Maggie Nelson

In Nelson's Bluets she describes the process of coming to terms with the grief of a failed relationship through describing her affinity for and relationship to the color blue. However, much of this conversation-- in regards to understanding color and understanding her emotions-- is deeply intertextual in nature and brings in other writings on color, on what 'blue' means, and other works of art (including the titular 'Les Bluets', a painting by Lydia Davis), as well as stories of her friends, ultimately expressing the self through conversation with and representation of others (whether that other be people, art, or something else).

Walt Whitman

In Whitman's poetry, in particular his "Song of Myself", although the title invokes a first-person subject, Whitman constructs this sense of self as an expansive and all-encompassing one, for example when he writes: "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

Ultimately, this expansiveness leads to the speaker becoming part of the earth itself, writing: "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles."

Bhanu Kapil

In her text Humanimal Kapil engages both with the mode of documentary poetry in trying to document the stories of Amala and Kamala, but in doing so the work also becomes and expression of her own experiences of liminality (between place and between identity).

"To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed," (15).

Muriel Rukeyser

A 20th century American poet and political activist. In Rukeyser's Book of the Dead she's engaging in the documentary mode of poetry, specifically the expository form of it, in which the author documents a subject (in this case the tragedy of Gauley tunnel) and edits + synthesizes information like images and interviews to advance an argument. Here, Rukeyser uses poetry to express the voices of her subjects and the injustice they have gone through, while also taking on the role of the 'camera', describing and gazing up on those subjects.

In "Mearl Blankenship" for example she describes her subjects through quotation ("Dear Sir, my name is Mearl Blankenship.") as well as in an outside perspective ("He stood agaisnt the stove/facing the fire--/Little warmth, no words,/loud machines.")

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound was a Modernist poet, who also, in works such as his collection Cathay made attempts at translation. Such texts show Pound's perspective in portraying the "other"-- the work as distanced by language and time. Pound's approach as translator is often to invoke and make clear the linguistic and temporal distance, moving towards the language of origin rather than towards a modern English.

Take for example his translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Seafarer," which begins "May I for my own self song's truth reckon," mimicking Germanic syntax. The rest of the poem often uses Germanic, Anglo-Saxon language, or otherwise antiquated language to emphasize linguistic and temporal distance

Nathaniel Mackey

Nathaniel Mackey's Nod House explores experiences of diaspora through the story of a migratory group of people over the course of its poems, very often from the perspective of the "we", the whole community rather than a single character (for example, the first poem in the collection, "Sound and Somnulence," never uses the singular 3rd person). As such, the collection is deeply entrenched in a collective perspective, seeing the movement of this group as a collective experience, even as characters within the group are distinct from each other.

Myung Mi Kim

Kim's Commons deals with subjects like war, immigration, and colonization on a societal level (rather than an intimate, personal one) but in rendering the collective experiences of these histories she does so through abstraction, highlighting through the work's silences and discussion of language and translation the degree to which certain things cannot be expressed. Its use of language in particular engages with untranslatability: the way that an 'other' cannot always be absorbed into another (in this case a colonizing, English) framework.

"_, a word that cannot be translated: it suggests, 'what belongs to the people'"

Steven Zultanski

In Zultanski's "Bribery" he uses the mode of confession (which constructs itself around the expression of the personal/individual) but uses this genre to confess to a number of unsolved crimes around NYC, absorbing the crimes and actions of the what, due to the perpetrators' anonomynity, could be called the 'collective' into the self of a single speaker.

Tommy Pico

Tommy Pico's IRL deals with issues of performance (especially in the age of social media) and the politics of storytelling; it also juxtaposes this the narrator's expression of his current problems (with relationships, for example) with a more serious tone in discussing the trauma of his past and how this relates to the collective trauma in being Native American in modern America.

"Who deserves yr story?
Not all stories. Not my story,
my lol truth Not life or live-
lihood or food. Who deserves
this, particular, story, yr, blasting?"

Terrance Hayes

In Hayes' American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin the speaker engages in the expression of a lyric "I" but this self serves to both express and be a part of a literary history and the history and modern experience of blackness in America. In writing (or at least calling his poems) 'sonnets' Hayes puts his poems in conversation and in context of the history of this form, similarly to how he invokes the tradition of Black poetry in the first sonnet of the collection:

"The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors..."

