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Nikki SkillmanIndiana University Bloomington

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year’s horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”

Since its publication in 1961, James Wright’s poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” (Wright 2012, p. 114) has acquired the dubious distinction of paradigmatic status as an epiphany poem. “The ‘deep image’ epiphany at the side of the road,” writes Michael Davidson, “the apotheosis of horse turds into epiphenomenal vapor…these are attempts to represent the casual as special, to escape contingency through better advertising. Instead of returning us to everyday life, such images strive for continuities outside of time” (Davidson 1991, p. 344, italics Davidson’s). Davidson’s misgivings about “Lying in a Hammock”—his mistrust of the poem’s aura of metaphysical “apotheosis,” his embarrassment at its gestures toward “escape” from time and responsibility, and his intuition that the experience the poem describes is false “advertising,” a contrivance presented in bad faith—exemplify ubiquitous objections to the epiphanic mode in American poetry over the last forty years. It turns out that Wright’s revelation amid the blazing horse turds marks a watershed moment in the history of American poetry, a point at which secular revelation was wrested out of the realm of world-ordering modernist grandeur and domesticated, inspiring a “seemingly endless round of epiphanies” (Perloff 1981, p. 252) by the early eighties and, even more influentially, a backlash that helped define the course of late twentieth-century experimental poetry. Recalling the coalescence of language poetry into a poetic movement in the early 1970s, Charles Bernstein identifies the disingenuous, tediously formulaic poetics of epiphany as the point of origin for the movement’s critique of the unified expressive subject: “We shared a very strong dislike of the Official Verse Culture of that time,” he writes, “which seemed to favor poems so crippled by their formulas for personal epiphany that personal epiphany was shed at the starting line in favor of a highly mannered voicey voice ‘indicating’…rather than expressing the poet’s feelings, the so-called feelings of the so-called poet’” (Bernstein and Freschi 2005). In a retrospective introduction Lyn Hejinian appended to her seminal language poetry manifesto “The Rejection of Closure,” she reiterates the role “the coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry” played in providing a “negative model” for language poets in their early theorizations of the open text. She objects particularly to the epiphanic mode’s “smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth” (Hejinian 2000, p. 41).

The specific terminology of epiphany is more likely to appear in summative assessments of language poetry in hindsight than in its founding manifestoes, a pattern that reflects the consolidation of the term “epiphanic” over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as a pejorative shorthand for disingenuous literary affectation, aesthetic closure, stylistic conservatism, bourgeois self-expression, and facile aggrandizement of the banal—features that oppositional poets of the period identified closely with the lyric poetry against which they defined their own artistic forms and purposes. The status of “epiphanic” as a dirty word is thus integrally bound up with evolving conceptions of lyric over the past several decades—with the “super-sizing” of the genre that Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson have called “lyricization” (Jackson and Prins 2014, pp. 5, 7), with the related phenomenon of widespread remonstration against the “mainstream” lyric in avant-garde rhetoric and practice, and with the subsequent emergence of a pervasive sense of “lyric shame,” as Gillian White calls it, a situation in which the sudden, profound insight emerges as perhaps the most embarrassing of the lyric’s signature conventions, leading poets to “[flinch] from their own epiphanic inclinations, and the forms of subjectivity these produce” (White 2014, p. 232). The polemics of taste and value surrounding epiphany invite us to ask what forms revelatory experience can now acceptably take in a poem and to what ends; to answer those questions in turn requires reckoning with the cultural power the epiphanic mode has wielded in its canonical formations and how that power has come to inflect its creative possibilities for poets in the wake of resounding critiques. A diverse array of poets have recently shown that epiphany need not produce lyric subjectivity, and that the epiphanic mode—capable of grounding the poem in impersonal forces of language, history, and structures of power rather than in the transcendental consciousness of an expressive subject—is a more neutral representational technique than disparaging appraisals have allowed. What kinds of poems does the oppositional narrative surrounding the epiphanic lyric leave out, and how have experimentalists themselves leveraged the epiphanic to enlarge their claims for the formal strategies they espouse? Are epiphanies really obsolete?

