Posture is a word for embodiment that is also a means of describing social order. In its social sense, as one’s “standing” in the world, posture resonates with its embodied sense, as a physical pose. That these two senses also meet in actions like standing ovations or taking a knee suggest too an element of performance. “Posturing” introduces an association with artifice that heightens the questions of representation that posture evokes.

The panel we propose for MLA 2024 animates the idea of posture not in drama or fiction, as one might expect, but in poetry. We ask: How do poets express, represent or enact postures—in a word, how do poets or poems posture—when that term is bound up with social ordering and emplacement alongside bodily and affective dynamics? From Keats sitting down to read King Lear, to Gwendolyn Brooks’s exemplary poseur, Satin-Legs Smith, the poetic performance of posture may be figurative or mimetic, lyric or balladic or something else. As a theme as well as (potentially) as a theory, the poetic posture becomes a way to think the entanglements of the socially situational and circumstantial with forms of subjectivity, sensation and potentiality.

While literary studies scholars often challenge the idea “the body” as a universalizing construct, we have not yet fully reckoned with how to talk about bodies in particular. Our panel therefore engages with visual studies and disability studies scholars, who have developed sophisticated technical vocabularies for describing the body’s literal positioning, as well as its figurative resonances. Our panel builds on existing scholarship on the affect and embodiment, and on the performativity of gender and race, by asking how such identities may be projected or captured by the textual performances of posture in poetry. How have anti- or non-normative postures been animated or received or subsumed by a poetics of posture that may include dimensions that are in excess of a poem’s expressed content? In the four 12-minute papers that we have planned, this panel seeks to be a space for testing and foregrounding innovative approaches to the study of poetry and poetics beyond the bounds of period specialization. We emphasize that our panel gathers colleagues with expertise in different poetic traditions, histories and theoretical approaches. We therefore anticipate a wide audience and a dynamic, generative conversation.

Carmen Faye Mathes begins our discussion by bringing the paradigmatic posture of eighteenth-century British Abolitionism—the kneeling slave of Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion—into dialogue with the poetics of apostrophic address. Through a reading of Mary Robinson’s “The Negro Girl” (1800), Mathes considers how Robinson’s apostrophes invoke the posture of the kneeling slave only to animate its alternatives. In a poem motivated by a politics of white pity for the enslaved, leaping is a posture that sometimes performs the refusal of the world and other times refuses the world for good.

Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau builds on dynamic postures by examining the tension between frozen, erect and stone-like figures and liberation through dance in Emily Dickinson’s “I cannot dance upon my Toes.” Chevrier-Bosseau considers how Dickinson galvanizes the lyric condition through precarious balance and a whirling motion where features – bodily and choreographic – are blurred. Between this release of pure energy and formal containment, Dickinson’s elusive and mercurial lyric-self begins to emerge.

In “John Ashbery’s Studly Pose,” Brian Glavey turns to visual archives. After Ashbery’s death in 2017, Thomas Vinciguerra contrasted the photographs that circulated with Ashbery’s obituaries to the “studly pose” and “hunky glory” of images that appeared on his book covers in the 1970s. These confident, assertive posture suggests a presentation of Ashbery’s selfhood that is arguably absent in his abstract and evasive poems. Glavey’s essay therefore asks what this absence might reveal about Ashbery’s treatment of sexuality in his poetry of the 1970s, and what this treatment might tell us about what Lee Edelman calls Ashbery’s “pose of imposture.”

Sarah Dowling’s paper, “Brought Low,” considers the body thrown or dragged to the ground in an act of violence in Anishinaabe poet Liz Howard’s poem “Superposition” (2021). “Superposition” describes being pushed to the threshold between life and death: it is a poem about being raped. Dowling focuses on the status of Howard’s text as a “grid poem” in order to demonstrate that Superposition” is about emplacement, about the ways that spaces—both social and material—are ordered, patterned, and shaped so that some people will be made vulnerable. The poem asks us, over and over, to consider how one figure is positioned in relation to others.