Contemporary Poetry

lyric subjects 51

in the text. Hesitant, disorienting and painful statements are
made and then discarded, such as: ‘The music of moths, the small
lamps’, ‘What we called the hour in those days’ and ‘I was there /
cut in half, only to survive’ (p. 61 ). As in Palmer’s earlier rewriting
of Orpheus and Eurydice, this poem balances a process of recov-
ery with a threat of amnesia or immobilising silence: ‘He means
to say’ (p. 61 ). The French theorist Maurice Blanchot under-
stands this tension between memory and forgetting as an implicit
drive in the writing of poetry. He notes that ‘the poet speaks as
though he were remembering, but if he remembers it is through
forgetting’.^50

CONCLUSION: JENNIFER MOXLEY’S DECEITFUL
SUBJECTIVE

Jennifer Moxley somewhat playfully recognises that she has been
identifi ed as a lyric ‘poster child’ for her generation. And yet her
initial impressions of contemporary American lyricism in the mid-
1980 s were far from auspicious:

This was the mid-eighties, a time when if you opened a main-

stream literary magazine all of the so-called lyric poems were

little stories from an individual’s perspective broken into lines

and ending in an epiphany usually with a sense of either moral

or political superiority, directed toward an absent interlocu-

tor.^51

As a younger poet, her work contemplates the experimental legacy
of American poetry and the reception of lyric forms in the twenty-
fi rst century. Notoriously, Moxley’s preface to her fi rst major
volume Imagination Verses champions the rights of the ‘universal
lyric “I” ’.^52 In ‘The Open Letter’ series Moxley reiterates her
belief in a community of readership; that the solitary reader of
poetry is, in fact, interrelated to a network of other readers, a pre-
supposition which is not so far from William Wordsworth’s ideal
of a ‘common’ language and Shelley’s ideation of the imagination
as the ‘great instrument of moral good’. Moxley’s own conditions