Orphic Capability and the Lyric Self: Multiplicity and Self-Making at the Threshold of Contemporary Poetry

Abstract

Robin Blaser describes “the foreignness, the outsideness, as a kind of metaphor for the sense…of the process that leads to a poem.” It is, he says, “akin to a translation, a word which in its parts holds the meaning of the word metaphor, the bringing over.” This dissertation expands on that notion of poetic process as the bringing over from a foreign, outside source, thus situating the poem as a heteroglossic text. In this sense, the poem is necessarily Orphic; it brings across the threshold a language that is other than the poet’s own language, and plucks the string that vibrates between loss and possibility. Positing a theory and praxis of this Orphic Capability in service of the lyric Self—a multiple, polyphonic self, rather than a singular self, as it is conventionally conceived—this study situates both Blaser’s The Holy Forest and my Cosmographeme as cosmogonic, choral, and continuous works of poetry that find language in the unconscious.

As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the text is a multiplicity,” which supports this approach to reading and making works of poetry that are more complex, more embodied, and more attuned to the matrix of philosophy, psychology, and history in their construction than they are grounded in a singular image or theme. Here, I employ theories and methods of boundary crossing in service of constructing a lyric Self that comprises the poet’s lived experience as well as the language that flows from outside that experience. Orphic Capability is the ability to bring voices and images across thresholds, be they psychic, textual, or unconscious, and into the poem; the resulting voice, the “lyric I,” becoming the lyric Self, which is a plurality. The poems of Cosmographeme enact what Blaser calls the carmen perpetuum, the continuous song, which, like the prophecies sung from the floating, dismembered head of Orpheus, are always both below and above, here and not here, I and other.