Lyric Temporalities

by Kimberly Johnson, Ryan Netzley

248 pages, Hardcover

Published January 13, 2026

About the author

Kimberly Johnson is professor of English at Brigham Young University.

Reviews

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging, edifying, surprising, and surprisingly rereadable. One of the most satisfying and exciting aspects of this collection is the fulfillment of a promise made in the introduction, that “the chapters in this book do not limit their investigations to a single historical moment, instead shifting nimbly between centuries in defiance of a spatialized temporality that treats time as a series of punctual occurrences and caused effects.” By leaping across centuries and literary “periods,” the essays themselves enact “the experimental temporalities that they identify in lyric.”
Building on Heather Dubrow’s explorations of deixis and lyric presence, as well as Jonathan Culler’s work on lyric as literary genre and expressive mode, Lyric Temporalities identifies and articulates the mysterious workings of time both in the lines and stanzas of individual lyrics, as well as in the minds and experiences of readers. Beginning with the premise that “lyric takes the issue of special time…as a central subject,” the essays in Lyric Temporalities aim to “elaborate models for conceptualizing time in lyric.” These models illuminate lyric as a mode that “often questions and sometimes even transcends the miniature teleology of process and product, learning and learned.”
A major strength of this collection is the variety of angles through which the topic is viewed. There are treatments of lyric temporalities on scales ranging from the syllabic level of rhyme and meter in Rosenfeld’s “The Sound of Lyric in Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene (1596) to the formal level of the sonnet itself in Crim’s “Procrustean Modernity,” and that range of scales (from minuscule to universal) is treated head-on in Hyman’s “Minute/Minute;” other essays approach the genre as a whole, wondering,, in Vasiliauskas’ “On the Way to Lyric,” how it presents and demands in ways different (and similar) to fiction, and the relationships between reader, poet, and poetic subject in Izenberg’s “DEAR FRIEND.”
Two stand-out pieces in the collection for me personally we’re Burt’s “Donne the Time Traveler,” which presented queer readings of several of Donne’s devotional lyrics, arguing that these poems take advantage of lyric’s particular temporal opportunities to “open up imaginative space for queer identification, queer amours, and queer futurity;” and Joseph Campana’s “(No) Future for Lyric?: On Sonnets and Speculation,” which argued against “objective time” in lyric, which views time as cinematic, broken into individual frames, frozen moments, allowing time “to be specialized, divided, and calculated.” Instead, Campana proposes lyric temporality as “duration,” and wonders “lyrics are not literally poems, made by a maker, but life forms grown?”
Heather Dubrow’s collection-crowning “Afterword: Time a-changin’,” crystalizes the arguments of the collection and convincingly presents their implications and applications in the classroom, clarifying the ideal audience of this work: educators. Taken together, the essays in this book offer various approaches to (slow-)reading lyrics that simultaneously make relevant the time in which they were written, the direction(s) of time in the action of the verse, and the temporal contexts of careful readers.
Lyric Temporalities is consistently convincing in its (re)assertion that the concerns contain in both old and recent lyric remains relevant in our time and will remain so past our time, that there are myriad rewards in (re)reading lyric which make the practice worth our time, and that (surprising as anything else about this mysterious genre) spending (slow) time with a poem can be, when all is said and done, a pretty darn good time!