UC Berkeley

On Lyric’s Minor Commons studies how minoritized writers use lyric poems to create alternative forms of collectivity. I argue that poets like Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Jack Spicer use lyric poetry’s undetermined multiplicity of voicing and reading for various social and political aims. These poems become spaces for politics: they conjure and mobilize collectives of action and feeling. My argument complicates generic and historicist critiques that associate lyric voice with the reinforcement of humanism. While lyric is often considered to be the genre of individual subjective experience, I read lyric as the genre of the collective who can voice or read it. For the minoritized poets I discuss in this dissertation, lyric’s collective is not the unmarked hegemonic universal, but another commons. The politics of difference often emphasizes the individual relative to the collective; my readings show how the “black poem” or the “queer poem” offer a commons of their own. These poems are minor in their position vis-à-vis the unmarked hegemonic universal, and also minor in their alternative prefiguring of a different form of sociality without a coercive and majoritarian impulse. By calling these invocations commons rather than particularisms, I argue that these writers figure minoritized identities as forms of collectivity rather than fixed identifications.

I begin with a reconsideration of the Romantic lyric, a primal scene for the association of lyric with the unmarked and abstract subject. Through reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals in apposition to some of William Wordsworth’s poems, I suggest a version of lyric reading that does not merely reproduce the subject, but instead exposes language to alternative reiteration through a contingent holding. Lyric’s attempt to capture experience in language, I argue, makes that experience into a commons. I then turn to more specific invocations by three mid-century U.S. poets, Amiri Baraka, Jack Spicer, and Frank O’Hara. Baraka and Spicer use lyric poems to call collective subjectivities—queerness and blackness, respectively—into being. Poems, for them, become utopian queer or black spaces par excellence: as Baraka writes, “Let the world be a black poem.” I complicate this utopian impulse by asking whether poems can offer security against despair. Across O’Hara’s bright sociality, and Spicer’s alienation, I find their poems offer various and contradictory sites of entry that account for how experiences of joy and negativity interfuse one another. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, whose commons is also internally differentiated, speculative, and without assurance. This poem, I argue, assembles a universality of aesthetic judgment as an ecstatic community that is radically indeterminate, yet posited nevertheless. Throughout these investigations I emphasize how the collective is not a lamentable or optional feature for these poets: rather than using lyric to plumb the depths of personal experience, they use it to imagine and create various emergent commons.