The Way Poets Read Now

Abstract

The way literature scholars read now has been under scrutiny for over a decade. The same long decade has seen an explosion in experimental literatures that make reading in the literary-critical sense a matter for poets: a poet’s hybrid, whose disturbance of genre is claimed by publishers as the writing’s main attraction. This paper explores the disturbance of literary criticism in the work of contemporary North American poets, Maureen N. McLane and Lisa Robertson. Asking how these poets read now, the paper argues that an exchange of powers between analysis and performance reorients criticism toward a hybrid ‘dramatic’ mode, activist in its sensibilities and committed to a redistribution of agencies by style and form. Far from deepening the divide between creative and academic criticism, these poets model the significance of composition, prosody, and voice for critical writing of all kinds.

The poet and novelist Tania Hershman is asked about hybrid writing: How to define it?

  

Hybrid writing is, by its nature, writing that does not want you to say what it is. It hops across genre boundaries, slips out from under labels, you think it’s one thing, and then perhaps it is another (Brethour 2020).

  

Shifting and slipping by program, what such writing wants, on this view, is to capsize all definitions—as though to call a piece of writing ‘hybrid’ were a way to stop talking about it, a consensus that all other consensus is out. Literary critics can be surprisingly accommodating to this direct or indirect sabotage of their work. ‘All aspects and variants of hybridization in American poetry are of equal and lasting value,’ says David St. John—for whom the ‘hybrid’ in American Hybrid is its essential and equalising virtue—while other commentators find the dazzle of hybridity undimmed by the steady normalisation of its defiance (St. John 2009, p. xviii; Rehak 2000, p. 39). The retreat from judgment aside, surely the most striking feature of Hershman’s ‘hybrid writing’ is its imagined retreat from readers. In not wanting us to say what it is, it is as though the hybrid text were in some way about refusing contact, a private ruse courting neither recognition nor exposure.

In the writing I discuss here, this vision of the disinterested hybrid simply does not hold. Nor does the suspension of critical judgment that would match its coolness. This has as much to do with the basic gesture of hybrid writing—which I think Hershman misreads—as it has to do with the texts I focus on. My sources in this essay are contemporary North American poets who write works of literary scholarship, criticism, and research poetics. If their writing does not need us to say what it is, it is because it tells us more or less upfront: because critical declaration and analysis are part of this particular hybrid performance, in which creative composition of several kinds has been blended with the apparatus and activity of criticism. Even beyond these sources, I would struggle to recall an author of hybrid poetics in English who does not mark, gloss, acknowledge, or otherwise explain what they are doing, and few who do not address the performance to ‘you, dear reader’ or a variant second person. It is to readers that the hybrid is addressed, explicitly or otherwise, as it is we who register the dissonance of mode or voice, the compression of genres, forms, and literary histories. It is we who provide the voltage for its resistance. Hence the extraordinary resilience of the lyric first person in and among such hybrid experiments, even those that admit or collude in the postmodern critique of persona. The hybrid needs our acknowledgement and will skim across any textual surface to get it.

In this keenly interested mode of contemporary writing, I’d like to propose, we are left in no doubt that what we are reading is, or would wish to be, an act of address. The scholar and poet Elizabeth Willis claims in the opening poem of Liontaming in America (Willis 2024) that ‘I’m not speaking for you, I’m speaking to you, America’ (Willis 2024, p. 3). The poems charge you, ‘Dear reader,’ with the unmaking and remaking of a nation, whose settlement narratives and canonical cultural histories cross in and out of Willis’s—and our own—present tense (172). The documentary poetics of Susan Howe have long appealed to us directly to listen: to voices suppressed, ‘Pilings of thought under spoken,’ and to what Howe herself does as she listens to them (Howe 1990, p. 30).1 She acknowledges as much in The Midnight (Howe 2003): ‘Words sounding as seen the same moment on paper will always serve as the closest I can come to cross-identification vis-à-vis counterparts in a document universe. I’m only a gentle reader trying to be a realist. Can you hear me?’ (Howe 2003, pp. 60–61). Explanations like this one venture an accord between author and reader that we will read and accept her literature on certain terms. Or like this one from the British poet Bhanu Kapil, who warns us not to expect ‘literature’ at all from the notes and paratexts of Ban en Banlieue (Kapil 2015): ‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’ (Kapil 2015, p. 32).2 The exposure is meant for us, sounding in our own ‘moment on paper.’ It asks for our recognition and hopes for our consent.

What kind of work does this exposure produce? What happens when it accompanies writing that is ‘made from literature’ in a different sense than Kapil’s—writing made from the quotation, commentary, and exegesis of other works? This essay will suggest that the mixture of critical scholarship and compositional performance in contemporary hybrid writing brings us to a headlong confrontation: not just with how theatrical hybridity can be in procuring our recognition, but with the power this procurement exerts over how we read and understand other works drawn into the hybrid field.

