Little Engines of Self: Joy Manesiotis’ “Revoke”

“It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials.”

In tracing the origins of lyric from the monody of Greek melic poems to Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody!/Who are You?” David Baker reminds us that “lyric poetry is never merely about a self but is always also a social performance…Interiority is—the ultimate paradox—one of our most conjoining gestures.” Does that also imply perhaps that there exists a path for the leap from lyric to epic, those famously counterpoised modes? Not everyone possesses the skill to vault back and forth across that canyon from private to public—yet it can be done. We commonly understand epic to mean long, heroic, and mythic or historical. Given, the term hero has been so overworked that one now only need be a first responder doing their everyday job, or a rank citizen who rescues a distraught cat to be designated a hero, thus the term’s falling off into a trite trope. Perhaps what needs rescuing first is the term itself.

For the purposes of poetry, I suggest it denotes a temperament forged of resolve, subtlety, and steely but supple wisdom in the face of a significant obstacle, as personified in a poem’s speaker. That could mean confronting whatever life dilemma originates in but resonates beyond the self (the conjoining gesture). The dilemma does not have to be universal, only common. It is enough to make us feel that one suffers, alone, in the way that many suffer. Long since in the genre of poetry, have we ceased to posit “great” destinies (kings, nation builders) as the sole significant avatars of heroic action. Does that then mean it is no longer a going value? The inner life offers sufficiently ample scope for any individual of sufficient depth and reflective power to resonate like El Cid: “With tearful eyes he turned to gaze upon the wreck behind.” William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.”

The making relative of what qualifies as sufficiently exalted status does not necessarily mean a diminishment of endeavor. What counts are qualities of mind and heart. Instead of taking up a lance or sword and mounting a horse, or poisoning a corrupt uncle-king, we say, as Thomas Merton did, “Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war.” The enemy lives within, as does the hero.