Call It a Poem: Sex’s Address

With reference to the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, this essay considers how the intersections of address, poetry, and sex are unworked in poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Carl Phillips, as well as in Ira Sachs’s short film Last Address and Michel Foucault’s essay “Lives of Infamous Men.” The essay argues that the structure of poetic address undergoes a radical mutation or transformation across nonlyric genres and forms, especially at the hands of theoretical approaches that stand to the side of matters of identity, intersubjectivity, and personhood.