Hybridity understood as resistance to genre inherits certain powers ascribed to the Creole: a refusal to assimilate or identify, and a performative rebuff to the discourse of purity. In this essay, I approach the hybrid scholarly writing of poets as an intervention in more local (though not necessarily less political) controversies around what has been termed ‘the way we read now’—the powers, methods, and voices of academic literary criticism (Best and Marcus 2009). Several high-profile approaches to the question confront a perceived ‘coercion’ in mainstream habits of reading, citing, and arguing; a ‘power’ critics can easily become attached to and which many would be reluctant to renounce (‘in the name of critique,’ claims Lisa Ruddick, ‘anything except critique can be invaded or denatured.’ Ruddick 2015, p. 71).3 These now well-trodden approaches target the epistemic moves and moods of mainstream academic articles, cordoned off decisively from the category of literature. This essay offers an alternative scenario. Where distinctions of category are no longer secure—in the hybrid’s circuits, where scholarship moves under literary constraints—‘reading’ flows along quite different currents. I examine works by two North American poets, Maureen N. McLane and Lisa Robertson, whose scholarly writings amplify the soft power of hybridity in very different ways. I explore how McLane reads what she calls ‘my poets’ and ‘my poetics’ in a pair of experimental critical volumes (McLane 2012, 2024), and how Robertson reads the philosopher Simone Weil alongside Occitan troubadour poetics in a short book that began life as a performance (Robertson 2021). On the view of these works, reading closely is—is always—as much about analysis as it is about performance. Reading closely is a way of speaking to readers, their readers, to whom hybrid form and hybridised speech address the promise of community. The poet’s hybrid diverts the agencies of criticism. It participates in the power of poems to make worlds, claim worlds, and keep them alive.

  

$$\begin{array}{c}*\end{array}$$

  

Here is a short excerpt from the jacket of My Poets by Maureen N. McLane (b. 1967), a poet, critic, and Professor of English and American Letters at New York University:

  

Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your “my poets,” or “my novelists,” or “my filmmakers,” or “my pop stars,” might be. (McLane 2012, blurb)

  

Part ‘dithyramb’ or hymn to other poets’ songs, McLane’s critical essay and memoir is an outstanding testament to what Jonathan Culler calls poems’ ‘iterative and iterable performance of an event in the lyric present’ (Culler 2017, p. 226). Culler’s ‘performance’ is one he binds to poetry and to lyric poetry specifically. Yet McLane’s 273-page book is an exemplary case of how the performance Culler singles out in poems can make its way out of poetry and into other forms such as criticism (Coles, forthcoming). McLane’s densely iterative song doesn’t only amplify the poems she reads by quoting them, echoing them, and writing new poems in response—which she does in both My Poets and its sister volume, My Poetics. Her book would have criticism share in these poems’ ritualistic power by speaking vocatively and performatively in turn. This is how My Poets works as an ‘invitation’ and how its hybrid gesture solicits and needs ‘you’: for to grasp McLane’s project is to hear and see her document of reading, much in the way she sees and hears (and we see and hear) the poems she reads. The writing is horizontal and non-hierarchic, streaming from poem to reading and poem to poem like a mind on continuous playback. McLane needs you to hear this happening and to note her text’s iterativeness and iterability in the real time of your reading (as you may note the jolt of coupled pronouns in ‘your “my poets”’ above). McLane models what making poets ‘mine’ can sound like so that, out of your own critical sensorium, you too might do the same.

So far, so contemporary, under McLane’s own definition in the long poem, Mz N: the serial: a poem-in-episodes: ‘Now I am being contemporary/I can bring the now/right into this poem’ (McLane 2016, p. 6). The first instalment in an ‘ongoing experiment in criticism,’ My Poets contains fifteen chapters, fourteen of which bear McLane’s first-person possessive in the title: ‘My Marianne Moore,’ ‘My Louise Glück,’ ‘My Shelley/(My Romantics),’ etc. All but three of these chapters are written in semi-autobiographical critical prose that detours into rhyming and unrhyming verse; the remaining three McLane tells us are poems (two ‘centos’) and a ‘proem’ (from pro-oimē, a prelude to the song to follow). The opening ‘Proem in the Form of a Q & A’ is a mock interview with McLane, who weaves her script from unreferenced quotations. Here are some examples from the conversation:

  

Why poetry?

Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought.

  

Why poetry?

The immortal Mind craves objects that endure.

  

Why poetry?

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours and cannot.

(McLane 2012, p. 5)

  

The answers to McLane’s questions here come from Hannah Arendt, William Wordsworth, and John Ashbery. Their loose threads knit an open inquiry into why poems matter and why McLane reads as well as writes them. In The Human Condition (Arendt [1958] 2018), from which McLane’s first line is taken, Arendt also recognises the craving in Wordsworth. She knows that poems written down appeal to the human ‘desire for imperishability’ (Arendt [1958] 2018, p. 170). Yet, despite being ‘less a thing than any other work of art,’ Arendt explains, ‘poetry is closest to thought’ because its technical arts of sound and rhythm turn the poem into what she calls (with Augustine in mind) a form of ‘living recollection’: through rhythm, says Arendt,

  

the poem becomes fixed in the recollection almost by itself. It is this closeness to living recollection that enables the poem to remain, to retain its durability, outside the printed or the written page. (169)

  

Why poetry? Because the poem commits its rhythms to thought, where they take root and become a part of your living memory. On which Ashbery offers a pessimistic twist: the poem wants to be yours and cannot (‘You have it but you don’t have it,’ runs an earlier line in the same poem, ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons.’ Ashbery 1981, p. 3). Why poetry? Because it is never the same as your recollections and so never sits flush with them. Its sadness at this inequity is exactly what you want it for.

