Introduction: Toward a Definition of 21st-Century North American Hybrid Poetry

The origin of this Special Issue on hybridity goes back several years to my early attempts to combine my sensibilities as a scholar and poet. As I started to experiment with new ways of writing, I kept coming up against the question of what literary hybridity, especially poetic hybridity, actually was. I wasn’t sure how to link what might be called formal hybridity—the mixing of academic and “poetic” voices, the insertion of visual and other media into poetic texts, and the like—with more identitarian and political notions of hybridity, especially work that considers contemporary culture from an inconsistent, shifting, or marginalized subject position. This opposition struck me as an opportunity to reconsider, but also reconfigure, old distinctions between what is often called “form” and “content.” What, I wondered, is the exact relation of these ideas in hybrid texts, or are these old-fashioned terms even relevant? Do formally hybrid poems always include sociopolitical critique and the reverse, and if so, how, exactly, does hybridity connect to the often-noted recent North American poetic turn to social engagement? And what are hybridity’s implications for the ways poetry, especially lyric poetry, is understood?

I put together this Special Issue to attempt to answer these questions, and I am struck not only at the range but the coherence of its essays’ responses to them. While the OED defines hybridity mostly in scientific (biological, engineering-related, physical, etc.) or racial/identitarian terms, the essays in this issue engage particularly with three quite different theoretical formulations of hybridity, the mostly formalist one put forth by Cole Swensen and David St. John in their introductions to the influential (and also controversial) 2009 anthology American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry; the postcolonial concept advanced by Homi Bhabha and others, which posits hybridity as a sometimes accommodationist or ambivalent response on the part of the colonized to colonization; and Gloria Anzaldua’s still-influential 1987 theorization of the North American borderlands as a place of slippage, indeterminacy, and play, an analysis that, as Becca Klaver usefully points out in her essay, is directly linked to hybridity. (More recent discussions of hybridity by Amy Robbins, one of this jssue’s contributors, and Lisa Lowe, among others, are also several times cited).

The issue’s essays concur that early definitions of hybridity are in need of updating. More strikingly, they offer a quite consistent new set of definitions. Some of these definitions follow, which emphasize a range of kinds of challenges to the status quo:

[A]esthetic approaches that challenge a singular narrative/lyric voice and feature fragmentation, broken sequence, secondary material, and/or documentary modes … a collagist style, [a] breaking of generic conventions, and [a] focus on the materiality of language.

(Julie Morrissy)

[Work that features] incongruities, contradictions, and moments of nonresolution.

(Klaver)

[The use of] aesthetic and poetic registers to unsettle the colonial nation, identity, gender, and poetic form … [a concern with] questions of hybrid identity.

(Heather Milne)

[A] dynamic temporal cybernetic system, a vessel, full of energy, simultaneously pulsing with the changing movements and constrictions of everyday life.

(Tess Patalano)

[An] assemblage of images and text on the page.

(Anastasia Nikolis)

It also seems true that literary hybridity, despite its absence from the OED, is ubiquitous in contemporary writing and criticism. Nikolis notes that the submission platform Chill Subs includes a range of combined genres, including one identified as “Hybrid.” This proliferation likely has many causes, among them a weariness with standard genre distinctions; a perhaps distinctively 21st-century set of challenges to established notions about facticity and truth; and ongoing but ever-more-urgent ecological, geopolitical, and economic emergencies. (It is worth remembering, though, that, as several of the issue’s essayists remind us, hybridity is anything but new as a literary practice).

This issue makes it clear that hybridity is employed by a wide range of authors in a wide range of twenty-first century works, from those of established poets who have won major national and international prizes (Jorie Graham, Bernadette Mayer, Claudia Rankine, Louise Glück) to often younger poets (Javier O. Huerta, Yosimar Reyes, and Javier Zamora), some of whom publish with non-mainstream presses (Joshua Whitehead, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, Jennifer Scappettone); from U.S.-based poets to Canadian (Whitehead) and Mexican ones (Balam Rodrigo); from poets writing in English to those who write in other languages (Rodrigo, Huerta, Kim Hyesoon); from U.S.-born poets to those born elsewhere (Zamora, Etel Adnan, Susannah Dickey, Gail McConnell, Kimberly Campanello); from works their authors identify as poetry to works closer to literary criticism (Maureen N. McLane and Lisa Robertson), performance art (JJJJJerome Ellis), and manifesto (Tamayo).

Unsurprisingly, hybridity appears in quite different modes and forms in different works, a variety sometimes evident in a single poetic text. Here is a partial list of these forms, some of which overlap:

• Multigenre: writing that involves the quotation, refashioning, or discussion of extant works (explored in essays by Elizabeth Coles, Michael Theune); that includes and alludes to different literary genres, including lyric poetry, autobiographical and more objective prose of different kinds (in essays by Amy Robbins, Nikolis), and critical theory, as well as more debased language.
• Multimedia: writing that integrates visual images, including digital ones, or musical scores or song lyrics (in Lynn Keller, Nikolis, Milne) in ways that at times emphasize “interruptions and, indeed, ‘disruption’” (Morrissey)
• Documentary: poems that evoke or take the form of news reports or that consider the function and effect of media depictions of recent events, including the ways these events “are reported, narrativised, … sensationalized[,] and depersonalized by the media” (Morrissey); poems that incorporate verbatim news reports, official documents, and other material (Keller, Jeannine Pitas); and poems that draw inspiration from nonpoetic, often activist modes of writing (Klaver)
• Palimpsestic (I borrow this term from Pitas): work that selectively cites and erases often canonical texts (Pitas, Milne).
• Identity-based: work that explores bifurcated or multiple identities, including Louise Glück’s embrace of simultaneous adoption of the position of mother and child (Reena Sastri) and several Undocupoets’ juxtapositions of material reality with an imaginary alternative to it (Daniel Enrique Pérez); the establishment of new hybrid identities such as Undocuqueer (Pérez) and “Indiqueer,” a fusion of indigenous and queer identities coined by poet Joshua Whitehead (Milne).

