Reclaiming the dialogic, reframing the topics: Culture, violence, and eros in contemporary American women's lyric poetry

Contrary to Mikhail Bakhtin's beliefs concerning the monologic and limited dialogic properties of poetry, this study argues that lyric poetry not only integrates rich dialogic possibilities, but that these possibilities rival, and often even best, that of the most complex and ingenious novels. The qualities of lyric poetry that allow these possibilities to thrive are, namely, musicality, ambivalence, nonlinearity, and subjectivity, all of which resist neat definitions or any centralized locus. I propose that subjectivity, in particular---the very quality that Bakhtin believes limits the dialogic nature of poetry as it presents a solitary ideological perspective---can set the dialogic in the lyric poem most dynamically in motion. This study will demonstrate how a number of contemporary women poets are creating multi-voiced, multi-leveled poems that challenge the single-voiced subjective "I" so often associated with lyric poetry. Some of the poems explicated, for example, will show how the "selves" of the lyric "I" (and, thus, ideologies) splinter into multi-dimensional "selves," while other poems present multiple, ever-shifting "selves" of a culture's past and present. The lyric poem's ability to mirror the counterpoints of "real time" dialogue through the interactions of these "selves" is directly related to its intense subjectivity. I also propose a new term, l'ecriture d'ambivalence , to illuminate the requisite interplay among the both/and as well as the either/or, which not only flourishes in lyric poetry but is also the bastion of dialogism; l'ecriture d'ambivalence captures the fleeting, momentary "I" or self that only has meaning when in dynamic interplay with a (likewise ever-moving) "other," as well as embraces such concepts of simultaneity and heteroglossia that are inherent to dialogism and lyric poetry. This study will position the lyric in a triadic of utterance (the lyric poem itself), addressee (women's voices, which are said to inadvertently embody Bakhtinian theories), and addressee (the reader whose "self" is likewise ever-shifting). This triadic will then launch an exploration of dialogic complications of "self," "other," and shifting identity through the current topoi of culture, violence, and eroticism in the lyric poems of Julia Alvarez, Harryette Mullen, Louise Erdrich, Jorie Graham, Claudia Rankine, and Adrienne Rich.