This is the contemporaneity McLane is interested in: the tension poems create in and against her memories as she recalls them here and now. Her ‘Proem’ sets the tone for the whole book—and for McLane’s ‘ongoing experiment in criticism’—by assimilating poems of diverse origin and speaking with and through them. She asks questions and her poets answer. The Anglo-Saxon word kankedort—‘a state of suspense; a critical position; an awkward affair’ (McLane 2012, p. 7)—used once in Geoffrey Chaucer and never again in the history of English literature, becomes a cipher for a single intractable experience in McLane’s biography. This is ‘My Chaucer.’ Turning over an apostrophe in the early H.D. poem ‘Oread,’ McLane slips inside it and speaks to us from there:

  

If a mountain nymph could speak, would we understand her?

  

Whirl up sea––

whirl your pointed pines…

  

when she addresses the sea, commands the sea, provokes the sea to respond to her spell, she cannot help but invest the sea with her mountainous mind:

  

splash your great pines

on our rocks,

hurl your green over us,

cover us with your pools of fir.

  

Cover us with your pools of fir, your aqueous splash gone spiney, piney, and green.

(McLane 2012, pp. 124–25)

  

The green nouns go on pooling and ‘Oread’ seems to go on speaking. This is ‘My H.D.’ Like H.D.’s poem, it wants to make and inhabit a world with us, a world we address as ‘you’ and a world that begins life as a pronoun. By the end of the poem—and as the poem asks—‘we’ and ‘our rocks’ are, perhaps always were, the foundations of this newly born world. McLane’s prose, with its agile metrics and alpine palette, seems almost to follow suit, invoking the world of ‘Oread’ only to become a part of it. There are tugs of dissension if we feel for them. The tautology, ‘aqueous splash,’ and the tautological feminine rhyme, ‘spiney, piney,’ far from contiguous with H.D.’s hieratic precision, seem to push her phrasing ajar.4 Perhaps McLane speaks, at these moments, against her H.D. Perhaps she wishes here to mark out ‘My Poetics,’ and to mark with it the distance of irony, a full century after ‘Oread.’

If what we read here is an imperfect fusion of voices, perhaps one of its functions is to suggest—as McLane’s experiment in criticism seems to want to do—that there is only one voice, the voice of the reader (‘the poem/Has set me softly down beside you,’ Ashbery continues: ‘The poem is you’). ‘Sit in this chair,’ invites McLane on the following page:

  

This chair knows and anticipates both the human need for rest and the contours of a resting human body. Now shut the window. This window bespeaks and answers the simultaneous desire for shelter and our love of light and a view. Now read this poem. This poem bespeaks our desire to commune, to hear and be heard, to make the chaos of inner feeling not only sentient but shareable (126).

  

Throwing us a view, McLane’s uplit script extends the deictic task of the poem she calls ‘world-brightening’ (121). Just as the poem calls on the sea (‘Whirl up sea’), as it calls up ‘great pines,’ ‘our rocks,’ and ‘us,’ McLane reciprocates with her own set of ‘instructions for performance’—one of Culler’s terms for the eventfulness of lyric (Culler 2017, p. 7): ‘Sit in this chair… Now shut the window… Now read this poem.’ She participates in the performance of the poem by explaining it, so that, as well as ‘this chair’ and ‘this window’ where the explanation and the imperatives happen, her prose is also the place of ‘this poem,’ where we find ourselves interpolated again:

  

I may be addressing a mountain nymph. You may be the sea. To command you, to address you, I must think you. “I” must think “you.” And yet even as I think you I interfuse you with my own nature ––my pines, my fir, my rocks.

  

Or rather, “our rocks.” Splash your great pines on our rocks… Hurl your green over us. Cover us with your pools of fir. (McLane 2012, p. 127)

  

Criticism like McLane’s is a transcript of iterability, where the events of poems keep on happening, recited and revived in the course of the reading. It is criticism turned liturgy—or ‘dithyramb,’ in McLane’s preferred term for her book’s choral involvement in poems. Her point of departure in the above is an apostrophe that pulls all of us into its currents, as though we were the land exhorting the sea: ‘Whirl up sea… Splash your great pines/on our rocks.’ It is a neat example of how poems get us to occupy their dramas by lending us one or more of their pronouns, an availability and mode of interest that Culler calls ‘triangulated address’ (Culler 2017, p. 8). Though extreme in its occupation of H.D.’s poem and its pronouns, McLane’s iterative prose merely ups the volume on what Helen Vendler (one of McLane’s teachers) called the ‘silent transaction’ between ‘the rhythms of the poet’ and the reader, as it ramps up what Jonathan Kramnick calls the ‘critical free indirect discourse’ of most literary scholars, a kind of stylistic mimicry or ‘sounding like’ that occurs all the time in the ‘everyday science and ordinary expertise’ of criticism (Vendler 1995, p. 1; Kramnick 2023, pp. 4, 43).5 (For Kramnick, whether or not a reading is judged successful depends in part on the ‘aptness’ of this mimicry). McLane sounds more or less ‘like’ the poem she quotes in full (McLane 2012, pp. 124–25). The change in register between source and analysis is minimal, making dissensions in tone feel deliberately marked. A movement has been made from where the critic is to where the poem is, and the prose speaks—errs and apostrophises—from there.

Elsewhere in My Poets—the ‘Proem’ is just one of these places—the poems have been moved, so to speak, to where McLane is. Remembering a conversation following her divorce, she says—still in ‘My H.D.’—‘the bones of my face turned to ash’:

  

• Could I not have said––

  

        I have had enough––

        ……………………………………

        O to blot out this garden

        to forget, to find a new beauty

        in some terrible

        wind-tortured place.

