Troubling the lyric : Weet-Bix and Honey & Freely bizarre : Hera Lindsay Bird's poetry, gurlesque performativity and the post-ironic lyric

Abstract

"Troubling the Lyric" comprises a book of poems and an exegesis. The former is "Weet-Bix and Honey", a collection of 49 lyric poems that explore networks of relation within Sydney suburbia, alongside a brief excursion to Los Angeles. These personally expressive poems might be seen as a "bestiary" or book of metamorphoses, after the way they transform people and feelings into other bodies and states. The exegetical component of this research, "Freely Bizarre: Hera Lindsay Bird's Poetry, Gurlesque Performativity and the Post-Ironic Lyric," examines the poetry of contemporary New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird across her first two books Hera Lindsay Bird (2016) and Pamper Me to Hell & Back (2018). Upon the release of Bird's boldly eponymous debut, two of her poems went viral. Bird garnered a cult following for her unbridled sexuality, mashing together of pop-cultural icons with literary greats, extended similes, feminine kitsch, and her highly ironic and dark humour. Though there have been many interviews and literary reviews of Bird there has been, to date, no published long-form critical engagement with her work. This thesis is structured around close readings of Bird's poetry drawing on scholarly conceptualisations of camp, the gurlesque and post-irony, and recent theorisations of the lyric. I employ the queer and feminist theory of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in order to elucidate how Bird playfully troubles conventional categorical divisions, including heteronormative performances of gender and literary conventions of affect. Bird in a camp and post-postmodern repositioning of hegemonic value gives priority to feminine, homosexual and bisexual desires that are typically subordinated in heteronormative discourse. The kitsch, melodrama and gurlesque humour that Bird liberally employs serve to trouble and queer femininity, feminism, conventions of poetry, and sexuality. The lyric is enlivened and updated by Bird to inhabit new post-ironic modes--interplaying sincerity and irony to create unconventional variances in affect and trouble normative idea of universality. Bird expresses personal conceits through inventive and over-elaborate similes, shamelessly creating a self-consciously inwardly-focused lyric.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English