Abstract

The adaptation of texts by contemporary British-Somali poet Warsan Shire for Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, released in 2016, raises several questions about poetic representation in the twenty-first-century mediascape. Shire’s poems, which have been composed for a variety of media, ranging from print distribution to audio recordings to online circulation, serve as transitions between the musical tracks in Lemonade, thus accompanying the overarching narrative of black female empowerment. Frictions between image and text present the starting point for an enquiry into the changes that contemporary lyric poetry undergoes when it “becomes pop.” Shaped by processes of circulation and reappropriation, Shire’s poems emerge as “memetic media.” Does this “meme-ification” of poetry, the digital mobilization and de-contextualization of poetic form, in turn affect the dynamics of poetic representation? A close reading of the texts as they are integrated into the visual album shows how Shire’s poems enter into a dialogue with Lemonade’s imagery, while remaining impervious to the narrative of positive transformation. In becoming “meme,” these poems retain their refractory qualities, thus presenting a design of lyric poetry for the contemporary mediascape.

摘要

当代英裔索马里诗人 Warsan Shire 为 Beyoncé于 2016 年发行的视觉专辑《柠檬水》改编的文本，引发了关于 21 世纪媒体景观中诗意表现的几个问题。Shire 的诗歌是为各种媒体创作的，从印刷品发行到录音再到在线流通，作为Lemonade 中音乐曲目之间的过渡，从而伴随着黑人女性赋权的总体叙述。图像和文本之间的摩擦为探究当代抒情诗“流行”时所经历的变化提供了起点。受流通和再挪用过程的影响，夏尔的诗歌成为“模因媒体”。诗歌的这种“模因化”，诗歌形式的数字化动员和去语境化，是否反过来影响诗歌表现的动态？仔细阅读整合到视觉专辑中的文本，可以看出夏尔的诗歌如何与柠檬水进行对话的图像，同时不受积极转变的叙述的影响。在成为“模因”的过程中，这些诗歌保留了它们的耐火性，从而为当代媒体景观呈现了一种抒情诗的设计。