Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism by Samuel Solomon;

Author:Samuel Solomon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

The first stanza provides a surreal portrait of a sort of squat: the surroundings are “old” and “abandoned,” and the atmosphere, following the pathetic fallacy that is perhaps all that can be seen from within the “grave embrace” of the family, is a “black night” with “high wind.” The room is both removed from and a part of this world: it is “a room on stilts” yet has “no roof.” This housing report vacillates between pointing out the shabbiness of the squat and emphasizing its miraculous sufficiency: this is the dream of the family always being enough even as it is wide open to and propped up by “the outside” that simultaneously abandons it to itself. Thus the room, “although too small for our needs” and “despite the fact that it had no roof,” appears “glowing and secure,” “warm, bright, and harmonious.” The poem does not simply demystify the bourgeois comforts of security and harmony; they are presented as part of the same fantasmatic reality that extends “upwards to the/ black clear sky.”

At this point the poem shifts to its second act, in which the speaker recounts having “left there briefly.” What transpires is an encounter with “x,” an ambiguously authoritative figure who suggests “where we should both/ go.” The “impossible” architecture that follows ends the poem ambivalently. If “it looked impossible,” then why is the speaker not disheartened? Is it because she is plucky and believes that with effort she will succeed? Or, alternately, because she does not want to leave with x at all but would prefer to remain in the roofless house? Should we read the speaker as intentionally withholding the reason for her perseverance? Or, reporting a dream, is she merely recounting an affective state without any understanding of its cause? The poem leaves these questions suspended, and in this way invites the reader to speculate on the affective dimensions of housing and the as-yet-inscrutable nature of the needs of single mothers within a regime of the figure of the mother as vessel of intersubjectivity.

Like much of Marxism for Infants, then, this poem lays bare a range of affects and experiences for the reader’s attention. This is not, however, because these poems invite the reader to imitate the lyric subject or to find moral integrity by censuring her. Rather, poetic address, as the purportedly ethical management of otherness, is shown to be coeval with and implicated in the institutional (linguistic, ideological and repressive) discourses of the capitalist nation-state. But what these poems bring to the surface is the way in which wants and needs are, all the same, constantly produced within and through this matrix, written onto and out of the socialized body: and they will continue to be so even after any revolution in the relations of production. “Real” needs and wants are recuperable for struggle only through their rehearsed expression, only through repeated, partial attempts to share them with “you.” This is the socialized biology of Riley’s lyric, which cannot be produced in expository

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