- 1 R. Chartier, La Main de l’auteur et l’esprit de l’imprimeur.
1With the passage of time, technological advances encourage the appearance of new lyrical forms which can transform both the way poetry is written and the way it is read or engaged with. It is almost as if poets were continually seeking to adapt or subvert the tools available to them in their time and their culture. Although some poetic functions remain stable through all these changes, others are brought to life. From clay tablets to rolls of papyrus, from the codex to the printed book, lyric poetry has always taken advantage of new media. Some of these transitions are straightforward, but others wholly alter the sociology of reading and writing.1 The beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed a shift from poetry that was mainly read silently, in private, to the rise of poetry in performance, on stage, in poetry readings and festivals, with online experimentation, and multimedia projects more generally, providing many new possibilities for lyrical expression.
- 2 G. Agamben, Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?
2These new forms of poetry impose choices on critics. Should we regard them as marginal to the genre or rather as heralding fundamental new poetic principles? Does their emergence mean we have to change our ways of reading? Do we need to augment or prune our critical vocabulary? Some long-established critical practices, such as close reading, may need to be adapted in this new context. Multimedia lyrical objects invite such questions. Such a constantly evolving corpus demands a subtle and flexible approach. The notion of multimedia, and the multimodality or intermediality that it involves, does not only apply to the study of contemporary poetry, but equally invites us to reconsider poetic works from earlier periods, which have traditionally been the subject of very different critical approaches. That is why the contributions to this issue range over many centuries, not focusing on the contemporary multimedia “moment”, but rather taking a contemporary approach to lyric poetry as a whole by looking at it through the lens of multimedia.2
- 3 C. Hanna, Nos Dispositifs poétiques, p. 13.
3Even criticism that is receptive to current work and the questions it generates might run the risk of treating these poems as purely ephemeral, noting their existence without making the attempt to analyse them, to better understand them and to incorporate them in the broader picture. Critical tools primarily developed through the experience of silent reading may well prove to be inadequate. In short, it would be easy to disregard this kind of poetry as fleeting and insignificant in the face of a long-established canon with its tried and tested methodologies. But rather than being relegated to the margins of the canon, multimedia lyrical objects require sustained and developed critical analysis. 3
- 4 G. Guerrero, Poétique et poésie lyrique; V. Jackson, Y. Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader.
- 5 A. Casas, «La poésie non lyrique»
4The history of lyric poetry is full of misunderstandings and paradoxes,4 especially since the genre came to literary pre-eminence in the Romantic period. All across Europe, there were debates on the necessity of the category of “lyric,” in poetry and beyond. Yet the most radical and perhaps most common approach was to consider lyric uniquely from the Romantic point of view, and this perspective still strongly influences the description of poetry today. Such a prejudice might tempt us to distinguish between lyric poetry (something essentially found in books), and a kind of “non-lyric” poetry which would include performance and digital technology.5 This volume aims precisely to escape from such exclusions – or conclusions – and to encourage a more inclusive form of criticism. The contributions discuss poetry from the Renaissance to the present day, without focusing on a single period or a single language.
- 6 M. Cléren, Danse et poésie plastiques.
5The first step is to move beyond the idea of the lyric as a fixed object, especially a printed one, with the implicit assumption that the author is addressing a silent reader. Such a perspective leads to an impoverished understanding of the materiality of poetry, the diversity of its producers and readers, and of its means of diffusion, mechanical or digital. A multimedia approach, on the contrary, begins with an insistence on this diverse materiality: manuscripts, engravings, illustrations, prints, as well as stagings, films, online platforms, and their technical production teams. The lyre multimédia no longer implies one single type of poetry, but something more communal, with shared aims across diverse artistic disciplines. Despite the heterogeneity of these multimedia objects embracing multiple arts and actors, their sounds, images and material forms still give them an unmistakable “lyric textuality.” Even wordless objects may have rhythms and visual metaphors that evoke our interactions with the lyric, as was already the case with ballet, often associated with poetry or lyricism.6 This understanding of “lyric” requires us to see beyond the poem or the book as the definitive and homogeneous text.
- 7 OED, multimedia A. 1. (cf. A. 2 for the digital definition: “content that uses or combines various (...)
- 8 C. Kozak, «La poésie numérique vue depuis l'Amérique latine».
