Lyric Exposure

This article examines how lyric conventions put specific features of everyday language to work, and more precisely, how rhetorical forms of address can produce the effect of lyric exposure, positioning the reader in social space. Drawing comparatively on the romantic poetry of John Keats, it argues that contemporary poets Claudia Rankine and Erica Hunt experiment with the parameters of lyric address to reframe poetry as a site of exchange. Bringing several bodies of scholarship together—including Lauren Berlant’s exploration of “structures of feeling,” Barbara Johnson’s “structures of address,” and Patricia Williams’s literary attention to the reader’s role in the process of meaning-making—the article expands available theoretical vocabularies for recognizing the sociohistorical pressures registered in poetic forms.