dinosaurs ruled Massachu-
setts dinosaurs fucking and laying eggs in
Amherst Boston Mount Holyoke then you
appeared high priestess pulling it out of the
goddamned garden with both hands you
Emily remembered the first time comprehe-
nding a struck match and spread a flame it
feels good to win this fair and square protest
my assessment all you want but not needing
to dream is like not needing to see the world
awaken to itself indestructible epiphanies
….I will be your outsider if
that’s how you need me electric company’s
stupid threatening letters cannot affect a poet
who has faced death
(Conrad 2012, p. 4)
Tying the work of gardening and poetry to both elemental and transcendental energies, Conrad pictures the “high priestess” pulling “it”—art, life, the force of nature itself—“out of the goddamned garden with both hands”; the “indestructible epiphanies” of her poems, they suggest, are the sites at which it becomes possible to imagine an alternative to a heteronormative status quo populated by menacing “dinosaurs” defined by their impulses to procreate and dominate. The poet inhabits the familiar role of a Romantic outsider-hierophant poised before the sublime (“electric company’s stupid threatening letters cannot affect a poet who has faced death”), but they also inhabit the role of the outsider precariously and violently ostracized by us, their readers (“I will be your outsider if that’s how you need me”), a position of vulnerability that clarifies the significance of the emphatically “indestructible” epiphanic as a necessity rather than a mystical luxury.
In correlating transcendental associations of epiphany with states of disequilibrium that “not only garner a momentary new…awareness for the senses, but also present the possibility of changing the structures of thought for entire new ideas and new practices of forming ideas” (Conrad 2012, p. 167), Conrad presents a utopian association between poetry and revelation famously cultivated by one of their influences, Audre Lorde:
I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean – in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
(Lorde 2020, p. 25)
Over the past several decades, a critical narrative that consigns epiphany to obsolescence has sidelined the radical potential that poets have found and continue to find in revelation as a structure of experience and a representational practice. Though the “mainstream epiphanic lyric” might be obsolete, epiphany evidently dies hard; the works above demonstrate how formally innovative poets have recently leveraged the epiphanic to militate against traumatic repressions and dehumanizations, identifying sudden experiences of illumination with vigilance rather than escape, uncertainty rather than mastery, process rather than closure, recognition rather than repression, and community rather than the egotistical sublime. These poets do not consider revelation to be an embarrassing vestige of dualist metaphysics; for them, the numinousness of the epiphany originates in its subversive disruption of the experiential status quo and the frictionless complacencies of history-as-usual. “Resistance,” writes Conrad, “is the real magic” (Conrad 2012, p. 177).
NOTES
1 1. Abrams describes the meditative climax upon which the “out-in-out” structure of the “greater Romantic lyric” hinges as the moment in which “the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem,” delivering him back to the scene with “an altered mood and deepened understanding” (Abrams 1965, p. 528). Culler, taxonomizing the “Poetics of the Lyric” in Structuralist Poetics (1976), presents the epiphanic as an outcome of the transhistorical hyperbolic conventions of the genre; see pp. 175–178.
2 2. Hong points out that despite the avant-garde’s rhetorical equation of radical form with progressive politics, “Avant-garde poetry’s attitudes towards race have been no different than that of mainstream institutions”.
3 3. Cf. Skillman (2019), pp. 426–435.
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