Published! Dorothea Lasky Lecture: 'Poetry and The Metaphysical I'

Originally presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, Dorothea Lasky's lecture "Poetry and The Metaphysical I" is now in the current issue of Wave Composition. She discusses the case of James Frey, Lorca's duende ("[a]nd that without a little demon, a poem is not a poem at all"), and Alice Notley’s 1998 essay “The Poetics of Disobedience,” where "she writes of an I that has been stripped down to its essence, full of strength, that is bare and fearful, but that has a supernatural power":

In a book that will soon be published, Mysteries Of Small Houses, I was firstly trying to realize the first person singular as fully and nakedly as possible, saying “I” in such a way as to make myself really nervous, really blowing away the gauze and making myself too scared of life and death to care what anyone thought of me or what I was going to say. Saying I in that way I tried to trace I’s path through my past. In a more subsidiary way I decided to go against my own sense that certain styles and forms I’d participated in formerly might be used up, that autobiography was, that the personal-sounding I (as opposed to the fictional I) might be, against the rumor that there’s no self, though I’ve never understood that word very well and how people use it now in any of the camps that use it pro or con—I guess I partly wrote Mysteries in order to understand it better. I came to the conclusion, in the final poem of the book, that self means ‘I’ and also means ‘poverty,’ it’s what one strips down to, who you are when you’ve stripped down.

Like Notley’s idea of the I an I that is one of poverty, is at its essence beyond the trappings and costumes or layers that might normally surround it, a Metaphysical I is an I, a self (both fabricated and true, simultaneously) who is what it is when it is stripped down. As Notley says, it is an I to “make myself really nervous, really blowing away the gauze and making myself too scared of life and death to care what anyone thought of me or what I was going to say.” It is an essence of self that cannot only conquer its own personal demon(s), it can overwhelm the Devil himself, or the source of all human evil, whatever we choose to call it. Like Notley’s I, a Metaphysical I is a core I, but it is also a core that is willing to move and recreate itself at every turn.

And what I mean to distinguish today about the Metaphysical I is like what we think of as duende and also what isn’t duende. And what differentiates The Metaphysical I from duende is very important, is the crux of everything important about the poems I am about to discuss. Because while duende is the power core of the I, stripped down to its essence in poverty, a Metaphysical I is the use of this power to become a trickster, a thief, a demon, a little thing, infused forever with purely the occult.

Read so much more at Wave Composition.