Though today’s nearly inextricable association of epiphany with lyric in critical discourse could be said to culminate in 2009 with Cole Swensen’s canonization of the term “mainstream epiphanic lyric” (Swenson and John 2009, p. xx) in American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, the association begins to be formalized in the structuralist criticism of the mid-twentieth century. It is in fact a literary critic, Northrop Frye, who coins the adjective “epiphanic” in 1951 to describe a modal disposition of lyric specifically, a constitutive affiliation that had not been present in other influential post-Romantic definitions of lyric poetry as the “the self-expression of the subjective life” (Hegel 1975, p. 1038), as “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude” (Mill 1860, p.18), or as the “voice of the poet talking to himself—or to nobody” (Eliot 1953, p. 106). In hindsight, Frye sets many of the terms for subsequent discussion of epiphany in postwar American poetics and beyond. Like Pound, who identifies the concision of the imagist poem with its capacity to induce “sudden liberation” and “freedom from time limits and space limits,” Frye identifies the distinctive temporal profile of the epiphanic moment—“the flash of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time”—with the ephemerality of lyric, suggesting a fundamental congruence between the paradoxical temporality of the sudden and timeless epiphany and the paradoxical temporality of the lyric that commits ephemeral experience to stasis in textual form. Frye’s terminology also emphasizes the ancient Greek and subsequently Christian associations of epiphany with the manifestation of the divine, associations that come to freight the epiphanic mode with the residues of Christian metaphysics and ideology. Setting up the fundamental premises of his archetypal criticism, Frye writes that the literary critic must first study sacred scriptures, since “After he has understood their structure, then he can descend from archetypes to genres, and see how the drama emerges from the ritual side of myth and lyric from the epiphanic or fragmented side” (Frye 1951, pp. 103, 105). If ritual is collective, communal, and unfolding, the epiphanic is solitary and sudden, a fragment of consciousness suited to both the scale of lyric poetry and the expressive circumstances of conventional lyric speakership. Frye also consistently applies the term to Romantic poetry, grounding his concept of the “Romantic epiphanic” (176) mode in the personal, meditative lyricism of Wordsworth and Keats. Other influential critics and theorists, particularly M.H. Abrams and Jonathan Culler, reinforced and naturalized the association between the epiphanic-as-mode and the lyric-as-genre in the 1960s and 1970s.¹

Influenced by this epiphanic turn in mid-century lyric theory, the entangled and mutually reinforcing discourses of language poetry and literary criticism dedicated to its analysis have presented an array of critiques of the ‘epiphany poem’ in American poetry that generations of poets and scholars have now echoed and expanded. Marjorie Perloff introduces the term in 1971, applying it approvingly to James Wright, specifically: “Wright is at his best,” she writes, “when he writes what we might call the ‘epiphany poem’—a brief lyric in which contemplation of the external landscape suddenly gives way to insight into the world beyond” (Perloff 1973, pp. 128–129). Over the course of the subsequent decade, however, Perloff’s influential characterizations of the epiphanic become more disparaging. Wright’s epiphany poems appear ever more retrograde “from our vantage point in the eighties,” she writes, “best understood as…late variant[s] of the paradigmatic modernist lyric as that lyric has come down to poets like both Wright and Lowell from Emily Dickinson or Yeats or Stevens or Frost or Roethke.” By contrast, Frank O’Hara’s contemporaneous “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” which Perloff characterizes as an (anti-)narrative poem rather than a lyric (“the equation of poetry with the lyric is almost axiomatic in contemporary criticism,” she laments), looks presciently forward; for O’Hara, the postmodernist avant la lettre, “the world just doesn’t—indeed shouldn’t—make sense, [and] the gnosis which is narration remains fragmentary. By frustrating our desire for closure…such ‘stories’ foreground the narrative codes themselves and call them into question” (Perloff 1982, p. 412, 415, 417). For Perloff, the “paradigmatic modernist lyric” and the “epiphany poem” present none of these salutary frustrations or deferrals of resolution. In The Poetics of Indeterminacy, the epiphany appears obsolescent on different terms, because it is ubiquitous and false; Perloff praises John Ashbery in particular for “cast[ing] a cold eye on the seemingly endless round of epiphanies his contemporaries say they are experiencing” [Perloff 1981, p. 252, italics mine]). In her insightful assessment of the “abjection of ‘lyric’” (White 2014, p. 26) during the last decades of the twentieth century, Gillian White draws out the tacit politics of Perloff’s deeply influential characterization of the epiphany poem specifically; Perloff, she writes, “identifies it as a technique of the ‘logocentric universe,’ of Cartesian ideology, one that emphasizes the ‘centrality of persons’ and is thus deeply out of tune with any politics concerned with intersubjectivity and community. Seeds of this critique, which Perloff drew from her readings of Language writing…offered to a broad academic audience a version of lyric whose coherence depended on its abstract function as an antitype” (White 2014, p. 218).

