Renate Wood: The “Embodiment of the Speaker” (January 1996)

How can the speaker in a poem, “deprived of that prop of the body,” convey the sense of embodiment? “One of the determining factors, which helps create the speaker as a viable presence,” poet Renate Wood argues, “is the poem’s projection of audience.” Through readings of poems by Louise Glück, Cesare Pavese, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, C.K. Williams, and Anne Carson, Wood considers how poets can project and relate to an imagined audience, and in doing so create authority and presence.