Typically defined as "a single speaker relating his experience of the world," the term evokes for many Wordsworthian pastorals, Byron's Childe Harold or Frost's elemental Yankee loner. Yet John Berryman, the master of "shipwrecked syntax," navigated the lyric's powerful currents as the "voice of the other." In Ragan's Hunger Wall, Kinnell's Book of Nightmares, it is the spillway of brute force, the collective undertow of horror.

Through the intimate bonding of sound and meaning, the lyric poem draws the deepest emotional, the keenest sensual response, its enunciated breath the music that "joins the liberties of sleep with the intensity of extreme wakefulness," (Valéry) the rhythm and sonority that "respond to man's immortal need for symmetry and surprise." (Baudelaire)

Lyric is mesmerizing in any language, however rudimentary one's linguistic, thus, mental apprehension. Once emotionally allied with the piece, the listener imputes his own meaning, as here to a stanza in Suvicnai ("Shoo-veets-NYE"):

Voc mani sloka, sloka tedü,
nu sonic lennia kim debai.
Edevi kum battoy sis bajani,
nev husko fai ranne dari mijü.
O nev nev ranne faisi dari mijai.

The lyric poem's first stirrings are rarely verbal; it arrives by emotional sensation, by the internal color, texture, smell of a mood, by an image, pitch, cadence, hum, by the savor of a long vowel. "The poet is occupied with the frontiers of consciousness where words fail, but meanings still exist." (Eliot) This is the zone we inhabit when we enter into dialogue with the poem to transliterate our non-verbal exchange onto the page. Poet accounts solely to poem as the final arbiter of its completion; poem scrutinizes and challenges poet.

Rilke's Apollo is headless, limbless, yet every contour of muscle and bone radiates a gaze and a smile.

Denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht.
Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

For there is no part of him
that does not see you.
You must change your life.

Only by surrender to the dialogue can we create anything true, anything of lasting value. By recovering the lyric, we acknowledge needs and reaffirm values that alter, enlarge, transcend ourselves.

In eleven sessions in New York, Paris and Prague, Lyric Recovery™ sought to extend the lyric to full potential, presenting, engendering and visibly rewarding work marked by reach, craft, content and musicality. The twelfth culminated with the sold-out 2000 festival session at Carnegie's Weill Hall.

Huddled since mid-century as "global village" around a dominant source of imagery, sound, even meaning, we must make uncommon use of language to ferry us beyond its perimeter to the essential, shared harmonics. Many of this year's honorees achieved just that.

(Lyric Recovery Festival™ at Carnegie's Weill Hall is a p h i l o p h o n e m a ™ presentation. LyR 2002 was produced in association with the LyR 2000 winner, Nicholas Johnson, and in collaboration with Dances Patrelle (dancespatrelle.org) Program details appear on the 2002 LyR web site.) LyR 2003 is projected for San Francisco or Vienna. Postmark deadline for submissions will be February 28.