          (“Sheltered Garden”)

  

• Might I have said––

  

        Splintered the crystal of identity,

        shattered the vessel of integrity…

          (“The Walls Do Not Fall”)

  

• Could I have thought––

  

        I compensate my soul

        with a new role.

          (“Sigil”)

  

• Did I really feel––
• … (145–146)

  

This is the verse-prose of what Arendt calls ‘living recollection.’ Poems that have ‘happened’ to a reader surface in her as part of the narrative texture of memory (McLane suggests as much when she titles her bibliography ‘Works Consulted or Remembered’). Here, the poem is an instrument of dramatic monologue: one speaker, one lyric throughline, and someone else’s words. Deixis is reclaimed from the poems, their prepositions and pronouns aligned under a single narrative arc, from which rhymes splinter off at random.

The assimilation is completed by McLane’s own poems in the book. ‘My Poets I: An Interlude in the Form of a Cento,’ appearing in the last third of My Poets, is a poem with sixty-five footnotes, referencing a text of origin for each of its lines. The cento is a poem composed from the constrained vocabulary of other poems. Its task—apart from the performance of bibliography—is to reveal a bone structure or ideational shape that other writers’ words have been cropped to fit. McLane speaks through Hannah Arendt, Emile Benveniste, Anne Carson, Denise Levertov, Walt Whitman, and others, and what is thrown into foremost relief is the act of speaking—pure intention to put into words. The fact that it is other authors’ words that provide McLane’s content is not a failure of expression or expressivity, any more than her iterative prose is a failure of critical aptness.

Completing a spectrum that runs from iterative critical prose to dramatic monologue to uncreative poem, the ‘cento’ poems are the culmination of a ‘“dramatic” method’ of reading that extends from My Poets to My Poetics twelve years later. McLane’s model here—as well as a professed intellectual passion—is Roland Barthes, whose A Lover’s Discourse (Barthes [1977] 2002) replaces description of the discourse with its ‘simulation’ or performance, so restoring it ‘to its fundamental person, the I, in order to stage an utterance, not an analysis’ (Barthes [1977] 2002, p. 3). McLane’s ‘fundamental person’ stamps her pronoun on the title of My Poets. Her syntax in the book unspools the utterance ‘this poet—this poem—is mine’ as though to shout down Ashbery’s claim for the thwarted desire of poems to belong. McLane is open about her affinities with Barthes’ performative methods in My Poetics, where she zooms-in on the hybrid prose-and-verse form, the haibun, as it appears in Barthes’ lecture course, The Preparation of the Novel (Barthes 2011). McLane announces this form is what she has produced herself in My Poetics: ‘This chapter [her Chapter 3] has been a kind of haibun, an itinerary prompted by several invitations, a mix of haikus or haiku-ish forms—mine and others’—amidst prose meditations’ (McLane 2024, pp. 114–15). Thinking about McLane’s experiment in criticism as a ‘“dramatic” method’—Barthes’ term for his—can help us to see how hybridity can sustain rather than jeopardise the work of criticism (Barthes [1977] 2002, p. 3). The performative or ‘dramatic’ method gives us a model for how performance and analysis can coextend in a single composition, and for how the lyric throughline can absorb—or at least own up to—the powers and coercions of interpreting. Yet Barthes has more to say on criticism and its traffic with other people’s words.

In the examples I have read up to now—and in notable others from ‘My Louise Glück,’ ‘My Gertrude Stein,’ and ‘My Emily Dickinson/My Emily Dickinson,’ an homage to Susan Howe’s vocally experimental criticism—McLane’s hybrid writing speaks with candour in what, in a different essay, Barthes calls ‘the combined voices’ of literature and criticism, which together ‘always say: “I am literature”’ (Barthes [1966] 2007, p. 36). Barthes doesn’t stop here, and observes what he calls ‘criticism’ at closer range:

  

To read is to desire the work, to want to be the work, to refuse to echo the work using any discourse other than that of the work: the only commentary which a pure reader could produce, if he were to remain purely a reader, would be a pastiche… To go from reading to criticism is to change desires, it is no longer to desire the work but to desire one’s own language. But by that very process it is to send the work back to the desire to write from which it arose. And so discourse circulates around the book: reading, writing: all literature goes from one desire to another (Barthes [1966] 2007, p. 40).

  

We can see how a hybrid text like McLane’s hopes to display such desire as it circulates in the form of discourse: to—the reading and analysis of poems—and fro—the iteration of poems, the composition of new ones, and so on. Barthes is stringent, though, about what he sees as a difference in the love objects of ‘criticism’ and ‘reading.’ Criticism desires what it can make out of literature—the linguistic artefacts we call scholarly essays—whereas reading desires ‘the work’: no other artefact will do. Academic criticism, of course, operates no such distinction. ‘As literary critics,’ say Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘we were trained to equate reading with interpretation: with assigning a meaning to a text or set of texts,’ and to assign meaning, in Barthes’ view, is already to begin to ‘change desires’ (Best and Marcus 2009, p. 1). Thinking about hybridity and the politics the term inherits, Barthes’ choice of words could not be more pungent. A ‘pure reader,’ if he is ‘purely a reader’, produces pastiche; a critic produces something else, but returns the work to its native condition: ‘the desire to write.’ What are we to make of this purity, the purity of pastiche and imitation? Is McLane a ‘reader’ under Barthes’ definition, and in contrast with the way most critics read now? Can a hybrid text be pure?

