Avatars of the Speaking "I": Denise Riley's Meditations on Poetry and Identity

Abstract

This paper takes as its point of departure the importance and even urgency of addressing issues of identity and the lyric “I” within contemporary poetry in the UK, which have been matters of concern for a new generation of poets. In Denise Riley’s work, the dialectic between the “I” and the “other,” between poet and community remains largely unresolved. Her poems strive to create a space that shows some cohesion in terms of its apprehension of gender’s centrality to modes of poetic practice, authority and tradition. Throughout this paper, we will try to address the status of the speaking subject, largely a philosophical question that gravitates around the status of the self, and the unfinished conversation between the “I” and its “others,” in a reading of Riley’s important collection Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986-1993, and her Selected Poems (2000) among other works.