Poetry and Other People

Event details

One of the problems of modern poetry (from, say, Wordsworth forward) has been the consideration and representation of other people, besides the “I.” Of course, every instance of the first-person pronoun produces – explicitly, ambiently, obliquely – the second-person pronoun, and we often take poems that do not specify a “you” to be speaking to us as readers. If we read a poem in which the “you” is identified or specified, we tend not to put ourselves in that position, and the “you” of a poem tends to remain in the gravitational orbit of the “I” – as addressee, as object, as spectacle, as appropriation, as mirror for the subject’s own self-regard. How, then, might a poet adequately address other people? And, to raise the stakes of the question: how might poems adequately address other people who are by definition unknowable to the poem – the dead, people from the past? Or to reframe the question: can a poem adequately address that which is other to the “I” of the poem, whether in space or time? What can poetry do with, what should it do with, history?

Eric Falci will discuss several poems by Irish poets – one published in the early 1980s, one in the early 1990s, and two in the late 2010s – in order to try and get a better sense of the ways in which poems can fashion an address to or representation of other people. How does the otherness of history and difference come into poems without simply becoming a kind of lyric narcissism? How can poems reckon with the past? What strategies do they take to do so? 

Online information to follow.