  

$$\begin{array}{c}*\end{array}$$

  

The penultimate question in the ‘Proem’ of Maureen N. McLane’s My Poets is answered anonymously by the poet Lisa Robertson:

  

Why do you write poetry?

  My purpose here is to advance into

  the sense of the weather.

(McLane 2024, p. vii; Robertson 2001, p. 24)

  

The lines surface again at the start of another McLane ‘Proem,’ this time in My Poetics and now attributed to Robertson in a footnote. The question Robertson answers, this second time round, is not ‘Why do you write poetry?’ but ‘Why poetics?’—why write about what poems are? That these questions share the same answer for McLane should not surprise us. Several pages later in a note ‘To the Reader,’ under the subsection ‘Why I Write Such Good Books,’ McLane tells us openly that ‘I reject any a priori opposition between analytic and so-called creative dimensions, between lyric (or poetry) and critique’ (xxiii): poetry and poetics, poetry and criticism, can and do exchange tasks. Robertson and her ‘sense of the weather’ is one of many instruments put to work in the service of this claim. McLane could not have chosen a more striking exemplum, nor a more powerful counterpoint to the way McLane herself reads.

Lisa Robertson (b. 1960) is a poet and researcher who has taught and held residencies at the University of Cambridge, the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and others. An artist statement by Robertson meets McLane aslant on the question of poems and what we can do with them: ‘I usually can’t recall what a poem is. I don’t feel its task is to solve anything. It seems more suited to the occupation of an open complexity’ (Robertson 2018). Something she shares with McLane is an interest in what Robertson calls ‘the mouthfeel of somebody else’s diction’ (ibid.). In The Weather (Robertson 2001), the work McLane quotes from, this is ‘diction as rhythm’ in the everyday liturgies of talking about the weather, ‘a flickering social prosody’ that measures the pulse of belonging and the edges of community (Robertson 2006, p. 28). Weather-talk is site-specific, but Robertson’s poems in The Weather are the site and portrait of a discourse whose microclimates of diction and verse phenomenality move into and occupy where we are in the present. Robertson’s weather moves to include us, and tentatively describes its effect:

  

The rain has loosened; we engage our imagination. The sentence opens inexpensively; we imagine its silence. The shrubs and fences begin to darken; we are deformed by everything. Therefore we’re mystic. The sky is closing in; we mediate an affect. The sky is curved downward, we desituate memory. The sky is dominant; we lop off the image. We come upon our thought. The sky is lusty; so are we. We prove inexhaustibility. (Robertson 2001, p. 38)

  

We do prove it, reading The Weather and consenting (perhaps) to count among its consequences. Our consent makes a community. Our consent makes a ‘weather.’

Robertson writes closest to critical poetics in two other, more recent works: her debut novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (Robertson 2020), whose narrator so fully identifies with Les fleurs du mal that she discovers herself to be its author; and the commentary and poems of Anemones: A Simone Weil Project. Anemones derives from Robertson’s research in troubadour poetics—an ongoing project she calls wide rime—and was produced during a ‘Performance in Residence’ in Amsterdam between 2019 and 2021. The book collages several prose and verse compositions around an essay on Occitan culture by the philosopher Simone Weil, translated by Robertson and surrounded on each page by Robertson’s scholarly annotations. The annotated essay is followed by an ‘augmented translation’ of a twelfth-century troubadour poem quoted by Weil—the poem ‘Lark’ by Bernart de Ventadorn—each of whose eight stanzas exfoliates, in Robertson’s hands, into a new and longer poem.

In her introductory essay, ‘To Make Six Shirts from Anemones: Consent, Reading, Resistance,’ Robertson considers the power and endurance of poems. She announces she has approached Weil’s text ‘in the spirit of an experiment in thinking’ and ‘as a poet, not a philosopher.’ Robertson turns to face the power of poems on the second page of her essay:

  

The poem does desire—it desires the freedom of new futures. With spoken and inscribed time as its medium, the lyric poem vividly performs a philosophical and political task. (Robertson 2021, p. 22)

  

We are back once again with the desire of poems: not for other works or languages, but for ‘the freedom of new futures’ (‘The poem… wants to be yours,’ etc.). Nurturing desire and safeguarding freedom are tasks that elevate poems into a larger order of urgency—‘a philosophical and political task,’ Robertson says. I want to think about this task in the hybrid Anemones, and about what it means for Robertson to read critically, and read consensually, ‘as a poet.’

Simone Weil’s essay ‘En quoi consiste l’inspiration occitanienne’ (1943), which Robertson translates literally as ‘What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of,’ vindicates the twelfth-century experiments of Catharism and Occitan troubadour poetry as an exemplary mode of resistance to fascism. Like Weil’s earlier and more famous essay, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’ (Weil [1939] 1965), the Occitan essay was published in the internationalist avant-garde journal Cahiers du Sud, in a special issue celebrating ‘Le Génie d’Oc’ (Weil [1943] 2014). As in the earlier essay, Weil turns her gaze on the power of force to crush and the power of compassion to resist. For Weil, in Robertson’s translation,

  

The essence of Occitan inspiration is identical to that of Greek inspiration. It consists of the understanding of force… To understand force is, recognizing it as almost sovereign in this world, to refuse it with disgust and contempt. This contempt is the other face of the compassion for everything that is exposed to the ravages of force.

