Poetic Voice in the Expanded Field

The poet’s voice has long been an elusive object in literary studies. It has been understood as both a biographical substrate and a commodity the poet has to manufacture or develop over time. It can be a metonymy for embodiment and identity, a means for “giving voice” to a collective or a genre of experience, or a way of figuring the swerve that signals the emergence of the individual within language. Voice across poems is both amalgamating and individuating: it distinguishes one poet’s poems from another’s, and the voice of the poet from that of a speaker, while also being something certain poems may have in common. And it can reappear in other contexts, mediums, and genres, linking things that are formally and generically diverse.

Recording technologies have allowed the transient qualities of the voice to solidify and repeat, opening up more literal and textured ways of understanding voice in poems. And these more sensuous and analytic approaches to voice may inflect, in turn, the way we approach the figure of voice in other media, opening up new understandings of prosody, personality, and style. At the same time, the voice can still serve as a way of projecting personhood on an alienated medium, and of connecting objects and mediums through an intuition of personhood. In the moment of generative AI, voice has become newly important in fathoming the social work of writing, as the last boundary that might distinguish the human from the merely algorithmic, or as a literary goal that algorithmic writing might still obtain.

This panel asks what we can learn about voice in this expanded field of cultural production, and how our ideas about voice might be augmented or challenged by the contemporary mediated moment and the history that precedes it. We are interested in how the personable intuition of the voice is stretched or expanded beyond the boundaries of the individual: voices that are plural, collective, hybrid, or nonhuman. But we also wonder about the uses of an individual voice within a moment of digital circulation—of remediation, appropriation, and delegated labor—in which the assertion of personhood might still be an antidote to abstraction and forgetting.

Among others, this panel hopes to address some of the following questions: 

How have poets used various technologies to theorize new ontologies of voice or create sonic personae as their poetry shifts from object to event and back again?
What tensions, assemblages, materialities, sensualities, or ideologies are sustained by asynchronous, algorithmic, or archival forms of communication between a speaking subject and audience?
How do poets negotiate the imagination or utterance of so-called raced and/or gendered voices as both textual and sonic phenomena?
What risks or rewards come with reflexively foregrounding the relationship between media and the voice?
What does a digitally discursive voice look, feel, sound, or act like?