As White’s observation about the political valences of the epiphanic “antitype” suggests, the narrowly aesthetic and philosophical charges against epiphany—charges of reductive closure, clichéd corniness, oracular affectation, and a naive conception of poetic voice as a transparent reflection of inner life unadulterated by the tacit imperatives and distortions of language itself—soon gave way to explicitly political critiques directed toward the epiphanic mode’s putative valorization of bourgeois subjectivity and cultivation of an authoritative ethos of mastery. These critiques, abetted by the perception of epiphany as the signature of an aesthetically dominant “mainstream” poetic tradition descended from Romantic forebears, consolidated the reputation of the epiphanic lyric as the consummate literary embodiment of willfully naïve, repressive normativity. In 1992, Rae Armantrout questions whether “the conventional or mainstream poem today,” which she describes as “a univocal, more or less plain-spoken, short narrative often culminating in a sort of epiphany,” “is best equipped to raise feminist issues” (Armantrout 1992, p. 39, 40); Rachel Blau DuPlessis likewise associates epiphany with the sexist “foundational cluster” of conventions that underlie lyric, proposing that the genre uses literary aesthetics to sanctify repressive gender ideologies by positioning the female as the revelatory object in a matrix of representational scenarios that link “the sublime, scenes of inspiration, the muse as conduit” and “transcendence” (DuPlessis, 2001, p. 29) with gendered structures of power.

Timothy Yu, tracing the marginalized history of the Asian American literary avant-garde, observes the racialization of the mainstream lyric epiphany, as well; Asian American poetry that “fits comfortably into what some critics have called the ‘MFA mainstream’ of the 1980s and 1990s, with its emphasis on personal voice, epiphanic insight, and loose verse form,” he writes, “has allowed Asian American poetry to become an acceptable part of the multicultural curriculum, a transparent conduit for those neglected stories that some have asserted it is the job of minority literature to tell” (Yu 2009, pp. 73–74).

Demonstrating the reverberation of these critiques across critical and poetic discourses, White charts the emergence of the “lyric shame poem” in the 1990s, a trend marked by the topos of embarrassment about the lyric speaker’s own impulses toward epiphany. Robert Hass’s poem “Interrupted Meditation,” for example, emphatically interrupts and defers “what wants otherwise to be a shimmering epiphany-cum-symbolic description,” White writes; she describes a situation in which we come to see “self-effacing refusal of epiphanic and meditative convention as itself a convention” (White 2014, p. 215, 228). It seems significant that the major practitioners of the 1990s lyric shame poem whom White cites—Robert Hass, Charles Wright, and James Tate—are straight, cisgender white men. The concentration of lyric shame poems within this demographic suggests that their authors are on some level aware that their cultural positions frame the significance of their epiphanies to their readers; they seem to recognize that avant-garde critiques of the epiphanic mode target poets whose uses of epiphany can be read as consolidating existing arrangements of cultural authority and privilege. From Hejinian’s characterization of “the coercive, epiphanic mode…with its smug pretension to universality” to Yu’s framing of epiphany as a signature expressive practice through which minority literatures slid smoothly into the white-dominated literary establishment of the 1980s and 1990s, critiques of the epiphanic mode have cemented its association with a dominant aesthetic order (“mainstream lyric,” monolithically conceived) that they identify, in turn, with the dominant social order.