This refusal of force finds its fullness in the concept of love. (Robertson 2021, pp. 68–69)

  

It is the refusal of force that binds Athens and medieval Occitanie to the twentieth-century anti-fascist resistance. This refusal makes contemporaries of Plato and Bernart de Ventadorn, whose poem ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’—literally, ‘When I see the lark move’—Weil reads alongside the poet Agathon’s famous speech pitching love against force in the Symposium. The essay summons both inspirations to the ‘philosophical and political task’ that Weil saw as hers: to claim philosophy as a way of life, an authentic vita activa, realised as philosophy by its exercise in the world. Weil is uncompromising, and her example is famously troubling to assimilate. The facts of her short life are astonishingly consistent with her philosophical commitments, and this consistency—the performance of absolute commitment—fits comfortably into most definitions of fanaticism. Yet Robertson turns this reading on its head, starting with what she shows happens to philosophical discourse in Weil’s essay, and to a single word whose primary associations are to fascism, fanaticism, and ‘an ideology of terror’ (Robertson 2021, p. 34). The single word is ‘purity.’

Simone Weil, says Lisa Robertson, ‘chose to claim the word purity for an anti-fascist thinking’ and to ‘reinhabit it with a profoundly altered political value’ (34). ‘Pure’ is the lark of Ventadorn, whose joy presses on the pain of finitude (73). ‘Purity’ is the poise sustained in a state of contradiction, dissonance, or extreme difficulty. Hence, says Weil, ‘Greek poetry expressed pain with such a purity that at the depth of undiluted bitterness, perfect serenity shone,’ or ‘Gregorian chant rises slowly, and at the moment when one believes that it will assume its confidence, the rising movement is broken and lowered’ (74). This Pythagorean concept of harmony, Weil explains, consists in ‘the unity of opposites as contraries,’ so that ‘pain and joy, by dint of being pure, are one and the same thing’ (75). By this logic, while purity is a concentration of spirit, it is also the fruit of admixture, a refusal of absolutes: no longer opposable to ‘impurity’ and viscerally opposed to the logic of fascism. In Robertson’s language, Weilian purity ‘is the opposite of force… Purity is a prepositionally horizontal relationship,’ the relationship we call ‘consent’ (35–36). It is conceptually close to the hybrid, understood as the performance of admixture and resistance to absolutes. By reclaiming the concept of purity and thinking with it against the grain, Weil works deconstructively against philosophy, ‘undoing …the rhetoric of force from within its own grammar’ (52) and turning discursive style into a ‘profound activism’ (51). But the activism of style places demands on its readers and those who wish to continue its work. For Robertson, nothing less is at stake than ‘the freedom of new futures’ she has claimed in the name of poems. Style, here, is its guarantor. ‘Style is desire’ (52).

The way Weil reads, then, serves as a model to Robertson, who set out to read her philosophy ‘as a poet.’ If this logic is difficult to grasp, Robertson explains it for us:

  

I am also moved by her gift as a reader—very much like a poet, Weil throws open her subjectivity in order to be fundamentally changed by language… I will consider that such throwing-open is a contingent form of readerly consent, where this consent is a model of the refusal of force (24, my italics).

  

What Robertson wants to do—how she will read like a poet after Weil—is to allow herself to be changed by Weil’s language. This is Robertson’s ‘readerly consent,’ which seems to mean, first of all, reading Weil within stylistic and conceptual constraints that are Weil’s, not Robertson’s, and within a lineage of Weil’s choosing, not Robertson’s: a line drawn from Plato to Ventadorn to the French anti-fascist resistance. Acceding to Weil’s resignification of ‘purity’ is Robertson’s greatest challenge, and it forces a reckoning with the ‘intellectual habits’ of a lifetime (22). Yet the strongest consequences of Robertson’s ‘readerly consent’ occur at the level of form: the hybrid documentary form of Anemones and the performance with which it began. An activism of form throws open the community of consent to include us, Robertson’s present and future readers.

True to the demonstrativeness of the hybrid, Robertson explains her title early on. The young Weil wrote an essay on ‘The Fairy Tale of the Six Swans in Grimm,’ whose six brothers have been turned by their stepmother into swans. The task of restoring them falls to their sister, who must spin and sew six nightshirts from the petals of white anemones, staying silent as she works and facing the gravest of accusations. After six years of silent labour, she restores her brothers and saves herself just in time from the gallows. ‘To act is never difficult,’ remarks Weil. ‘We always act too much and scatter ourselves ceaselessly in disorderly deeds. To make six shirts from anemones and keep silent: this is our only way of acquiring power.’ This power (puissance) is the inverse of force. To acquire it demands the minimum of action and the maximum concentration of purpose: ‘The sole strength in the world is purity… the sole strength and sole virtue is to cease from acting’ (31–32). Focused passivity in this story is a mode of radical action. To read Weil ‘as a poet’ is to match her demands and read her with a minimum of force and a maximum concentration of purpose. To read her as a poet, Robertson must ‘rhyme’ with Weil (which is not the same as merely mimicking her voice). Her method should reprise Weil’s ‘power,’ continuing its activism and performing her consent. Robertson—in a drama very different from McLane’s—must be a ‘pure’ reader.

