In Ellen Bryant Voigt’s essay, “On Tone,” she opens describing the close relationship poetic tone and poetic meaning have had. Affect is like that kind of poetic tone, except it’s harder to articulate. Sianne Ngai describes the near impossibility for a reader to identify the feeling Bartleby might have in “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” That impossibility, that’s what affect is.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Voigt, Ellen Bryant. The Flexible Lyric. University of Georgia Press, 1999.
In an effort to further expand on the #AffectTheory lens, I’ve written these brief essays to explore what it means to read with this in mind.
In the poetry collections below I’ve noted the usefulness of reading these poems using the #AffectTheory lens. My interest in using #Tags is not to nail down a set reading, or to imply a uniform criticism for each of these collections. Instead, #Tags represent an evolving notion that develops while reading the poetry collections. And conversely, I recognize an emerging sense of how the #Tag speaks to the work. Any one of these books elaborates on the #AffectTheory lens. And my reading of any one of these books further informs what I might understand of the #AffectTheory lens.
While the poetry collections above often fit with several #Tags, I find individual poems often benefit from an intersection of 2-4 #Tags. The poems I’ve listed below are drawn from my lit journal reading practice, as well as notable poems from individual collections that can be found in the above list. By tying individual poems to a tighter set of lenses, I find it offers a more refined reading.