Lyric Interiors: The Contemporary Ecological Imagination in American Women's Poetry

"Lyric Interiors: The Contemporary Ecological Imagination in American Women's Poetry" argues that women poets in the later twentieth and early twenty-first century inaugurate a new lyric tradition by yoking ideas of lyric interiority to environmental justice (EJ) critique. While lyric has traditionally been thought of as poetry that expresses inner feelings and experiences, women activist poets---Audre Lorde, Myung Mi Kim, Claudia Rankine, and others---expand the concept of lyric interiority to encompass the material interiors of bodies sickened by environmental contamination. In the process, these poets reimagine lyric as material feminist practice that can reveal how environment is bound up with embodiment. This new lyric imagination culminates in poetries that are multiply determined and oriented---toward the past, future, and future-past, along with both the regional and transnational---challenging critics' notions of lyric atemporality or a perpetual lyric present. The resulting tradition provides an intersectional account of women's and other marginalized groups' historical experiences of deracination, toxic exposure, and attrition. By reconceptualizing lyric interiority and temporality, this new tradition also circumvents the crisis rhetoric that pervades environmental discourse.;By tracking lyric interiors, this study posits a new trajectory for ecological poetics. As I argue in my Introduction, it is the imagination of embodied lyric by women activists such as Muriel Rukeyser in the earlier twentieth century and Denise Levertov and Audre Lorde in the later that motivates the concerns of contemporary ecopoetics. For twentieth century poets, notions of lyric interiority were intertwined with the antiwar, anticolonial, and antiracist politics that laid groundwork for the EJ movement. This is not to say that private feelings and embodied experiences expressed in poetry constitute the primary or only political struggle of lyric for women poets. Rather, for these writers, lyric lays bare the impossibility of private life for groups increasingly administered, policed, and subject to hazards through its process of documenting the interior of the environmentally ill body.;My chapters investigate how poets develop "lyric interiors" in tandem with concepts for grasping environmental experience: restoration, risk, translation, and duration. In my first chapter, I theorize "lyric restoration" in the work of African Caribbean American poet and cancer survivor Audre Lorde. Lorde, who believed cancer was a political weapon used against black women, names poetry an "artifact for survival"---what will have been a lost and later partially restored archive of embodied African diasporic experience. Through a poetry multiply oriented in time, Lorde conceives of lyric as a queer restoration practice that both un- and remakes ideas of household and home. In Chapter Two, I explore "lyric risk" in Chinese American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and American artist Kiki Smith's collages. Inspired by Berssenbrugge's illness from pesticide exposure, their art book Endocrinology invites readers to materially engage with the book's body. Through active reading processes, readers de- and reconstitute the concepts of body, risk, and lyric. Then, in Chapter Three, I investigate Korean American poet Myung Mi Kim's "translative lyric." For Kim, "translating" deracination's before-after temporality can render traumas such as wartime sexual violence against Korean women along with the Korean diaspora partially intelligible, but only at the cost of lyric as it has been understood. Therefore, readers must reimagine lyric interiority as processual, or translative. In my final chapter, I theorize Claudia Rankine's "lyric duration." In Rankine's work, raced bodies come to be defined by their state of wasting. But, Rankine suggests, by critically inhabiting the wasting or environmentally ill body---what Fred Moten calls "exhaustion as a way of life"---lyric can reach toward alternative forms for social and ecological engagement.