Singing the quotidian: the lyric voice and contemporary American prose poetry by women

ABSTRACT

The ‘lyric’ is a celebrated mode of expression and a catch-all term used to describe a great deal of admired poetry, including ancient works, Romantic poetry and contemporary poetry. However, no-one agrees on exactly how ‘the lyric’ might be defined or how the lyric ‘I’ might be understood – some see this as an autobiographical ‘I’ and others interpret it as a persona enabling lyric poets to activate language in particular ways. Furthermore, although the term lyric has been applied to short forms of poetry, it has much less often been applied to prose poetry. Yet prose poetry, which often invokes the quotidian, is frequently lyrical and often employs the lyric ‘I’. Importantly, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, prose poetry written by American women has found new and experimental ways to position the lyric ‘I’ and, in doing so, much of it transgresses conventional lyric boundaries in order to re-assess and critique the experiences of women. Khadijah Queen’s book, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On provides a powerful example as it makes use of a compelling lyric voice that comments on the everyday experiences of women as they are objectified in contemporary society.

KEYWORDS:

• Lyric
• first-person
• prose poetry
• quotidian
• Khadijah Queen

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Hetherington

Paul Hetherington is a distinguished poet who has published numerous full-length poetry and prose poetry collections and has won or been nominated for more than thirty national and international awards and competitions. Paul is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), and joint founding editor of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations. He founded the International Prose Poetry Group in 2014. He is co-author of a scholarly study of the anglophone prose poem for Princeton University Press (2020) and co-editor of the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020).

Cassandra Atherton

Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised prose poet and a leading scholar of prose poetry. She was a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, Tokyo. She is the recipient of national and international research grants and awards and has judged numerous poetry awards. Cassandra’s books of prose poetry include Pre-Raphaelite (2018) and Leftovers (2020). She is a Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University and commissioning editor for Westerly magazine and Axon: Creative Explorations. She is co-author of a scholarly study of the anglophone prose poem for Princeton University Press (2020) and co-editor of the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020).