This panel explores how contemporary poets have begun to challenge long-standing assumptions about lyric form. In the twentieth century—the era of “lyricization” that Virginia Jackson has influentially described—the construction of lyric as a generic category was predicated implicitly on its relationship to looking. Whether or not proponents and detractors of modern lyric had visuality consciously in mind, they generally agreed that the lyric was the genre of the invisible: its subjects were the interior events that comprised the hidden welter of feeling and thought; its modes of address were distinguished by an “invisible listener” (Helen Vendler) and a speaker who “turns his back on his listeners” (Northrop Frye), preferring to be overheard; the genre’s foundational materials—the unseen emanations of breath, voice, and song—remained integral to its self-conception as a literary form. These figurations of lyric as a genre rooted in speaking and listening rather than performing and looking emerge in stark contrast to the era’s major poetic alternative: the avant-garde poetries that to varying degrees decentered the poetic “speaker,” militated against voice and expression, and exchanged patterned sound for splashy, improvised, and otherwise heterodox visual forms that foregrounded the material sources from which subjects and poems were seen to be fashioned. With the consolidation of opposing “expressivist” and “constructivist” strains of American poetics over the course of the century, the familiar silhouette of the stanza, the gravitational left margin, and the auratic halo of white space came to signal commitment to voice and personal feeling. In the twentieth century, you generally knew a lyric poem when you saw one.

Today, not so. A convergence of forces has transformed how poets understand the relationship between visuality and lyric expression. The ascendency of word processing has rendered the swift manipulation of textual presentation more accessible and enticing, and the explosion of social media has made fashioning identity, selfhood, and intimacy through multilayered visual and textual performances intuitive. Less interested in vision (as a biological phenomenon) and the visionary (as a spiritual one) than in visuality (perception conditioned by culture), contemporary poets often turn to forms that foreground readerly and writerly acts of beholding when they want to explore how history supervenes on the motions of consciousness. As contemporary poetry reflects and aspires to reconfigure regimes of perception bound up with the allocation of human value, it invites us to trace longer genealogies of poetic looking and to consider the mutual significance of social visibility and lyric form.

Our panel of four 15-minute papers will consider how a range of contemporary poets use graphic forms to approach conventionally lyric topics and tropes: personal loss, “authentic” personal expression, and the illusion of voice. Sarah Nance will begin by focusing on C.D. Wright’s One Big Self (2004), in which the poet travels to Louisiana prisons with the photographer Deborah Luster to document how the prisoners become monumental representations of loss, violence, and the passage of time. In her collaborative poetry, Wright uses the space of an oversized page to represent the fractured temporality of violence, memory, and embodiment, using the visual imprint of her words to “lay out,” as Wright puts it, “the real feel of hard time.” Extending our discussion of photography, lyric, and loss, Andrew Hill will examine Rachel Eliza Griffith’s Seeing the Body (2020) and its use of poetry and photography as forms of griefwork. Hill argues that Griffith’s blending of mediums and modalities of reading refuses the assumption of readerly distance often associated with the fiction of lyric as “overheard” speech. By offering moments for mutual witnessing, Hill argues, Griffiths’ collection engages in practices of collective griefwork with its readers.

The second two presentations will address issues of lyric expression and voice. In his paper “Writing, Drawing, and the Voluminousness of Poetic Subjectivity,” Nate Mickelson will focus on Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences (2021), considering how her pairing of poetry and line drawings complicates lyric expression and its gestures of authentic identity centered on straight, white, cis-male-ness. Mickelson proposes that the experiences of embodied looking Gladman’s drawings elicit serves as an alternative to modes of judgment and interpretive mastery that predominate in the academy. Finally, Aliya Ram will examine Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry, arguing that he connects “oral poetics” with the visual and aural faculties. Analyzing “I Cristobal Kamau” and “Colomb(e),” Ram shows how Brathwaite uses typographical and spatial decisions to animate Christopher Columbus as a mask-like object that channels multiple voices and stories, in line with west African traditions of artifactual animation in performance.