Additionally, descriptions and expressions of the self become contextualized within Black history. The statement "I'm not sure how to hold my face when I dance," (18) becomes a discussion of Jimi Hendrix, for example.

Sylvia Plath

Plath was a 20th century confessional poet, Confessional Poetry referring to a style that emerged in the USA in the 1950's and focused on the expression of the "I" and individual experience. Plath's poetry is characteristic of this, using the medium to express emotion and experiences of trauma, but at the same time her work at points acknowledges the degree to which this confession is also a sort of performance.

A key example of this is the poem "Lady Lazarus" from the collection Ariel, which describes the speaker's numerous suicide attempts ("I have done it again./One year in every ten...") as a sort of performance ("the big strip tease,") and ultimately how the public expression of her pain becomes performance as well ("For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge...").

Trisha Low

Low's The Compleat Purge (2012) is structured as a series of last will and testaments of Low over the course of her life. The text is functionally a series of letters to her loved ones and a series of lists of objects to be given a way, both indicating to the audience how the speaker sees herself and wants to be seen in each stage of her life. Who is addressed in each 'letter' and what Low writes to them performs how she wants to be remembered or understood by that person, for example.

Additionally, in cataloging what possessions will be bequeathed to whom at each stage of her life, Low engages in another type of self-expression and self definition-- she is defined by her interests, what objects she identifies as important or unimportant to her (especially as these sections morph from lists of objects into specific letters about specific objects to specific people).

Claudia Rankine

In her book Don't Let Me Be Lonely Rankine discusses themes such as grief, death, and depression, but does not only do so through the expression of her own experiences-- she also relies heavily on recounting the stories of others. These range from experiences of those close to her (such as her father's grief after losing her mother) to experiences only known through the media, such as the death of Princess Diana and the collective grief afterward. The use of and gazing upon the stories of others is highlighted by the presence of a number of TVs in the work, especially in the stories of events only observed and processed from a distance.

Wendy Trevino

Trevino's work, for example in her 2018 collection Cruel Fiction, while still making use of the "I" is very concerned with issues of collective and societal movement or action. While "Poem" for example critiques the direction of a collective (the "riot girls drinking riot rosé" and the party that "[melts] into the riot [melts] into the party"), "Revolutionary Action" focuses on the construction of a collective, the people who are "with you."

William Carlos Williams

A 20th century Imagist poet, a movement which emphasized "simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the use of exacting visual images," and often was concerned more with constructing an image than using poetry as a mode of self-expression. Williams' Pictures from Brueghel, for example, is a collection of ekphrasitic poems describing Pieter Brueghel the Elder's paintings-- although Williams' own perspective on the work is unavoidable (as seen in the way that each poem moves throughout the image).

Gertrude Stein

In her work Tender Buttons Stein is concerned with the description of everyday objects, but in her cataloging she uses dense and abstract syntax in a way that defamiliarizes the object from the reader's expectation of it-- an approach that has been called "cubist" poetry by some. We can see this use of abstraction in "A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass"

"A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading."

John Ashbery

In Ashbery's work, specifically his "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror", Ashbery engages with the 'other' in ekphrastic description of the titular painting. But in contrast to say, Williams' approach, Ashbery uses the mode of ekphrasis to reflect on the nature of perception and distortion of an object-- and how that perception distorts ("A peculiar slant/Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model,")

Marianne Moore

Moore was a 20th American Modernist. In her work, her subjects are rendered with linguistic precision, including her many animal subjects. However, these animal subjects are notably often depicted not through the physical or visceral, but are almost intellectualized, or better said, made sense of through the lens of human culture and values. One example of this is in Moore's "To a Snail" which is reminiscent of a blazon, detailing the virtues of the snail on a physical level, piece be piece. Another example is in "Snakes, Mongooses, Snake Charmers, and the Like," which frames the snake in terms of its cultural meanings ("This animal to which from the earliest times, importance has attached'). In this way her method of understanding the 'other' is in attaching significance to its form.

Emily Dickinson

Dickinson was a 19th century American poet, and is admittedly hard to place on this chart-- while many of her poems express a lyric "I", in contrast to many of the 'individual' works presented here, she does not engage with confession to that degree, especially as the "I" can at times read as allegorical or metaphorical (see for example "My Life had stood- a Loaded Gun" in which the speaker takes on the perspective of a gun in relationship to its master), resulting in a broader sense of who "I" is or could be in these poems.