Luke Dunne: Subjunctivity

My Poetics, by Maureen N. McLane. The University of Chicago Press, 2024,  296 pp., $22.50.

Maureen N. McLane’s My Poetics is a digressive work of poetry criticism ( / poetic criticism / critical poetry / all and none of the above). In My Poetics, McLane, a distinguished poet in her own right, offers us the fruits of a life of poetic labour, as well as a committed defence of poetry’s enduring necessity; a defence of the view that, in the words she borrows from Dorothea Lasky, “poems, the way they are created and the way they exist, can, in a small way, remind the world of what’s still possible.”

My Poetics starts with a series of questions. The first of these - “why poetics?”- sets the agenda for the book to come, whereas the many follow ups to, riffs on and repetitions of that question set the tone (“And?”, “And again, poetics?”, “And? Huh?” “Really?”). Reiteration - the tendency for a discrete, seemingly answerable question to loop back on itself and, in doing so, sprawl out unmanageably - is one of McLane’s chief strategies. Citation is another, and that too is omnipresent from the outset: none of the answers McLane offers to the questions posed in the introduction are given in her own words. Instead, they’ve been collaged from 46 pre-existing texts; mostly poems, with a smattering of criticism and philosophy.

The effect is disorientating at times and beguiling at others. McLane lifts one of the quotes in this opening section from Sean Bonney’s “Letter against Sickness”: “I was fully aware of the risks involved, that any plausible poetics would be shattered, like a shop window, flickering and jagged”. This image of the shattered shop window, with all the goods inside suddenly available to whoever happens to walk by, stands for the book itself. It’s McLane’s shop, it’s her window, and she’s the one who has, generously, smashed it open for us.

The theme of openness carries us into the first chapter (“Conditional/Poetics”) where we spend a good deal of time with Percy Shelley, and in particular his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (this isn’t new territory for McLane, whose first two academic monographs focused on Romantic poetry and its precursors, respectively). In the “Hymn”, Shelley attempts to capture, however fleetingly, what he calls the “Spirit of Beauty”, the “unseen Power” which joins the mind and soul, enervating both, yet remaining, itself, mysterious:

   “It visits with inconstant glance

   Each human heart and countenance;

   Like hues and harmonies of evening,

   Like clouds in starlight widely spread,

   Like memory of music fled,

   Like aught that for its grace may be

   Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.”

Shelley’s pursuit of this ephemeron has him dwell with many things which both are and are not there - ghosts, shadows, demons, rainbows. The poem is, as McLane puts it, a “speculative wager”: Shelley is acting “as if there were Intellectual Beauty.” McLane goes on to describes Shelley as “part of a long line of speculative poets”; one who practices what the novelist Samuel Delaney calls “subjunctivity”:

“[Shelley’s] is a mode of hypothetical world-framing— not quite building or even modeling but moding. We might say that Shelley is modulating from the as— spectacular likenings—to the as if: subjunctive positings.”

McLane, too, is committed to “modulating from the as…to the as if”, and if this passage seems close to the heart of her project, then it also illustrates several risks McLane has taken in My Poetics. The book is conspicuously theory heavy: there’s Badiou and Barthes and Arendt and Althusser and Schlegel and (And? Really?). Deploying not one but two specialist vocabularies – that of poetry and that of aesthetic philosophy - runs the risk of alienating both poets and philosophers, leaving the readership for this book very slight indeed. Yet, for those willing to be baffled (and, really, anyone who loves poetry or philosophy should be), it is a risk that sometimes pays off handsomely. McClane’s deft reorchestration of material from Arendt’s The Human Condition grounds the otherwise challenging first chapter, rather than obscuring it. Barthes’ cheerful acuity makes him a particularly welcome presence in McLane’s chorus. And, despite appearances, complete fluency with the idiolect of contemporary theory is not a prerequisite for appreciating My Poetics (many, many footnotes had gone by before McLane referred to a book I had read).

McLane’s pedagogical gifts help to keep us on side. She likes to splice the heavier stuff with less formal registers (indeed, she adverts to the trickiness of that first chapter in the introduction, and enjoins us to skip around where needed). Poetic interludes break up the chapters, and McLane’s attentiveness to lapses in the reader’s attention means that she is more than happy to drop the usual pretences of scholarly sternness whenever possible. For example, this take on Gertrude Stein from Chapter Four (“Rhyme/Poetics”):

“Why spend so much time on Stein? Because she is so very fine. Her ways and means are near sublime though yes dementing at some times. Idiolectic and deictic, ludic not splenetic. And through her lines I came to see that rhyming need not mean poesy but need not not mean poesy too: her prosing rhymes are dancing, true, but stanzas meditating true love rhymes are pleasing yes oh yes they are. And thus she takes us very far.”

McLane’s playfulness does more than keep our eyes on the page. What seems to be quite a silly paragraph doubles up as an object-lesson for McLane’s argument in this chapter, which is concerned with the fruitful relationship between bad rhyming and good writing, and the ways in which certain poets (Paul Muldoon, for instance) run the gamut between good rhyme and doggerel successfully.