Her reading begins as a performance. The opening text of Anemones is a letter from Robertson to floral artist Benny Nemer, to which Nemer responds at the book’s close. Robertson introduces her project of translation, commentary, and transcreation, recapitulating Nemer’s role in its delivery. Addressing his ‘attention,’ she wraps his second-person pronoun around ours:

  

‘To make six shirts from anemones and to keep silent: this is our only way of acquiring power…’ …In the spirit of this floral heresy, I asked you to help me formally present this work to some chosen receivers, the people it’s dedicated to. For me your attention to intangible, fragile and intimate gestures and material—floral bouquets, letters, garments, choreographies—accompanies the troubadour spirit of Weil’s thinking, her joy in abundant consent, so elegantly. (Robertson 2021, p. 17)

  

For this inaugural action, Nemer crafted individual bouquets of white anemones, which he delivered to the work’s dedicatees along with a letter from Robertson, which we do not see. Out of sight but within our earshot, the action accomplishes the kind of direct address longed for and triangulated by the troubadour love poem. So doing, the action performs its dependency on the consent of its recipients. It literalises the ritual labours that acquire the status of metaphor in Grimm, Weil, and Anemones: the silent dedication of sewing, the silent resistance of making, and, later, the concentrated labours of annotation, collage, and translation. The floral action is an event that happens again, iteratively and iterably, in the compositional scenery of Anemones, which documents and reprises the original performance. Bouquets and hand-delivered letters become, in Anemones, an arrangement of texts with no definite addressee. Robertson does as much as she can to guarantee for her book ‘the freedom of new futures’ and the wider ‘political and philosophical task’ she ascribes to poems. She consents performatively to Weil’s concept of purity by producing a series of ‘prepositionally horizontal’ writings, distributing the reading’s agency across multiple texts, forms, and authorships: in the book’s wide rime with Weil, no single discourse, voice, or style predominates.6 (As in the ‘horizontal discourse’ of Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, all interpretive figures ‘remain on the same level.’ Barthes [1977] 2002, p. 7). Annotation is a way of staging this arrangement on the page. Slim columns of two-tone ink blush from bright red to brown alongside Weil’s essay. The colouring betrays a desire that Robertson’s analytic attention confirms, and which an activism of form hopes to arouse in her readers.

The ‘Lark’ poems, finally, are a labour of love qua the refusal of force. Like a rhapsode or sewer of songs (from rhaptein, to sew or weave together), Robertson reproduces the eight stanzas of ‘Lark’ as eight interlinked poems, riffing on and augmenting the original. Like the book as a whole, the sequence is an ‘open work’ in which, as Lyn Hejinian describes such a work, ‘all elements… are maximally excited.’ The work ‘rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other …hierarchies’ (Hejinian 2000, p. 43). Robertson splays out her sources and process together and in full; augmentation, riff, and collage are then ours to reprise. No source is assimilated in the way we saw McLane assimilate H.D. No single poem is occupied. Rather, Robertson cedes her reading to the shape and demands of Weilian consent. This means minimal force and maximal concentration, but it also means collaging essays, poems, translations, and correspondence: the performative purity of formal admixture. It means handwritten, hand-delivered letters. It means reproducing four variant translations of Agathon’s speech on consent, composing eight exfoliated poems out of the eight stanzas of ‘Lark,’ and the intimate documents of a collaborative process. Address and consent are the driving compositional model.

Robertson performs her accession to a lineage of resistance to force and hierarchy. Yet to do so, she must refuse or dramatically reroute the conventional powers of literary criticism and scholarship. What can an experimental work like Anemones—or like My Poets and My Poetics—offer to contemporary conversations around ‘the way we read now’? Facing this question, I’ll end with one of Robertson’s ‘Lark’ variations, alongside McLane on what she calls her ‘Compositional/Poetics.’

  

$$\begin{array}{c}*\end{array}$$

  

My Poetics, the second book in McLane’s ‘experiment in criticism,’ announces itself thus:

  

My Poetics explores how poems and poetic projects variously “think what we are doing” (cf. Arendt); how poems register, sense, and shape their conditions; and how poetics (as a discourse on poetry) might participate in and shape this ongoing relationship between poems and readers. (McLane 2024, p. xxi)

  

McLane will return to the source enclosed in ‘cf. Arendt,’ confessing it ‘has haunted me for years’ (1). The phrase haunts her book, surfacing in quotation marks or as a loose occasional refrain. It returns in a chapter on ‘Compositional/Poetics,’ where McLane’s focus is the poetry of ballads. Like the ballad, in McLane’s own definition, the Arendt refrain is caught en route, ‘in medias res’: ‘always…en route to another ballad, another version, performance, or iteration’ (61). Here, McLane thinks what she is doing as she writes poetry as well as poetry criticism. She describes the iterativeness of My Poetics, its performed attachment to song, and its share in ‘this ongoing relationship between poems and readers.’

‘Compositional/Poetics’ is where McLane measures the proportions of this share. ‘What do I mean by a ‘“compositional” axis of poetic inquiry?’ (43). It turns out ‘compositional’ is evocative ‘of composing, of making, arranging, wordsmithing, tunesmithing, poiesis itself,’ of ‘the plant family Compositae,’ and the philosopher Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘compositionism.’ McLane quotes Latour: ‘It is time to compose—in all the meanings of the word, including to compose with, that is to compromise, to care, to move slowly, with caution and precaution’ (Latour 2010, p. 487; McLane 2024, p. 43). Latour proposes compositionism as an ‘alternative to critique,’ continuing the work of an earlier paper that influenced debate on ‘the way we read now’ more strikingly than perhaps any other (Latour 2010, p. 474; Latour 2004). He steadies his term with etymology: componere, a putting together that retains the heterogeneity of its components, he says, channelling the cognate words ‘composure,’ compost, and the single stark fact that ‘a composition can fail’ (Latour 2010, p. 474). McLane’s approach to the ‘compositional’ is to turn it onto the world of poems. She is interested in how poems sustain and enact a ‘compositional field’ of relations between non-human agencies whose entanglement is not recognised or allowed under the auspices of critique (McLane 2024, p. 43). She produces a footnote in which Latour claims this power for the study of literature—‘The distribution of agencies is the right purview of literature studies’ (44; Latour 2010, 498 n25)—then she hands the ‘compositional’ back to ‘planty poems’ and non-lyrical ballads (McLane 2024, p. 49).

