Book Description

The influence of Jacques Lacan on the work of poets has been well documented, with the much referenced example of Robert Hass's poem "Picking Blackberries with a Friend who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan" as one example. As early as 1979, with the publication of Hass's breakthrough volume of poetry entitled Praise, a variety of poets have demonstrated more than just a passing familiarity with the terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. With the discursive poets, who first gained prominence in the seventies; the proliferation of the very particular Lacanian usage of the word desire by poets of vastly differing writing styles in the eighties; and through the great number of poets here at the University of Missouri in the nineties who have taken seminars on psychoanalysis, poets have been at the forefront in recognizing the compatibility between Lacan and the vocation of poetry in rendering mutable notions of "self" from an external perspective. In the eighties and nineties, postmodern aesthetics have allowed poets to illuminate the self without necessarily relying on the confining parameters of this confessional style which gained prominence in the fifties and sixties. The sentence became increasingly necessary for the first-person narrations of confessional verse, ushering the poetic line to a more peripheral position in academe. In more recent years, considerations of tone and rhythm have refocused attention on the necessity for cohesive line structure. If the line still reigns as the basic unit of poetry, the sentence deserves attention for placing a close second in importance. A poem has to mean something as well as sustaining its lyrical drive. My work carries on the mission of the deep image poets and the discursive poets, following in their tradition of inner focus without restricting its scope to just the psychological. The discourse of hysteria provides the most efficient means of mapping my particular brand of poetry and poetics, with the poem's focus not so much centered on the writer's experience or an ideal reader or even the poem existing for the sake of its own beauty. My poetry endeavors to flesh out the Real, the sublime truths which usually lie beyond the focus of most except for poets serious in their vocation.