Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry by John Steen

Author:John Steen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

6

Aaron Kunin’s Line of Shame

As the arena of this study’s concern moves into the twenty-first century with readings of recent books by Aaron Kunin and Claudia Rankine, it is worth noting that both poets, who have been linked to the avant-garde, question poetry’s relationship to the historical, poetic, and temporal past. Although situated within a poetic avant-garde, Rankine’s poems nevertheless focus on new ways of representing how the past accumulates in what would otherwise be illegible experiences of frustration, anger, and rage in the present. Kunin’s poetry, as we shall see, considers the affect of shame as a possible corrective to a long history of poems acting with less justifiable restraint on the lives and feelings of their readers. Inasmuch as rage and shame in the present depend for their power on the existence of relationships in the past, and inasmuch as these powerful affects change the ability of the feeling subject to envision the future, these chapters draw attention to the ways that affect’s ineluctable, often overwhelming presentness may also represent the regimes of time—past and future—that lie outside it.

Without excluding the genre entirely, both twenty-first-century chapters also look to poetry beyond the lyric. As several commentators have pointed out, the richness of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is shown in the simple fact that it was the first book ever to be selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in two categories—poetry and criticism. And Kunin, who regards scholarly writing and poetic production as equally important tools, derives the necessity for and the precise coordinates of a concept of poetic shame from twentieth-century poetry criticism, literary theory, and psychology. As such, I turn to Kunin’s own literary criticism alongside his poetry in this chapter in order to consider how and why poems can—and perhaps should—generate shame.1 Following on the heels of a century in which the very existence of the genre of lyric was deeply contested, both Kunin and Rankine’s interventions suggest that it may be in the very withdrawal of lyric from the foreground of poetic production that its most intense affects can be witnessed.

By blending a complex conceptual apparatus with theoretical references derived from affect theory, gender studies, and art and literary history, Aaron Kunin’s 2005 collection, Folding Ruler Star, quickly established itself as among the most difficult volumes of recent poetry. Taking its title from a set of photographs by the German artist Sigmar Polke, its line measure and mise-en-scéne from a combination of Milton and Oulipo, and theoretical cues from the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, whose work is best known through Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s anthology, Shame and Its Sisters, the scope of Folding Ruler Star is as vast as its vision is intricate. The poems depict miniature dramas of punishment and blocked communication that unfold between the fragile, limited, and rigidly zoned parts of the terrorized human body and an array of personified objects haunting domestic tableaus. These constellations of human and inhuman pain unfold in a line

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.