8 - Queer Poetry and Bioethics

Summary

Twenty-first-century poets, particularly queer Indigenous and queer of color poets, have taken particular interest in lyric, its excesses, and its transformative potential. Queer Indigenous and queer of color poets make clear that the relationships that make and sustain life are not merely those between human selves. The poems discussed retain the physicality associated with the lyric voice but reject its fantasy of a self-organizing, independent consciousness. They explore what might happen when the speaker's crystalline singularity is shattered – first, by a more accurate conception of the interdependence of living beings; and second, by historical and contemporary conditions of mass death. Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem makes astute use of the conventions of lyric poetry and its associated reading practices in order to invoke, if not inaugurate something different – poetry that disidentifies with the form of the person and that radically expands the tripartite relation of speaker, addressee, and audience that structures the American lyric tradition.