The goal of this panel is to trace the entanglement of lyric aesthetics with mass media since 1945. The vexed relationship between lyric and the public has long been central to theorizations of the genre: John Stuart Mill famously framed poetry as "overheard,” while Theodor Adorno (in a radio address) theorized lyric as the genre that reveals art to be “most tightly bound to the social in just those moments when it turns its back on it.” More recently, Virginia Jackson, Yopie Prins and others have stressed the importance of situating lyric communication in historically specific, rather than idealized scenarios of abstracted readership and authorship. This panel brings a fresh approach to the problem of lyric sociality by exploring how the genre ramifies through and is transformed by ecologies of mass media (radio, film, television, and digital culture) in the later twentieth century and beyond.

Conscious that genres sediment media history—and also that one of lyric’s chief affordances may be “a relative flexibility and freedom from the determinations of media history,” as Matthew Kilbane argues—this panel is rooted in a growing body of work marking a turn to media studies within the study of twentieth- and twenty-first century poetics. Following early forays by Marjorie Perloff and Jerome McGann, Christopher Grobe’s The Art of Confession (2017), Jacob Edmond’s “Make It The Same: Poetry in Age of Global Media” (2019), Mike Chasar’s “Poetry Unbound” (2020), and Kilbane’s Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Culture (2025) go on to explore how the attention economy, digital composition and distribution, and platform culture interact with paradigms of poetic expression, transforming practices of composition and reception and the communities that form around poems. Our panel asks how the ethos of intimacy and interiority formalized through mid-century lyricization runs up against and is remade within the massified media landscape of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, reshaping lyric as a social practice.

Andrew Gorin provides a historical grounding for our discussion, arguing that the intimate apostrophes, universalized speaking positions, and fantasies of immediate communion that much lyric criticism has treated as defining features of the genre also structured U.S. mass media more broadly in the early twentieth century. In the postwar period, however, he argues that such lyrical rhetorics came into contradiction with shifting forms of mass mediation and audience demographics. Through case studies of Frank O’Hara’s film The Last Clean Shirt and Amiri Baraka's spoken-word LPs of the sixties and seventies, Gorin proposes that these works do not abandon lyricism. Instead, they expose the limits of lyrical publicness and rework lyric address for a massified discursive environment, tracing how lyric becomes a site for negotiating personhood and collectivity within the mass-mediated public sphere.

Micah Bateman will take up the question of how media platforms shape not only the circulation of lyric poetry but the forms lyric takes in public. Drawing attention to how lyric’s cultural authority operates within platform infrastructures, Bateman turns to Twitter/X, political campaigns, and hashtag activism to examine how poems circulate as textual fragments that authenticate collective feeling during moments of crisis. Poems by Bertolt Brecht, Emily Dickinson, and Muriel Rukeyser reappear in online discourse surrounding events such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the #MeToo movement. In these contexts, lyric functions less as a literary form to be interpreted than as a portable media object; Bateman shows how platform affordances such as character limits, screenshot circulation, and algorithmic amplification reduce poems to minimal signals of moral alignment and political solidarity, transforming lyric into a flexible cultural infrastructure for organizing collective feeling.

Finally, Nikki Skillman will consider more indirect, ambient signatures of twenty-first-century media ecologies on print-based lyric aesthetics. Skillman proposes that graphic forms, having risen to prominence across poetic subcultures with the flourishing of digital computing, have lately shed their close association with avant-garde agitation “against expression.” Focusing on poems of mourning by Douglas Kearney, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Brenda Hillman, Skillman examines elegies that make a spectacle of introspection and reveal that in the age of digital media, lyric poetry no longer has a formal phenotype. Against complaints that the visual turn in contemporary poetry merely reflects the demands of the attention economy, Skillman proposes that poets are turning to graphic forms to engage deeply with the practices of looking and overlooking that have shaped the history of the genre.

Note: Our gender-inclusive, international panel includes tenure-track scholars at the assistant and associate level from departments of English and Library and Information Science.