6What do we mean by lyre multimédia, and what of the closely related terms, multimodality, intermediality and transmediality? The term multimedia, generally used nowadays to refer to digital content that combines texts, images and sounds, in fact emerged in English in the mid-twentieth century to describe artwork that “combines different artistic or communicative media.”7 But even before this, the notion of multimedia already existed, in the cinema, or even earlier in lyrical forms that involved multiple senses. Before cinema, we can find elements of what we now call multimedia in ballet, opera, and classical song, as well as in all kinds of performances, rituals, and music or the recitation of poems alongside “tableaux” in dance. In our digital age, the term multimedia goes beyond diverse media such as CD-Roms, DVDs and the internet and may refer to streaming, online platforms, and reading on a variety of screens (telephone, tablet, computer). Thinking about multimedia involves more than a simple combination of media, and this is why we draw on Claudia Kozak’s terminology to stress the point that certain works create a powerful “intermedial event” 8in which it is often difficult to dissociate distinct media within the aesthetic experience. This is crucial to our understanding of the lyric. The lyre multimédia thus invites us to understand “transmediality” in a broad sense, that is, in questioning what the lyric achieves through the media mobilized in a work, not only in terms of the different materials or interfaces employed but also in terms of the fresh interactions made possible by a multimedia work. This is how the multimedia lyric manages to incorporate multiple associations to the point of generating an “intermedial event” that reimagines our aesthetic interactions.
7Throughout the centuries, lyric poetry has coexisted with other forms of art. Now that the genre is to some extent freed from association with the printed book, criticism of poetry must come to terms with a multiplicity of objects, which in turn generates a range of new problems. We need to adapt in order to understand these forms, interactions and events which will challenge and renew our critical habits. Far from being restricted to the contemporary period, this involves a rereading of the entire lyric tradition.
8The contributors to this volume form the academic team of the research project Poetry in Notions: The Online Critical Compendium of Lyric Poetry, a four-year inter-university “Sinergia” project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The goal of this project is to publish an international open-access handbook on key notions of lyric poetry in different languages. The fundamental principle of this project is to overcome the boundaries between different cultural and linguistic critical traditions, not to homogenize them but to make scholars aware of critical traditions and vocabulary that may not translate exactly. Through twenty-four commissioned chapters based on key concepts in scholarship on the lyric, the project aims to record and engage with various “theoretical challenges” in the study of poetry, not by defining technical terms but by confronting the different ways that the concepts have been treated in the critical traditions of different cultures.
9To take the primary example, the term that defines our genre is understood differently in different scholarly traditions: “lyric” in English, “Lyrik” in German or “lyrisme” in French do not mean exactly the same thing, each having its own distinct connotations and usages. The multilingual nature of the project team is thus fundamental to the project’s goals and concerns, and this is reflected in the present volume. The articles gathered here are written in two languages, but the issue covers the four literary fields of the project directors, postdoctoral and doctoral colleagues: English, French, Hispanic and German literatures. (Added to this base, the project’s associate partners and contributing authors cover a much broader range of literary cultures.)
10Like this volume, the Poetry in Notions online compendium aims to cover lyric poetry in all its forms, across a range of media. While it has a strong historical component (the editorial team includes specialists in the early modern lyric and in Romantic poetry of the nineteenth century), the developments and transformations of the lyric genre in our contemporary period are essential to the critical and theoretical questions the project is asking. The possibilities offered in the digital age regarding the performance, recording and distribution of poetry, but also its composition, allow new angles on some of the theoretical challenges the project showcases, such as questions of “address”, “performance” and “multimodality.” Yet whether their focus is historical or contemporary, it is striking that the research interests of all the members of the project team converge on questions of materiality and mediality. From metapoetic metaphors drawing on painting and needlework in the early modern period, to the impact of the digital paradigm on the form and the metaphors of the lyric poem, it seems that investigation of the lyric’s material contexts and of its own textual materiality inevitably generates the kind of theoretical reassessment of critical concepts around which the project is constructed.
11The eight essays in this issue are split into two sections, “Lyric objects: documents” (Objets lyriques: les documents) and “Lyric objects: embodiment” (Objets lyriques: les incarnations). The three studies in the first section investigate intertextual and intermedial poetic practices that blur the boundaries between lyric text and real-world context. Kirsten Stirling’s discussion of the early modern portrait poem allows her to explore the question of whether the lyric poem may be said to be mimetic. This goes beyond the discussion of poetic ekphrasis to engage with the controversial concept of the poetic voice. Should it be read as a representation of the poet? As a coherent fictional persona? The parallel with painted portraits highlights to what extent many of these poems already call into question the lyric’s power to represent either the painting or any coherent speaking self.
12The possibility of direct mimesis in the lyric is also called into question in Philip Mills’ contribution. For Mills, the poem constructs a space where the document may be understood otherwise. But Mills approaches the boundary between world and poem from a different angle, examining a poem that imports “documents” – newspaper articles, citations of authors and texts – into the poem, not only making poetry out of the ordinary but also finding poetry in the ordinary. The format of Philippe de Jonckheere’s Mon Oiseau Bleu is inspired by Twitter (hence the title) and like the micro-blogging service it includes multiple media – images, videos, and internet links – in its more than 300 pages.
