Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature and Culture

This piquant treatise from poet Queen (Anodyne) makes the case for adopting a method of literary analysis she calls “radical poetics,” which “urges the mind toward truth via feeling.” Radical poetics should focus on love and its absence, Queen contends, positing that the lack of love with which Ralph Ellison treats the female characters in his novel Invisible Man reveals them to be little more than “thin archetypes.” Proposing that intuition can serve as a valuable form of knowledge, Queen cites as a model the ways in which the archivist figure in Dionne Brand’s poem The Blue Clerk uses imagination and intuition to compensate for the paucity of historical evidence about Black lives during the transatlantic slave trade. Elsewhere, Queen defends Muriel Rukeyser’s assertion that poetry and science share a commitment to “inquiry, imagination, and feeling,” and argues that Natasha Trethewey’s poems are “palimpsestic, asserting the speaker’s memories and observations while erasing what may have previously been accepted.” Though the scholarly prose can be tough going and a chapter recounting Queen’s disillusionment with the restrictive bureaucracy of academia feels out of place, her call to foreground the subjective experiences of characters and readers in literary criticism is thought-provoking. English students and scholars will find plenty of food for thought. (Jan.)