‘We’ the people—Collective lyric self in twenty-first-century poetry

Abstract

Questions of positionality permeate 21st-century poetics—and seem to come to a head around the intentional inclusion/exclusion of the reader in the speaker’s pronoun of choice, especially when the pronoun in question is “we.” This essay contrasts the fragmented lyric self of modernism with current approaches to a lyric “we” and puts three contemporary poets in conversation: Nathaniel Mackey, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Solmaz Sharif. Their voicings of a lyrical “we” are each presented as particularly fluid, complex, and distinct from the fragmented plurality of modernism: 1) Mackey’s jazzy and serial “we” in the “Song of the Andoumboulou”; 2) Gumbs’s “we” of summoned haunting voices; and 3) Sharif’s political “we” that is implicated in the layered relationships between speaker and a specific “you.” In putting these poets in conversation, the paper questions the supposed neutrality of a lyrical poetry without political stakes and gestures towards a poetics of entanglement.