Poetry and Bondage offers a new theory and history of poetic constraint.  Poets have, for millennia, compared writing metrical verse to being in bondage – chains, fetters, cells, or slavery.  Tracing the history of this metaphor from Ovid through contemporary poetry, Brady reveals how it obscures the contributions to poetics of people who are actually in bondage.  How, the book asks, does the history and theory of lyric – and of the political freedoms and forms of human being it is supposed to epitomise – change, if we listen to the voices of enslaved and imprisoned poets?  The book’s innovative approach brings canonical and significant contemporary poets into dialogue across a wide range of historical periods, from Thomas Wyatt to Rob Halpern, Emily Dickinson to M. NourbeSe Philip, and Phillis Wheatley to Lisa Robertson.  It also examines the relationship between poetries and sites of bondage: the Romantic poem and the nineteenth-century prison; the lyrics of solitary confinement in the contemporary US supermax; the African-American songs of bondage recorded in the late nineteenth century.  It makes a significant intervention in lyric studies and literary criticism, opening up new ways of understanding the foundations of English and American poetry and the possibilities for committed writing today.

Andrea discusses the project in a podcast for the National Humanities Center.

October 2021, Cambridge University Press, 422pp, 9781108845724

cover image: ‘Memorial’ by Donny Johnson

Reviews:

‘Brady’s point is not that poets avoid reality through fantasies of being imprisoned, lashed, bound, and cuffed, as if securing pleasure against pain in exchange for devoted sacrifice to their art. Her core discovery is that lyric detainment names a nonbinary condition. Sublime creativity, melancholic longing, and impotent idleness: the affective states of poetic bondage appear to have little in common with the cruelty, domination, and sadism practiced by the historical agents of bondage, but it’s a mistake to think they would. For unlike the prison cell, the poem is an elastic membrane whose boundaries are negotiable in every instance. Romantic gestures like Pound’s “heave” only challenge the norms they fail to abolish. A solitary poet makes a heaven of hell, but it requires years of slow, hard, repetitive work—a rather different genre of attention from lyric’s—to make a dent in the prison industrial complex…. That “lyric whiteness” operates centrally in lyric constraint, according to Brady, undermines the prerogative of literary texts to hold themselves above the interests of history and sociology. In a chapter that every US poetry scholar should read, Brady traces the origins of the “self-contained” poem theorized by the New Critics to their more explicitly political counterparts, the Southern Agrarians, a circle of early- to mid-twentieth-century intellectuals who fused craft formalism, white supremacist ideology, and anti-capitalist paternalism. Not merely a linguistic object that refracts aesthetic tradition and invites expert interpretation, the New Criticism, as a way of thinking about verbal art, denies the historical contingency of how societies demarcate labor and value. The New Critical poem is the spatial homologue of the plantation.’ - Lukas Moe, Chicago Review 66.3 (2023)

"Reading the history and theory of lyric through the genre’s longstanding self-troping as bondage, Brady offers a much-needed re-evaluation of the now common understanding of lyric as an expression of human freedom and transcendence... Her pairings highlight what is made possible and what is foreclosed in different moments, enabling an expansion of ‘the possibilities of the lyric beyond its current constraints’ (p. 26). There is a certain practicality to this study, in that Brady writes it from her position as both a poet and a scholar. The opening up and closing down of lyric possibilities are equally relevant to her work in both spheres. Not only does Brady reveal the importance of thinking lyric tropes in relation to and across the material conditions structuring their historical moments, her tracing of these tropes also stands as an incitement to writing (and rewriting) lyric poetry, to thinking carefully about poetry’s material relationship to conditions of freedom and unfreedom." - Sarah Dowling, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 30.1 (August 2022)

“Andrea Brady's monograph, Poetry and Bondage, explores the limits of the conventional lyric as pointedly exclusionary, removing the traces of violent history from the textual record, abiding by unspoken or mystified white and patriarchal ideology. In an astonishing reading of Wyatt's lyrics, she demonstrates with detailed analysis and deft political tact how the poet deflects his own vulnerability and precarity (as a privileged aristocratic diplomat and courtier, subject to the sovereign's whims and casual violence) upon the weaker vessel, the lusted-after female in his chamber... Brady braids together this superb reading of Wyatt within a section of chapters that explores solitary confinement and the problem of poetic access to this extreme example of the removed space of lyric, the punishment cell... Chapters open up to a devastating demonstration of the vicious use of solitary confinement in the United States to discipline and punish black citizens, working up from the panoptical prisons of the 19th century to the terrifying horrors of the industrial prison-sites that use this technique... Brady's ethical work is, too, to show how the assumptions about lyric as self-testimony within an enclosed space, self isolated as self talking to itself like Wyatt to his supposed mistress, take on an entirely different dynamic once the witness of those detained in real closed spaces, forced to self-commune till their minds and bodies are broken, is acknowledged, read and felt, moving readers to political action to counter the systematic abuse.” - Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold 28 (Summer 2022)

"This monograph from the US-bred, London-based poet is a model of argument across historical periods; it’s capacious, ambitious, judgmental, and obviously valuable." - Stephanie Burt, Critical Inquiry (May 2022)

“Andrea Brady’s monumental study of poetry and constraint focuses on ‘the ways that poets invoke bondage as metaphor while effacing the actuality of bondage’. Milton’s aspiration to deliver poetry from ‘the modern bondage of rhyming’, and Blake’s injunction that ‘poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race’, associate formal freedoms with political liberation. The modernist discovery of free verse was quickly followed by a formalist reaction in the 1940s, which was in turn displaced by renewed experimentation over the following decades. Yet poetry always and inevitably imposes boundaries on experience, and Oulipian or procedural devices are just another instance of this shaping practice. Brady is not occupied with tired oppositions between neo-formalist and free verse approaches – though a concern with prosody is foregrounded in her analysis. Rather, the focus of her work is a fierce interrogation of the lyric mode itself, and what she identifies as a ‘lyric whiteness’, both in its historical and contemporary formulations.” - John Hawke, Australian Book Review (April 2022)