lyric subjects 39of the preacher in ‘Be a Butterfl y’. His cadence of the saying ‘Don’t
be a kyatta-pilla / Be a Butterfl y’ (p. 49 ) informs the momentum
of the poem as the refrain becomes equally a statement of ambi-
tion, self-belief and assertion. This shaping of nation language
as a presence of dynamism asserts Nichols’s desire that Creole
is not read as a secondary language, as mere dialect, or at worst
incorrect English. Through her negotiation of biography and life
story Nichols revisits the complexities of Caribbean culture and
historical violence, while ensuring that the linguistic inventiveness
of Creole remains central to her narrative.
SELF-REFLEXIVE LYRICS: PORTRAITURE IN JOHN
ASHBERY, SUJATA BHATT AND JORIE GRAHAM
I have already examined the concept of an ‘expressive lyric’ in
reference to poetic forms such as the elegy, epistle and life story –
as well as the representation of race and cultural inheritance. It is
also essential that we acknowledge how contemporary poets depict
the representation of selfhood through ‘self-refl exive’ techniques.
Self-referential writing is not, of course, new terrain for poetry.
Poetry has, across the centuries, displayed awareness of the act of
its own making. Yet it can be proposed that for contemporary poets
meditation on other media, particularly self-portraiture, enables a
detailed examination of the construction of selfhood as a textual
entity. Certainly contemporary poets John Ashbery, Sujata Bhatt
and Jorie Graham share a general fascination for how self-portraits
are created and what they tell us about the artist. Ashbery, Bhatt
and Graham use their meditations upon portrait painting as a way
of exposing and examining poetic techniques, what I will call a
‘self-refl exive’ lyric. Commenting on the works of others in this
way draws useful attention to how poetry addresses not only the
idea of selfhood, subjectivity and the role of the artist, but also
poetry’s engagement with everyday experience.
Susan M. Schultz writes of Ashbery that ‘No poet since
Whitman has tapped into so many distinctly American voices and,
at the same time, so preserved his utterance against the jangle of
infl uences.’^25 Ashbery in an interview comments upon the need