Introduction: Hearing Over

The poet Paul Celan wrote, “The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an Over-against. It seeks it out, speaks toward it” ( Selected 409). Claiming for poems an inherent addressivity—an awareness of the listener or interlocutor, and an anticipation of other voices, minds, or responses—Celan challenges what has become a commonplace contemporary assumption about the genre of poetry (or, more precisely, about the personal lyric, which is often taken as poetry’s default form): that it is private, that it is primarily for and about self-reflection and self-expression. But what if Celan’s became our new model for reading lyric or, indeed, all poetry? How would we think about the poetic speaker or voice, the forms and traditions of poetry, the personal and sociopolitical purposes of poetry, or the ethics of poetic address and of reading practices? What would this new poetry look like—or is it the poetry we’ve known all along? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.