13A “found” document is treated rather differently in Adela Sabban and Ralph Müller’s study of Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey’s “SONNE FROM ORT.” In this project the German and American poets use erasure to adapt a bilingual edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and its German translation by Rainer Maria Rilke. The bilingual nature of this collaboration and appropriation is evident in the title which erases letters of the original English title to create new meanings in German. Although both the English and German versions of Barrett Browning’s sonnets are subject to this process of erasure, facing page versions of the same sonnet in the two languages are often adapted very differently. Sabban and Müller argue that this process of erasure and recreation is not only textual but material – the traces of the process of erasure are visible. While Wolf and Hawkey’s work is not a multimedia poem, working as it does within the medium of the printed book, it can be described as a “meta-medial artefact,” self-reflexively aware of its own mediality.
14The five essays making up the second section of our volume focus on the “textual embodiment” produced by the lyric in different material contexts. Synaesthesia in lyric poetry has a long history – the genre’s historical links to song and music and the ut pictura poesis tradition mean that different senses have been mobilized in the creation and reception of poetry for centuries. Philip Lindholm’s essay provides a comprehensive and fascinating account of theories of synaesthesia in poetry with reference to classical nineteenth-century examples in Wordsworth, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, before going on to explore how the theory – and practice – of this interface of mind and body, literature and perception might develop in the light of advances in digital technology. Partly, this could involve new neurological studies of how poetry affects the brain but, even more excitingly, Lindholm sketches how new technology can allow sensory stimulation to be built into poetry performances, giving a fresh understanding of the “embodied imagination” and opening up the possibility of new multimedia, multisensory experiences of lyric poetry.
15Ezra Sibyl Benisty goes back to the period of the English Renaissance to explore how the embodied lyric text may be clothed, with a focus on the work of the siblings Mary and Philip Sidney. The different layers of the poem are described in terms of textiles, but also of skin and clothing. The body presented is a clothed body, just as the poem is dressed by the materiality of its medium. In the work of the Sidneys, these reflections apply not only to their original poetic creations, but also to their translation of the Psalms, a translation Benisty describes as dressing its biblical originals in new clothes.
16In their discussion of the online Latin-American anthology Lit(e)Lat, Gustavo Guerrero and Gabriela Lázaro focus on contemporary poetry, more specifically the question of how to index experimental digital poetry in the multimedia age. How do these new paradigms change the work of both the anthologist and the critic? How might this affect the construction of new literary canons? Recent developments in the technology of online platforms bring to the fore particular aspects of the poetic texts presented there, thus highlighting the intermedial quality of this selection of Latin-American poems.
17Melina Marchetti develops this contemporary focus with an exploration of metaphor in the multimedia age, in three music videos of rap songs in French. Her essay studies the work of three rap artists, Tiers-Monde, Dinos, and Damso, through an analysis of their videos, which build on – and can even be said to enhance – the metaphors in the words of their songs. Far from simply adapting the verbal metaphor, these multimedia clips force us to take into account the multiplicity and diversity of associations that the metaphor generates. Marchetti goes beyond a purely rhetorical analysis to show how a cognitive approach can shed new light on this type of metaphor. The multimedia angle invites us to rethink our approach to the well-documented trope of the metaphor itself.
18In the final essay, Antonio Rodriguez discusses lyric and poetic sequences from mainstream Hollywood films. He demonstrates to what extent the union of text, image and sound, typical of digital multimedia, is clearly to be found in older film sequences that are now being retransmitted online, on streaming platforms, social media and other screens. Through these sequences, Rodriguez establishes the aesthetic principles of the lyric characteristics deliberately employed in cinepoems, contemporary film sequences, music videos and short films, in a study that allows us to move towards a better understanding of the poetic or lyric characteristics of these sequences.
19Debates about literature produced in the multimedia age provide a new basis for the criticism of lyric poetry. Instead of concentrating on a single author expressing his or her emotions, we become more aware of a production process involving many participants: artists but also technicians. Instead of asking “who wrote it?” we rather ask: who was involved in the production of this work? How did they collaborate? How have they been influenced by each other’s work in the process of creation? Can we describe this as an intermedial event?
20The image we have chosen for the cover of this volume is a bridge in the form of a harp, or lyre. This non-musical work of art may remind us how, in different periods, the lyre has taken on its symbolic role, through texts engraved on temples, manuscript illuminations and communal chanting. Perhaps in our times the lyre is hidden in places where we do not expect to hear it, but where it becomes newly apparent, ready to sound again for those who choose to track it down. This bridge represents, for us, the state of the genre of lyric today – monumental, unexpected, hidden in plain sight – and the challenges it presents to existing methods of literary analysis across disciplines. Above all, it represents an invitation – as this volume makes one step towards opening a door to a new era of lyric criticism.
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