In the first part of this essay, we saw McLane de-compose poems and absorb their parts into the field of My Poets. We heard the ‘combined voices’ of literature and criticism turn quotation and analysis into balladry, with its characteristic ‘liturgically organized sound’ (McLane 2024, p. 56). The question of agency is one we cannot help asking in response to McLane: not the agency of plants and non-human animals, but the agency of poems and voices whose heterogeneity succumbs, finally, to the possessive syntaxes of My Poets. The contrast with Robertson could not be bolder. Where Robertson’s poems crop from the ‘troubadour rime-field’ and where her project scans in wide rime with Weil (Robertson 2021, p. 14), both My Poets and My Poetics can read like a ‘field theory’ of Maureen N. McLane, in which everything she reads is fair game, all poems an exfoliation of her own (McLane 2024, p. 56). McLane’s community of poets gathers under the possessive pronoun of her titles, in part, she says, so that we might gather ours in the same place. Where McLane’s pronoun roves and her syntax assimilates far and wide, Robertson’s is troubled at home by her encounters: ‘I end by troubling my self-designation. I think now,’ she says, ‘that to approach the historical community of consent, to sense with one another in new time, the desiring work of poesis must begin empty handed’ (Robertson 2021, p. 57). To sustain this community in new time, perhaps the staging of utterance must cede to a different ‘dramatic’ method. To stitch together whole and heterogeneous sources, to reproduce their voicing, alignment, and dissonance, is to produce another kind of drama: of agencies and powers still at stake, yet to be determined or pinned down.

Robertson finds an ally, finally, in the hybridity of troubadour performance, whose expository razo (rationale) preceded the live recitation of poems (Robertson 2021, p. 73; Nagy 2016; Poe 1995, p. 191). Annotating Weil’s quotation of the opening stanza of ‘Lark,’ Robertson warns of the dangers of partially and possessively reproducing poems:

  

Reading the entire poem, rather than stopping at this opening stanza, gives a much less transcendent interpretation of love than Weil’s… Even the decidedly beautiful swooping lark image is traditionally glossed, in the medieval razo (an interpretive introduction traditionally accompanying the poem, whether performed or transcribed in a songbook), as an erotic description of a woman named Lark who lifts up her skirts and falls back on her bed when she sees her lover, named Ray… My sense is that Weil perhaps did not read the entire poem… Did she cite the passage from memory, and somehow block from her recollection the decidedly carnal and cynical tale that follows? (Robertson 2021, pp. 73–74).

  

At stake in all quotation is a ‘distribution of agencies’: the agency or puissance of poems, the agencies of love, eros, and criticism, cognizant or not of their powers. Quotation is composition. Yet, as Latour reminds us, it can be well or badly composed. This aesthetics—sometimes called citational poetics—holds the balance of power in the hybrid, but it also does, as Robertson shows, in more conventional essays such as Weil’s. Her shortcomings as a practitioner of quotation are made up for by Robertson, who does not rely on living recollection, as she suspects Weil has done. Anemones reproduces the eight stanzas of ‘Lark,’ and each augmentation fuses the functions of commentary, pastiche, directions for performance, and performance:

  

…Wretched I go off song

From song I retreat, and making, wretched

  

I use this technical parlance for precision’s sake

May has left us.

(From ‘Nothing Else’, an augmented translation of stanza VIII of ‘Lark.’ Robertson 2021, p. 95)

  

McLane’s ‘experiment in criticism’ and Robertson’s ‘experiment in thinking’ are exemplary in showing how criticism—all criticism—is compositional, and that there is a distribution of power in how criticism is composed. Where McLane holds tightest to her professional credentials—in her command of theoretical discourse, for example—is where she is most possessive as a reader and where quotations are absorbed into the personal field. Robertson aspires to and documents an alternative: ‘Now it seems more precise to say that it is as an amateur that I translate Weil… I want to begin again, to insist that a poet is an amateur, which is to say a beginner’ (56–57). ‘Amateur reading’ has had a mixed press since Rita Felski opposed it to professional reading qua ‘critique’ (Felski 2015, 2020). Yet we can see Robertson as proposing a more specific approach to reading and writing. An open mode of interest: interest in unsettling its base and designation, and interest in the futurity of its sources; in iterability, or the continued sharing of its share. The poet and scholar Anne Carson admires the ‘amateur’ for similar reasons:

  

The thing about being an amateur is that is opens out that space for the third thing to happen. If I’m totally professional and locked in to my credentials as a professional, I can’t let you have a thought about what I am telling you. I have to make you have my thought about what I’m telling you and I just don’t like doing that. It’s not teaching, it’s closing off teaching (Carson in Coles 2023, p. 227).

  

Perhaps where hybrid criticism reads closest to poets and poems is also where it moves closest to teaching. For both have committed to freedom. Both want something they cannot hold onto.