The Lyric Tense

Since these cases of shifting tenses and other varieties of linguistic play are often said to mark the spots where these narratives most resemble lyric, one vital difference ought immediately to come clear: lyric discourse, unlike narrative, has no programmatic deictic movement, no hierarchic association of event and utterance that we can map and predict. It has no ready formula for process that corresponds to the narrative's heaping-up of perfect verbs and anaphoric deictics, or its postponement of the speaking present. Instead of hurrying toward it but deferring it, lyric often sees that here and now burst into the discourse spontaneously, abruptly; the speaking present, when it claims enough textual ground, may come into identity with the temporal dimension that most narratives keep at two removes, namely the reader's own present.

A flattening of temporal hierarchy: a “simple present.” Several theories of the lyric refer to poetry’s flatness, self-sameness, reflexivity, and equivocality. These qualities strike me as crucial beginnings, but poor endings for poetic experience; I would like to see and create more poems which challenge these commonplaces. Poems which explicitly lay out their hierarchical nature, their confluence with narrativity and dialogue. The Georgic seems to be a pretty good ideal for such a poem—a poem of giving information on a specific thing. But it still speaks across generations, and so the “present” is invoked once again. I suppose that what I really want is to delineate the different ways in which poems form a sense of the present or how they manage to dissolve the boundaries between self and other.