Julia Bloch’s current book project argues that innovative North American long poems use lyric as a site at which to experiment with race, gender, and forms of the self. She is the author of three books of poetry; her essays on poetry and poetics have appeared or are forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, the MLA volume Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English, and elsewhere. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Authors | Julia Bloch
Articles on Amodern by Julia Bloch
WORLDS WITHOUT AN I
Bernadette Mayer’s Procedural Lyric
This essay contends that the site-specific procedural texts of Bernadette Mayer constrain and animate the expressive and cognitive textures of the speaking I. In their prescriptive qualities, their ambivalent posture toward authorial intention and embodiment, and their animation of the expressive capacities of built environments, site-specific procedural texts like Mayer’s 1971 work Memory investigate not only the complexities of first-person expression in poetic and visual forms but also the apparent hermeticism of the individual mind. The radically inclusive documentary practices of Memory, followed decades later by the polyvocal and synaesthetic poetics of 2019’s Poems (in Color), constitute two instances of procedural poetics alert to how lyricism can be understood as a social form.