AustLit

'This is less an academic paper than a free-wheeling reflection on my recent practice of creating heteronyms in poetry. In it I discuss issues of identity not in a psychological sense but as the voice of a lyric self/persona/mask through which poets ‘sign’ their poetic insights to readers. These voicing devices are manipulated by the poet, consciously and unconsciously, and by language more comprehensively, to reveal (but also obscure) aspects of the poet’s ‘self’. They are often read as genuine and ‘true’, when they are clearly constructions. A poet may well hide behind such agency. With this much ambiguity in linguistic presence, poetic voice is a teasing and distinctive pathway of knowing, both in the writing process/discovery of poems by the poet and in the interpretive reading of those works by an audience. My own work—and thus my discussion—explores the shifts and ambiguities that take place through the license I receive when writing through heteronyms which reveal (or seem to reveal) personalities and values distinctly different from my own.' (Publication abstract)