The facile identification of poetic forms with fixed political meanings, however, has been widely decried and persuasively debunked in contemporary poetry criticism, from Mutlu Blasing’s Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry (1995) to Cathy Park Hong’s “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” (2014).² Blasing proposes that the story of poetry after modernism in terms of “the heroic drama of a central agon between the forces of reaction and progress – with its farcical repetition in the current competition between New Formalists and the Language poets – assumes…that early modernist and postmodern poetry alike pose avant-garde oppositional challenges to the cultural establishment”; “the plot of this politicized scenario of liberation,” she observes, “turns on technique: poetic techniques are seen to carry ideological freight, and specific sociopolitical, ethical, and metaphysical values are thought to inhere in particular forms” (italics mine, pp. 1–2). It is this persistent confusion of technique and value that frames the current critical status of epiphany. Like any other literary technique, the epiphanic mode has no inherent politics. This much is evident in the fact that the epiphanic mode that has seemed to some so pretentiously smug and arrogantly authoritative can signify quite differently when it presents challenges to “mainstream” lyric conventions and when it originates from positions of vulnerability rather than sites of apparent cultural power.

Indeed, while poets who are impervious to or unpersuaded by the critiques of recent decades continue to write poems of personal epiphany, configurations of the epiphanic mode have recently emerged that denaturalize its prevailing identification with aesthetic closure, consolidation of the autonomous, expressive lyric voice, mastery, atemporality, and escape—associations that, when ruptured, reveal how epiphany’s historical claims to cultural power also uniquely qualify it within poetries of resistance. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a book that challenges a number of conventions associated with lyric poetry, runs on numbing, repetitive annunciations of national and personal betrayal and bewildering revelations of racist dehumanization and devaluation. As I have argued elsewhere, the book’s dysphoric moments of insight—which enervate rather than ennoble, inhibit rather than enlarge understanding, and reveal and surprise despite repetition—lay bare how literary history has demoted epiphanies of injustice in poetry and elevated triumphant epiphanies that reinforce narratives of social progress.³ In the very different register of her jagged textual collages and prose paratexts, Susan Howe manifests archival epiphanies of female absence and erasure. Catalogued alongside expansive textual traces of male voices, the appearance of mute domestic objects provoke sudden recognition of the historical record’s smooth repressions: “Often by chance,” Howe writes, “via out-of-the-way card catalogues….a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy” (Howe 2014, p. 18). It is in the sanctified wilderness of archives that are also colonial, patriarchal sites of “acquisitive violence, the rapacious ‘fetching’ involved in collecting” (Howe 2014, p. 43) that material fragments—partial manuscripts, objects of unknown provenance, miscellaneous emblems of otherwise unrecorded lives—make the incoherence of historical narratives “compiled by winners” (Howe 2015, p. 4) perceptual and felt, however ephemerally. Howe constantly invokes the terms of mystical revelation to describe her adventures in the archives, but both the textual sources of her epiphanies and the poetry she generates out of them are defined by the tenuous coalescence of “fragmentary knowledge” rather than sudden annunciations of Truth. Committed both to the “Utopian ideal of poetry as revelation at the same instant it’s a fall into fracture and trespass” (Howe 2012), Howe deploys semantic ruptures and graphic inscrutability that dislocate any facile connection between epiphanic experience and epistemological certainty.

