A poetics of address: Speech and dialogue in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Josephine Miles, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde

This dissertation focuses on poetic address in the work of four American women poets. By attending to the connections and disjunctures within dialogical exchanges activated by the poem, both in the text itself and in the context of its reading, the dissertation shows how ideals of community and problems of community are at issue not only in poetic representations but also in exchanges between poet and audience. The dissertation reads poetic texts in relation to such particular contexts as live poetry readings, oral interviews, scrapbooks and correspondence, and narratives about the writers coming to poetry.; The first of four chapters explores the process of Emily Dickinson's canonization by examining various writings Dickinson first sent to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and the later re-editing of these texts as self-standing poems. It then examines assumptions about the nature of poetic speech evidenced in the continuing tendency to read Dickinson's texts and Dickinson as poet by way of narratives about her relationship with Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Moving on to the contemporary period, the second chapter demonstrates how Josephine Miles, in Coming to Terms (1979), constructs the reader and the exchange between speaker and reader so as to enable the articulation of voices these poems represent as silenced in other exchanges--the voices of children in exchanges between children and adults, and of individuals in exchanges with institutions, for example. The third chapter compares the mode of address and construction of the reader in Gwendolyn Brooks' Annie Allen (Harper 1949) with that in her later To Disembark (Broadside 1981). This chapter investigates notions of community in poetic speech by reading poems written before and after Brooks' explicit rejection of the notion of the universal audience and her (1969) decision to address a specifically black audience. In a discussion of Audre Lorde's use of poetic dedication as a feature of her political activism, the final chapter focuses the issues of speech, authority and community together to address the problems that differences among communities pose to intercultural communication.