Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (review)

In Poetry at Stake, Carrie Noland undertakes a revisionist study that posits “an alternative critical discourse on lyric poetry as well as an alternative account of its evolution into the plurivocal poetries of the twentieth-century avant-garde” (7). Noland begins by recalling a little known work by Guillaume Apollinaire, “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes,” a 1917 lecture and manifesto that called for a hybridization of lyric composition and technology. Her aim is to re-historicize late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetic practices by calling into question the traditional binarism that opposes the corrupting influences of early industrial modernity to the work of the isolated poet who resists its effects and remains unsullied by them. Taking her cue from Apollinaire, Noland argues that lyrical poetry need not be merely defined through the resistance it mounts to the forces of commerce, mass culture and technology. Rather, in the modern era, its marketing modalities and integration in technology-saturated settings create contexts where the relation of poetic form to print and electronic media does not have to be one of mutual indifference. Noland is cognizant, however, that poetic language and its lyrical force can be readily instrumentalized and commodified. How, then, are we to understand poetry’s subversive and emancipatory powers in societies dominated by the mass production, [End Page 157] circulation and consumption of goods and by the values they purvey? The critical approach Noland adopts in pursuing the answer to this question comes by way of Theodor W. Adorno.