This shift of epiphanic origins away from sources in the landscape or private interiority to sources in language, history, and identity distinguish such recent permutations of the epiphanic mode and indicate its distinct affordances to poets urgently concerned with the subjects of life, death, and cultural memory at the margins. Importantly, these poets—who may openly embrace or resist association with the lyric tradition—continue to be drawn to the vertical, metaphysical valences of the epiphanic mode, whether they ironize and critique epiphany’s aura of transcendence or set out to claim its power, leveraging epiphany to gain access to the cultural authority that the epiphanic mode has infamously accrued. In disparate ways, M. NourbeSe Philip’s and CAConrad’s works speak to the serviceability of epiphany to contemporary poets who position their art in opposition to existing arrangements of cultural power. Demonstrating epiphany to be a far more flexible literary mechanism than oppositional rhetoric has proposed, they can help flesh out the impoverished picture of epiphanic poetics that emerges from pervasive critical identification of revelation with “mainstream” normativity and political complacency.

“On their surface [my] poems approximate language poetry,” writes Philip; “like the language poets I question the assumed transparency of language and, therefore, employ similar strategies to reveal the hidden agendas of language. In my own work, however, the strategies signpost a multifaceted critique of the European project.” Referring to the massacre that took place upon the slave ship Zong, in which roughly 150 slaves were thrown overboard to their deaths to enable the collection of insurance money for the lost “cargo,” Philip identifies her work’s positioning of English, particularly written documents of English law that authorized human bondage, as the target of her critique: “The language in which those events [on board the Zong] took place promulgated the non-being of African peoples, and I distrust its order, which hides disorder; its logic hiding the illogic and its rationality, which is simultaneously irrational” (Philip 2008a, pp. 197–198). Strikingly, epiphany proves to be Philip’s mechanism for allegorically remediating the crisis of racial violence that the text “can only tell by not telling” (Philip 2008a, pp. 191). If a major objection to epiphany has been its falseness—its lack of credibility as a fictive contrivance—the pivotal epiphany Philip concocts for Zong! flaunts its counterfactuality in a way that highlights the elusiveness of justice outside of the realm of symbolic.

While Philip largely forgoes syntactic or narrative coherence in Zong!, deliberately mutilating the English of Gregson v. Gilbert (“I murder the text,” she writes, “literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives…” [Philip 2008a, p. 193]), voices and stories emerge in fragments. Among them is the voice of one European man, a crew member who is continually and closely identified with his literacy and writing; illiterate sailors call on him to write for them, and much of the book is punctuated by extracts from his own letters to his “dear ruth,” a silent, protean figure in the poem. The narrative climax of the book involves this writing sailor and Wale, an abducted African husband and father separated from his wife Sade and their son Ade. The fate of the latter two after the separation is unclear, but in an early section of the book we hear the sailor think or speak of Wale in passing references. In one, Philip writes in the sailor’s voice: “the negro/ asks/ that i write/ a/ most un/ common negro he/ hopes to re/gain africa/ one day his na/me is wale/he wants that/ they should wait/ for him” (Philip 2008a, p. 88). Soon thereafter, Wale’s request resurfaces: “a/ most un/ common negro you/ take/ pen you/ write/ to /my sade/i/ play/ a ruse/ on/ him/ a trail of/ lies /my truth (Philip 2008a, pp. 89–90). Nearly a hundred pages later, in the final moments of the Ferrum section that mark the climax of the book, the sailor capitulates and writes the letter Wale dictates to him:

(Philip 2008a, p. 172)

Wale dictates his heartbreaking letter to the sailor; the sailor writes it down and presents it to Wale; Wale eats the letter and throws himself overboard, to his death; and immediately thereafter the sailor commits suicide himself.

The letter to Wale’s family precipitates the European sailor’s epiphanic recognition of Wale’s humanity, a consequent reckoning with the full extent of his own crimes, and finally his suicide. The imaginative climax of Zong! thus centers on a melodramatic, emphatically artificial revelatory moment that Philip tacitly marks in the sailor’s revised description of Wale, who was formerly “a/ most un/ common negro,” as “an un/common man.” Philip, in explaining her symbolic destruction of the literate sailor in the text, explains:

for us—African people—and for the world as a whole, to survive, that person, not to mention the impulse and action he represents, has to die. …It’s akin to the idea that Columbus must die—for the world to live, that spirit of conquest, destruction, and domination that Columbus represents has to die….And it is in that death that we have an opening to some possibility of a more just kind of existence.

