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Modern & Contemporary Poetry (the other (the other as object/image…

- - - - 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...").
    - - 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).
      - 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).
      - 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.
    - - 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.
- - - - 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,")