The Creases Between Utterances: Jenny Xie’s “The Rupture Tense”

“Whether [Jenny] Xie’s volume was long in the making or came out in a fiery burst (maybe both, by parts?), it is a work of substance, worthy of its current high reputation.”

Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric reminds us that “genres change as new works are created that either modify the categories or, eventually, delimit them differently in creating new categories.” Might Jenny Xie’s poststructuralist-influenced poetic study of a hyper-aware self in relationship with her ancestral Chinese homeland rightly be called a new sort of lyric? Or, rather, a return to aspects of pre-modern lyric, newly situated? In describing the work of Pindar and Sappho, Culler says that in their classical era:

“we witness the birth of the modern mind, as poets came to know themselves as individuals with an inner life. But such individuation comes primarily through the articulation to an audience of values or judgments that deviate from a social norm, rather than allusion to inner states.”

In the mid-20th century, with the arrival of “confessional” poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell, the divulgation of inner states of the poet-speaker came to be valued above all other aspects of their writing. That was the only deviance from the norm that really mattered. Plath’s “Daddy” was erroneously explicated as a psycho-poetic document, a diary in verse, rather than as a skewed modern elegy, that form in which public and private grief collide. There was a weird wonder for many in staring through a glass skull into a tortured mind, to experience the electro-shock of the poet’s raw feelings.