(quoted in Philip 2008b, p. 75)

In her allegory, the route to the death of the white supremacist subject is revelation; Philip presents her staging of the sailor’s lethal epiphany as a necessary response to the ongoing precarities of Black life, responses in which, as Philip frames it, nothing less than “survival” is at stake. Philip deploys the epiphany not as an escape from history but as an attempt to intervene upon it in a counterfactual mode, a choice that implies profound frustration at an expansive history of failed remediation in the historical world. The scale of Zong! befits this vast historical scope; Philip positions her epiphany far outside the lyric frame, as part of an epic quest to imagine “some possibility of a more just kind of existence.”

Like Philip, CAConrad presents epiphany as a representational and psychic response to conditions of existential vulnerability. Writing at the convergence of activist, occult, and performance poetics, Conrad positions their anti-authoritarian “(soma)tic poetry rituals” as queer practices grounded in ideals of tolerance, community, and “absolute permission” (166), a kind of freedom they sharply differentiate from retreat or escapism: “because I was shunned, forced outside the acceptable, respectable world,” they write, “writing was an actual place I could go to where I was free. Not an escape by the way! I really HATE when writers say they write to ESCAPE! I escape nothing, ever, nor do I want to escape!” (Conrad 2012, p. 162). Coursing through Conrad’s rituals and the poems that emerge from them is a palpable history of trauma: sexual abuse in their childhood home, loss of loved ones to AIDS, and most brutally, the loss of their boyfriend, Earth, to an unprosecuted hate crime in 1998. In Conrad’s work, Earth’s horrific murder, in which he was “hogtied, gagged, tortured, covered in gasoline and burned to death” (Conrad 2014, p. 109), is framed within larger patterns of cultural violence that find expression in American economic imperialism and ecological devastation alike. In the face of these personal and civilizational horrors, the epiphanies Conrad sets out to orchestrate in their rituals are not ones of mastery but of healing; in their ritual “Radiant Elvis MRI,” for example, Conrad prescribes listening to music by Elvis Presley and visualizing a safe, familiar place during an MRI exam: “Don’t be afraid of the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine,” they write, “it’s an amazing opportunity for a poem. I created this exercise after my knee was injured by a homophobic bus driver in Philadelphia. Astral travel is possible with some dedicated preparation” (Conrad 2012, p. 79). Throughout their poetry rituals, which are in fact coextensive with the poems that derive from them, Conrad implies the talismanic significance of poetry to queer people in a hostile, homophobic culture and presents the ritual production of poems as analogous to new-age spiritual practices (numerology and the use of healing crystals, for example) that seek to conjure protective and curative magic.

Conrad designs their rituals to induce states of defamiliarization and sudden discovery that they associate with queer structures of awareness—with “the ways experience outside norms force disequilibrium” (Conrad 2012, p. 167). Their ecstasies flaunt their Romantic affiliations: they are euphoric, Blakean revelations of infinity in minute particulars (“THE MOLECULES! THE MOLECULES!” [Conrad 2012, p. 165]) and Whitmanian ecstasies (“I get it—I GET IT—we are one!” (Conrad 2014, p. 4), fleeting apprehensions of “the engine in everything” (Conrad 2012, p. 163) in instances of “SUDDEN recognition” and “TOTAL awareness!” (Conrad 2012, p. 170).

Emily Dickinson is the presiding spirit in their “(Soma)tic 1: Annoint Thyself,” a ritual in which they visited Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst after a reading event with a friend:

I scraped the dirt from the foot of huge trees in the backyard into a little pot. We then drove into the woods where we found miniature pears, apples, and cherries to eat. I meditated in the arms of an oak tree with the pot of Emily’s dirt, waking to the flutter of a red cardinal on a branch a foot or so from my face, staring, showing me his little tongue.