The essays included here also draw on diverse theoretical models, ranging from decolonial, indigenous, and transnational discourse (Morrissey, Milne, Pérez, Pitas); new materialism, ecocriticism, and posthumanism (Keller, Milne, Patalano); gender, queer, and feminist theory (Morrissey, Klaver, Pérez, Milne, Robbins); psychoanalysis (Sastri); and theories of the lyric (Nikolis, Theune). Read together, they reveal not only the relevance of these theoretical modes to hybridity as a topic but also hybrid writers’ often explicit engagement with a range of contemporary theoretical concepts.

Another throughline runs through many, if not all, of the essays in this issue: by focusing on poems by members of underrepresented groups not included in Swensen and St. John’s anthology, these essays argue that formal innovation in recent hybrid poems critiques and/or offers alternatives to contemporary or historical acts of exclusion, violence, and injustice. Hybrid strategies, that is, affirm slippage and multiple identities in ways that, as Milne cogently puts it, “[transcend] the colonial-margin-to-center dialectic” central to postcolonial notions of hybridity in favor of something less hierarchical and more “web-like.” Considerations of unequal power relations recur in recent hybrid works, which sometimes document “cultural positions forcefully imposed upon subjects” (Klaver) and sometimes directly foreground modes of resistance (Pitas, Pérez), a term that recurs in multiple essays (including those by Keller, Klaver, and Milne). Several essays directly link hybrid modes to activist projects (Klaver, Pitas, Pérez). While it is possible to divide the essays in this Special Issue into various groupings—those focused on single authors (Sastri, Theune, Milne), for example, tend to focus more directly on form than those that consider groups of poets—what is striking in this issue is the (itself hybrid) reimagining of older, mutually exclusive notions of hybridity.

Several notable subthemes also recur, which I list briefly in the hope of gesturing toward a more nuanced (though still evolving) definition of contemporary poetic hybridity.

• An emphasis on slippage, assemblage, multiplicity, unlocatedness, and liminality. Imagery of movement recurs, including an emphasis on “the … mixture or melding of elements pulled apart and pushed back together” (Patalano) and a consideration of “those who cross or are crossed by borders” (Pérez). On a textual level, several authors explore a “slippage between [the positions of] analyst and assembler” (Nikolis) and an Anzaldúan aesthetic of uncertainty (Pérez).
• A reclamation of marginalization and the border broadly defined, along with a speaking back to stereotypes and a disclosure of formerly taboo or forbidden information. Texts discussed in the issue explore what Lisa Lowe has called “the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations” (qtd. in Klaver) via explorations of gender and reproductive freedom (Morrissy), the legacy of colonialism (Morrissey, Milne, Pérez), the treatment of migrants (Pitas, Pérez), and more.
• Challenges to national and linguistic boundaries. This tendency is partly evident in poems that adopt a “decolonial” (Milne) or “postnationalist” (Pérez) point of view, but it is also apparent in shifts within texts between locations and languages, sometimes leading to linguistically hybrid texts (including those in Spanglish), texts incorporating invented words (Patalano), and incomplete translations.
• Manipulations of temporality. Bernadette Mayer, according to Robbins, “develop[s] experiences of subjective time as moments of resistance to the standardizing force of objective clock and calendric time” and replacing a physically located, “personal I” with one “thoroughly mediated by standard … as well as geological time”. Other essays consider conditions of “simultaneity” (Klaver), repetition (Nikolis, Patalano), and related disruptions of normative chronology.
• An emphasis on materiality. The essays consider “material objects” and “material constraints” (Nikolis), “material reality” (Galvin, qtd. in Morrissey), “material intertwining” (Keller), and a “poetics of material interruption,” which Morrissey defines as the use of distinctively poetic strategies to disrupt material conditions. In fact, the poets discussed often redefine the process of poetic composition, partly by situating the writer as reader (Coles) or compiler (Nikolis) as well as creator. By emphasizing performance and performativity, these poems also move beyond the printed page to gallery, theatrical, and virtual spaces in ways that help create the communities for which they advocate.
• Redefinitions of traditional poetic (especially lyric) conventions and subgenres. From Glück’s embrace of a dual identity in her poems (Sastri) to more radically “polyphonous text[s]” with multiple speakers (Pitas), the poets in this issue interrogate singular, stable lyric speakers (the traditional lyric “I”) as a response to contemporary forces ranging from environmental crisis (Keller) to the political instability associated with living in the Anthropocene (Robbins). These poems also tend to adopt what Coles calls “a variant second person” that enables at-times overlaid acts of reading and rereading, as well as a shifting between apostrophe (address to a singular absent entity) and reader address. Nikolis considers hybrid elegies that employ both written text and visual images as responses to traditional poems in this lyric subgenre. Theune considers Jorie Graham’s hybrid exploration of the constitutively lyric notion of the turn.

As this summary suggests, there is a great deal to be learned from reading these essays together as well as separately; I have only hinted at their richness here. Read together, this Special Issue’s essays help define an emerging literary genre and a still-developing critical field. They also offer a series of innovative concepts and redefined terms—including Keller’s “trans-vocality,” Pérez’s “undocuqueer,” Morrissey’s “poetics of material interruption,” Patalano’s “watery imaginary,” Sastri’s notion of poetic natality, and Theune’s reconsideration of the classic lyric turn, among others—that offer new tools with which readers can consider not only the works here discussed but also the proliferating and varied hybrid works that are still emerging and that, it seems likely, will come to define 21st-century poetry and poetics.