If there is a more substantive risk in My Poetics, it is the echo of ‘subjectivity’ in McLane’s subjunctivity. This could be a good time to talk about the ‘my’ in My Poetics. It’s not McLane’s first foray into ‘my’ - her critical-memoir, My Poets, was published to widespread acclaim a decade earlier, and serves as a kind of prequel to My Poetics - and ‘mys’ have abounded whenever poets write about other poets - ever since Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson at least.

A ‘my’ can go one of two ways. On the one hand, a ‘my’ can be modest - it’s one way of declining to make definitive judgments, of asserting your critical authority. On the other, a ‘my’ can also seem like a defensive crouch (‘well, I’m entitled to my opinion’), or a way to enforce propriety (‘I have my opinion, you have yours’). But the ‘my’ in My Poetics isn’t a carapace - it isn’t meant to shield My Poetics from prospective disagreement. It’s a gesture of openness rather than solipsism. McLane moves almost immediately from Bonney to Devin Johnston’s “Nothing Song”: “I made this up from nothing / It’s not myself I sing, / or love, or anything / that has a source.”

My Poetics is not made up from nothing, and McLane’s phenomenal breadth of reading is one of the chief pleasures of this book. That said, My Poetics is, in several ways, elusive. Paying close attention to where and why McLane decides not to speak her mind plainly is essential to understanding her project (I keep talking about McLane’s project, and as McLane herself expresses some ambivalence about the term, my attempt to attribute one to her should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt).

Consider, for example, the following case of riffing gone awry. When she describes Anne Boyer as “a flaneur … not of nineteenth century Paris not even of Kansas…but of her own mind”, it’s easy to wonder what the word flâneur could mean, now that it’s been dragged so far from its original context (nobody is actually walking anywhere). Of course, ambulatory metaphors for cognition are commonplace (minds wander, etc), but for that very reason it isn’t clear what makes Boyer’s writing especially flâneur-y. McLane doesn’t stick around long enough to tell us.

Because creative criticism tugs one set of strictures - those of normal academic presentation - it’s easy to slip into a kind of ‘anything goes, there are no wrong answers’ receptiveness. Something about McLane’s good naturedness compounds this. But My Poetics isn’t free from judgments and, indeed, its judgments are all the starker when they do appear - against the prevailing anti-intellectualism in poetry, against the snobbishness of the academy towards “creative writing”, against big ‘C’ ‘Conceptualism’. Perhaps most cutting as all is the following barb-in-verse towards the New Formalists (who advocate for regular rhyme and meter in contemporary poetry).

   I want to disemplot

   the plot

   against rhyme, to save it

   from the neo-formalists who claim it

McLane’s follows this with the caveat that this “is not a bawling out of them”, and, as if to extend an olive branch to those neo-formalists, praises one of their number (A.E Stallings). McLane calls the poem in which all of this happens a palinode; that is, a poem of apology. The first palinode is attributed to Stesichorus, who, tradition has it, wrote it for Helen of Troy, so she would restore his sight which she had taken from him after he slandered her in an earlier poem. The thing about palinodes is that they tend not to mean what they say. For example, three lines of Stesichorus’ cited by Plato in Phaedrus read:

   There is no truth in that story,

   You didn't ride in the well-rowed galleys,

   You didn't reach the walls of Troy

Even with his sight on the line, Stesichorus can’t help being a little sly (how strange that those non-existent ships should be so well rowed!).

One of My Poetics’ most admirable qualities is the way in which it asks the uncomfortable questions - those that it seems like poets should be able to answer, but rarely do. What is a book about poetry for? What is a book of poetry for? What is a book for? What is this book for?

It’s not that poets as a whole tend to avoid these questions. Poetry is about nothing if not itself, and both poetry’s possibilities and its limitations (as a medium of expression, as an instrument of political change, and so on) are rightly understood to follow from that. But these questions, once asked, are rarely answered, and the ways in which they are not answered are often frustrating, performative, nonplussing, or a combination of the three.

McLane is unwilling to accede to the uselessness of poetry, to accept its insufficiency to our present moment. She’s equally unwilling to discard all that is inessential, superfluous or unnecessary in poetry (and aren’t some of the best poems all three?). It’s harder to say just where poetry’s value lies in McLane’s account, but that indeterminacy is in keeping with the spirit of My Poetics. In a book where McLane so often cites another poet to make her point, the last words are hers.

   “Good morrow! I haven’t given up

   yet! we haven’t!

   The connectivity is good!
   Today every conversation

   found an open channel”

Luke Dunne is a writer from London. His poems and reviews have or will appear in The New Republic, The London Magazine, The Missouri Review, Socrates on the Beach, Counterpunch and berlin lit. In 2024, he won the Jane Martin Poetry Prize. His debut chapbook, Techne, is forthcoming from Ravenna Press.