This panel addresses the relationship between poetic voice and the poet’s community. How do poets negotiate between long-established ideas of lyric as an expression of emotion or the utterance of a persona—a definition of “voice” treating the poet as a lone, exceptional individual—and recent approaches emphasizing the poet’s social attachments? These papers show how contemporary poets complicate the ongoing critical argument, refusing to distinguish between their racial, ethnic, social, or political affiliations on one hand and their idiosyncrasies on the other. As these poets quote, ventriloquize, parody, and invent, they examine shifting relationships between form and identity. How do we distinguish the personal “voice” from dialect, idiolect, or even subject matter? How does our conception of “voice” interact with discourses of authenticity? What does it mean to speak in another’s voice, and how can we distinguish productive attempts to broaden the poet’s perspective from appropriation? These papers look at how poets’ formal and dialect choices establish distinct vocal personae while blurring racial, social, and even planetary boundaries, balancing writers’ desire for flexibility with groups’ need for cohesion and shared culture.

Christopher Spaide’s “Black Haiku, Asian Blues: Interethnic Form in American Poetry” examines how and why poets of one race or ethnicity write in verse-forms coded with a different race or ethnicity—e.g., Lawson Fusao Inada and Marilyn Chin taking on jazz and blues forms, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Tonya Foster using haiku, or Amiri Baraka's "low coups." The paper will examine poems that take race and living in a multiethnic nation as subjects, and appear to be using form to think through them. Interethnic usage of form raises questions about speaking for others, or speaking in others' voices or modes. How can contemporary poets write successfully (aesthetically, politically, any -ly) about races, plural, their own and others?

Rachel Trousdale also addresses the relationships among race, form, and voice in “Lemon Melon Mélange: Harryette Mullen’s Polyvocalism.” Mullen describes her fusions of varied source materials (1920s blues lyrics, Gertrude Stein, Yoruba religious practice, advertisements) as recycling, in which traces of the originals remain even after they have been transformed. These traces may appear to compromise or interrupt the distinctive “voice” of the poet, but that interruption reveals the internal plurality of the speaker. These poems suggest that the self—whether of the speaker, the poet, or the reader—is constructed out of apparently disparate and sometimes incommensurable components, and that inherent in selfhood is a plurality of variously-coded voices.

Stephanie Burt’s “‘Is that a Nerd Accent?’: Idiolect, Sociolect, and the Characters in Contemporary Poems” starts from the premise that poems present voices that let readers imagine characters. The kinds of languages a poem can use determines what kind of people—characters, personalities, selves—a reader can hear. New kinds of language mean new kinds of people in poems: new dialects and sociolects, new accents, new or newly recognizable kinds of speech. Modern and contemporary poets use new or newly audible kinds of words and syntax to portray newly visible kinds of character. This paper will examine recent instances: the Singlish (Singaporean English) of Arthur Yap and Ng Yi Sheng; the very online language of Hera Lindsay Bird and Patricia Lockwood (as chronicled in Gretchen McCulloch's study of Internet-speak) and the potentially autistic or neuroatypical language in some books by Aaron Kunin (read through the work of #actuallyautistic critics such as M. Yergeau), whose representational work has not yet been noticed by literary critics alert to neuroatypicality in other kinds of literature. What are the formal and emotional consequences of making these characters visible in short, lyric or anti-lyric, poetic forms?

Margaret Greaves’ “Poems in Outer Space” examines the extraterrestrial future of poetic voice. Since 1960, the U.S. has sent thousands of poems into outer space. 1,100 of these (all haiku) are currently orbiting Mars. The practice of sending poems into space feels futuristic. But, Greaves argues, it is also elegiac. This paper will examine the space voyages of poems by Joy Harjo and Amanda Gorman, sent up aboard the Lucy Asteroid Probe in 2021 as “messages for future humans” to find. Yet as these examples suggest, blasting human voices into space is less prospective than retrospective, a ceremonial tribute to a species whose extinction feels imminent. What, we might ask through these examples, is the future of poetic voice on a planet where it has become difficult to imagine viable futures?

Each presenter will speak for fifteen minutes, followed by fifteen minutes’ discussion.