When I returned to Philadelphia I didn’t shower for three days, then rubbed Emily’s dirt all over my body, kneaded her rich Massachusetts soil deeply into my flesh, then put on my clothes and went out into the world. Every once in a while I stuck my nose inside the neck of my shirt to inhale her delicious, sweet earth covering me. I felt revirginized through the ceremony of my senses, I could feel her power tell me these are the ways to walk and speak and shift each glance into total concentration for maximum usage of our little allotment of time on a planet. LOSE AND WASTE NO MORE TIME POET! Lose and waste no more time she said to me as I took note after note on the world around me for the poem.

(Conrad 2012, p. 3)

The connection Conrad’s ritual forges with a spiritually charged environment recalls both the great Romantic odes and the comparatively shriveled backyard epiphanies of the postwar era; literally anointing themself with “Emily’s dirt,” Conrad’s meditations on the landscape endow them with transformative insights that deliver them back to the scene with “an altered mood and deepened understanding” (Abrams 1965, p. 528), as M.H. Abrams puts it. Here Dickinson’s annunciation-as-cardinal “showing me his little tongue” embraces the visionary, ritual, and expressive associations of lyric while also queering that connection, invoking Dickinson as the consummate emblem of volcanically subversive, marginalized power. In the poem that results from the ritual, titled “EMILY DICKINSON CAME TO EARTH and THEN SHE LEFT,” Dickinson’s appearance transforms a world so backward it appears prehistoric:

dinosaurs ruled Massachu-

setts dinosaurs fucking and laying eggs in

Amherst Boston Mount Holyoke then you

appeared high priestess pulling it out of the

goddamned garden with both hands you

Emily remembered the first time comprehe-

nding a struck match and spread a flame it

feels good to win this fair and square protest

my assessment all you want but not needing

to dream is like not needing to see the world

awaken to itself indestructible epiphanies

….I will be your outsider if

that’s how you need me electric company’s

stupid threatening letters cannot affect a poet

who has faced death

(Conrad 2012, p. 4)

Tying the work of gardening and poetry to both elemental and transcendental energies, Conrad pictures the “high priestess” pulling “it”—art, life, the force of nature itself—“out of the goddamned garden with both hands”; the “indestructible epiphanies” of her poems, they suggest, are the sites at which it becomes possible to imagine an alternative to a heteronormative status quo populated by menacing “dinosaurs” defined by their impulses to procreate and dominate. The poet inhabits the familiar role of a Romantic outsider-hierophant poised before the sublime (“electric company’s stupid threatening letters cannot affect a poet who has faced death”), but they also inhabit the role of the outsider precariously and violently ostracized by us, their readers (“I will be your outsider if that’s how you need me”), a position of vulnerability that clarifies the significance of the emphatically “indestructible” epiphanic as a necessity rather than a mystical luxury.

In correlating transcendental associations of epiphany with states of disequilibrium that “not only garner a momentary new…awareness for the senses, but also present the possibility of changing the structures of thought for entire new ideas and new practices of forming ideas” (Conrad 2012, p. 167), Conrad presents a utopian association between poetry and revelation famously cultivated by one of their influences, Audre Lorde:

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean – in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

(Lorde 2020, p. 25)

Over the past several decades, a critical narrative that consigns epiphany to obsolescence has sidelined the radical potential that poets have found and continue to find in revelation as a structure of experience and a representational practice. Though the “mainstream epiphanic lyric” might be obsolete, epiphany evidently dies hard; the works above demonstrate how formally innovative poets have recently leveraged the epiphanic to militate against traumatic repressions and dehumanizations, identifying sudden experiences of illumination with vigilance rather than escape, uncertainty rather than mastery, process rather than closure, recognition rather than repression, and community rather than the egotistical sublime. These poets do not consider revelation to be an embarrassing vestige of dualist metaphysics; for them, the numinousness of the epiphany originates in its subversive disruption of the experiential status quo and the frictionless complacencies of history-as-usual. “Resistance,” writes Conrad, “is the real magic” (Conrad 2012, p. 177).