Will Burns on Anna Mendelssohn and lyric pedagogy

‘[N]othing can be clear’, Anna Mendelssohn proposes in the poem ‘pladd. (you who say either)’, ‘when knowing the associations | are read by unread people’. The line is typical of Mendelssohn’s poetry. It works through divided perspective, splitting our sympathies between those snobbishly excluded by the poem and the apparent vulnerability of its speaker. Few poets seem as concerned with training their reader or the dangers of being misread; of their poems being experienced as ‘exposées, exposures’. In another poem from Mendelssohn’s collection Implacable Art (2000) such training figures as a mode of social control, the way in which psychological, interpersonal, and literary ‘associations’ decline into repetitive, patterned behaviours:

a beginning weighed running startled experience

dragged from the gynaecium mouthed by pretence

irregular simulacrum in master hands

moulding little women in crotchety barns

indirectly revolution meant trust in validity

not weak & easily influenced word perfect lads

and sisters heavily practising jesuitry for subtlety’s sake

accumulating pats on the back from big brothers […]

(‘Staged Whispers’)

Within this condensed Bildungsnarrativ, education in the ‘gynaecium’ is both formative and coercive, as ‘startled experience’ finds itself dragged, moulded, and ‘mouthed by pretence’. Such rote learning carries over into the poem’s presentation of higher education, informed by the disappointments of post-1968 student politics, where ‘trust in validity’ is exchanged for empty, ‘word perfect’ facility pliable to paternalist, authoritarian agendas, ‘accumulating pats on the back from big brothers’. Still committed to revolution following her time at the University of Essex, Mendelssohn joined the far-left Angry Brigade, and was later incarcerated on charges of terrorism. Eight years after her release in 1976, she studied at St Edmunds College, Cambridge, living on the city’s periphery until her death in 2009, remaining outside—without ever being entirely detached from—the university as an institution. Publishing work under the pseudonym Grace Lake and later her own name, Mendelssohn’s marginality to Cambridge and its literary scene is reflected in her poetry’s wariness of these institutions. It may be better to write outside universities than be entrapped by them, Mendelssohn argues, addressing a would-be poet-educator in the poem’s closing lines:

woolly & probative stesichorus

it’s all been run through, the academies have been decoyed

by womb snatchers on time release, to give the economy last.

‘Run through’ further presses the poem’s connection of violence and instruction—we murder to dissect—fittingly for a poetry which uses coded indirection and irregular rhythm to disrupt standardised reading practices. The ‘decoyed’ academy neglects its students, and poetry, for the exigencies of the market; an ‘economy’ with a concealed reliance on women’s reproductive labour that is subsequently exploited ‘by womb snatchers on time release’.

This connection between poetry’s postwar professionalisation within the university and the academy’s function as a mode of ‘social reproduction’ stands at the heart of Samuel Solomon’s recent work, Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist Feminism (2019). As its title suggests, the book’s focus is twofold. It is partly a genealogical critique of ‘the form in which poetry [was] institutionalized and rendered a (nationalist and colonialist) good’ as the New Criticism. Solomon then moves to explore how the poets Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford resist this ideology of lyric pedagogy as ‘prepolitical moral training’ by highlighting the contradictions of late capitalist social reproduction. He also identifies this ethos in more recent poets such as Amy De’ath and Nat Raha, whose work reflects the present crisis, and opportunity, of poetry’s present function within a neoliberal university that eschews the forms of cultural legitimation lyric pedagogy was instituted to provide. De’ath and Raha instead suggest how ‘late capitalist disinvestment in social reproduction, including disinvestment in public institutions of poetry, has enabled those writing under the sign of “poetry” to articulate social needs against both liberal and conservative forms of social privation.’

Given ‘Staged Whispers’, it’s surprising that Mendelssohn is omitted from Solomon’s study of poetry resistant to its cooption as ‘a state sanctioned ideology of instruction’. Instead, he situates her work as closer in intention to lyric pedagogy’s ‘ameliorative’ tradition. We might dissent from this however, as Sean Bonney and, more recently, Joe Luna have done, to suggest that Mendelssohn’s awareness of the tensions involved in ideas of art’s putative autonomy, its apparent incompatibility with didactic or pedagogical purposes, engages the social realm in its own way:

a poem is not going to give precise precise directions.

you mustn’t touch the hiding places.

they address a different world

where trees are decorated with diamonds

(‘To any who want poems to give them answers’


Initially, this poem might appear to mark a privileged, continuous retreat from the actual world, committing instead to the mystique of art’s ‘hiding places’. Yet, by acknowledging its own risky inutility (‘decorated’), the poem’s ‘different world’ seems to exist somewhere between the utopian and the hermetic, in a variable gap orientated and open toward future possibilities (note the absent full stop). This points to a central paradox of poetry for Mendelssohn: both a process originating in language’s irrepressible metaphoricity, the way in which the objects it names can be ambiguously and endlessly transposed, and a practice which itself obstinately refuses to be translated into the terms of any other, including social or political action. While Mendelssohn appears implacably on the side of art, her work’s uncertain intentions, its visible lack of ‘direction’ may itself be a resource for understanding contemporary poetry’s uncertain place within the university, as a way of grappling with both its institutional ubiquity and wider socio-political marginality. It may likewise speak to the present anxieties of many in the humanities—amid large-scale funding cuts—as to the ethical purpose, or urgency, behind our research and our pedagogy. Hard to instrumentalise, indeed, to justify, poetry may offer a means of speaking between disciplinary identities. If we now feel more and more unsure about our work’s purpose within the chaos of late capitalist society, inside and outside of the academy, then poetry’s own unplacability may allow us to rethink these vocations; perhaps to recapture a sense of what ‘revolution’ might entail.

William Burns (@WNBurns) is a PhD student at UCL, researching Modern American Poetry and its relationship to the University.