The topic of this special session is the intersection of poetics, grammatical form, and the autobiographical impulse. Our plural title, “Forms of the Lyric Subject,” is meant to suggest the multitude of ways in which poets deal with the challenges of representing their own subjectivity, as well as that of others, in their work. The panel specifically intends to explore the ways in which poets negotiate these complexities by exploiting the potential resources of lyric forms. The lyric mode is characterized not only by what would appear to be its seemingly unbounded recursive devices—continually refracting and commenting on its own conditions of possibility—but also by its marked constraints, which demand a concision of expression and a heightened linguistic awareness on the part of both author and reader. The panel plans to treat this topic from the threefold perspective of a) a scholar of postmodernist and contemporary American “confessional” poetry; b) a practicing poet and theoretician of autobiographical writing; and c) a scholar whose work focuses on the relation between poetics, lyricism, and grammatical (syntactical) forms.

The rationale for organizing a panel on this topic is based on a few interrelated factors. First, the three speakers are familiar with each other’s work and have long supported one another’s mutual interests in this topic. They therefore welcome the opportunity to come together to share their work with each other and with an audience of similarly minded interlocutors, with the aim of generating and helping to expand a broader base of interest in this field of inquiry. Second, the speakers intend, by means of this panel, to shed light specifically on the history of the category of “confessional” poetry, which is greatly (and perhaps unjustly) stigmatized in our time, by examining its close ties with autobiographical styles of poetry on a larger scale. Finally, at previous MLA conventions, as well as at other conferences in literary studies over the past decade, the speakers have all noticed a lack of sustained attention paid to the formal and linguistic devices that so-called “autobiographical” poets employ in their work. Current treatment of such poetry, in their view, is almost exclusively historical and thematic in its focus. They are therefore hoping to draw attention to this important but often overlooked area of research.

The panel intends to build upon and extend several of the aims of recent scholarship in the field of contemporary American poetry and poetics. Each of the speakers will be allotted 20 minutes of time for their individual presentations. An open discussion between speakers and audience participants will conclude the final 15 minutes of the special session.

The panel will start with Anastasia Nikolis's paper, “Cognates and Confession in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” which examines Bishop’s villanelle, “One Art.” Nikolis contends that Bishop’s confessional aesthetics rely on tension developed between impersonal questions about the craft of translation and intimate, self-reflexive language. For Bishop, she shows, confession is a poetic device, rather than a genre defined by intimate or taboo autobiographical content. In her analysis of “One Art,” Nikolis argues that the submerged aesthetic investment in translation and the specific difficulty of translating near-cognates provides the impersonal focal point for most of the poem, so that the comparatively intimate last lines of the poem register as confession.

Nikolis’s paper will be followed by Lauren Russell’s hybrid presentation, “Selfing: Meditations on Poetry, Possibility, and Constructions of Self,” which asks: How do poets deploy the self? And how do the selves we create on the page open up possibilities for the selves we walk around in every day? Russell will revisit her own construction of self across three distinct periods of her poetic output, exploring such questions as the significance of choosing how, if, and whether to say “I”; of speaking rather than being spoken about; of constructing a self or choosing to interrogate, transform, subvert, or shapeshift into one already constructed for you.

Finally, William Scott’s paper, “Braided Language: Evie Shockley and the Syntax of the Lyric Subject,” examines a series of poems that treat subjectivity as a kind of “braiding,” in which the syntax of language reflects the “syntax” (the dynamic and ever-shifting bonds) of personal relationships. For Shockley, syntax is not only a concrete feature of language, constraining and interacting with various stylistic devices in her work (such as lineation and enjambment); it is also a metaphor, embodied in multiple related images that weave in and out of the texture of her poems, including marriage rituals, braided hair, similes, and mirror reflections.