Code-Switching, Code-Stitching: A Macaronic Poetics?

Abstract

What kind of home has poetry provided for code-switching over the course of the last hundred years? Given that speech and literary writing overlap but are distinct from one another, how should we think about the code-switching that’s particular to poetry? What can we learn from the analysis of poetry about code-switching, and from the analysis of code-switching about poetry? These are among the impossibly large questions I broach in this essay, exploring an understudied aspect of poetry’s transnationalism, with a focus on mixed anglophone examples. I argue that code-switching in poetry often points in two opposite directions at once: by virtue of breaking with monologic literariness, it heightens poetry’s speech-effect, its seeming orality; and yet by virtue of its pattern-rich code-stitching, it also signals poetry’s literariness, its bending back of reference on to itself, its insistence on the verbal materiality and sonic textures that resonate even across languages.