse strength'. 59 Making of his pain and imagined destruction in this dream writing, the boy reanimates the Christ-role played in 'The Redeemers' and reanimates those fearful, unexpressive ashes that lay the scene for so much of the action in this volume; he does so by revising the 'script' via 'noticeboards' that, we might say, reveal 'splits', as well as by ' crawling towards' his destroyer and thus shifting 'social self-destructive relationships his speakers continue to suffer even as they 'watch the dense and rising waters running over [their] feet'. 61 Poetic transcendence by fiat of social ills and catastrophes is never possible in his work, although accentuating positivity of a different kind is, I would argue -beginning with lyric speech erupting from the censored but shared in-between. So I perhaps 'perversely' see his final, composite speaker fortunately-falling into the volume's oncoming flood, as into the heart of violent language -not because it leads to self-dissolution and purging, as with Eliot's Phlebas the Phoenician sailor, but on the contrary because it seems to carry with it yet-'unrecognized' traumatic insolubles. And though it ' drowns' like a 'noun', the nonsensical rhyme suggests a paradoxical relation between such death-dealing drowning and potential return to consciousness and language of the unmemorialized, the 'unburiables', that 'like bone[s]' are swept along in its wake: The rain that falls and drowns -like a noun the disappeared -unrecognized, but walking What spills over these 'rims' is the return of those nouns, those discursive objects that have been lacking but 'unburiable', like the black boys from the start of this volume. And they are made like, too, 'the designated one|always beside you' in the next lines, which clearly refers to the tomb-skipping Christ on the way to Emmaus, as in the equally-dream-like conclusion to The Waste Land. Wilkinson argues that the word ' designated' suggests ' de-signed', written out, linking it to the dead boys -but they're clearly also coupled here with 'the redeemer', which to me is crucial.
The ' disappeared' are always there, above, ' on each syllable' -and I would argue the boys, too, are always there because of psychic processes that preserve most palpably the disavowed and displaced. This is how hope arises in Marriott's writing, which is always about the possibility of going back, under and in to discover a way forward. So it is that his speaker falls here, like Phlebas, 'to the bottom' of ' everything that I ever was'. But he doesn't surface in an Eliotic purgatorial desert of potential self-salvation, only; rather, he emerges 'washed ashore like all the others', rendered rich and strange by the tempest's more benevolent 'neutralizing' relations, so that: … we all began to dance again: manservants, hustlers, slaves. 63 Calling up the fantastical ending to Shakespeare's Tempest, its alternative social relations artfully imagined into being by an imperfect book-lover recalling past traumas with some measure of forgiveness, in a play that dwells on utopian possibilities and release from master/slave relations, Marriott makes his own potentially brave ending -complicated, however, by that 'again'. All over again? Would emergence be from irreality's nightmare into yet another charmed state, as with the bard's dancing sailors? Or is this the kind of 'dance' that 'again,' as at the start, ex-presses dis-covered trauma and suggests positive hope? Marriott is, after all, playing Prospero as 'redeemer' here, 'being good' with his art, as this poem's title has it. And in his greatly updated way, as I have tried to suggest, Marriott does seem to agree that we are such stuff as dreams are made on -and that therefore art, lyric art, and its interventions in dreaming culture can work to alter its self-destructive course. But whereas Prospero (after St Paul) confidently affirms a both personal and end-times release from the past -'yea, all which [the great globe] will inherit, shall dissolve' -Marriott's fears are for the meantime, the 'in-between'-time, and all that within those suppressed and disinherited might dissolve irretrievably before we're through. 64 I might sum up by saying that a discomfitingly new sense of 'universality' informs Marriott's lyric writing, wherein the raced 'personal' is always both other and not, always historically swept along (or violently disavowed) through shared language. His concern is for, as he puts it in his epigraph to In Neuter, what was 'taken away' -'eliminated' as in the old song by, ironically, both white-washing twentieth-century lyric practice and raced oppositional strategies that dissolve the very 'subjects' they would universalize. Marriott's broken 'action hero' who would save them should perhaps rivet us in the poetry world's equivalent of the movies (with its tiny box office), since it offers huge returns, nothing less than globe-sized redemptive visions -but perhaps that's not what we really want, not at the cost.