The subversion of voice
One of the challenges of writing a postmodern lyric is to avoid it becom-
ing overly confessional, self-indulgent or self-aggrandising. A way out of
this problem is to create a poem which does not take the concept of voice
entirely at face value. For example, it might debunk the authenticity of
personal experience, or adopt a register which seems at odds with
the subject matter. Denise Riley is a British experimental poet whose
‘Shantung’ is starkly anti-romantic, ‘in your face’, depersonalised and
improvisatory:
Example 8.4
It’s true that anyone can fall
in love with anyone at all.
Later, they can’t. Ouf, ouf.How much mascara washes away each day
and internationally, making the blue one black.
Come on everybody. Especially you girls.Each day I think of something about dying.
Does everybody? do they think too, I mean.
My friends! some answers. Gently
unstrap my wristwatch. Lay it face down.‘Shantung’ (Riley 1998, p. 296)Here, although the themes are love and death, the stance is satirical
(anyone can fall in love with anyone else; tears make mascara dissolve).
The poem is also provoking in the way it turns the tables with a subtle fem-
inist jibe, ‘Come on everybody. Especially you girls’. It suggests the poet
thinks her primary concern is to shake the audience from its complacency,
rather than communicate her own personal problems.
Another way of calling into question the authenticity of voice is by
adopting an extreme or alien one. In ‘Holes and Stars’, by Australian poet
Emma Lew, the narrator seems seriously disorientated:
Example 8.5
I just got my memory back.
Few loons and I would live
in a corner at the airport,
not for the sequence
but the agony we had to be in,162 The Writing Experiment