ABSTRACT
We also had other goals in mind, goals born of our conversations. For instance, despite our generally different training as poet and critic, we found ourselves in surprising agreement over the interpretation of poetry: we both often endeavor to unlock a poem’s meanings by way of its voice or “I.” Moreover, while familiar with the conventional ways of addressing this subject-as a fiction, a mask, or even as the poet herself or himself-we had both come to the conclusion that these notions failed to account for every poem’s construction, and particularly those contemporary poems which explore gender. Poetry had changed, and new poems were demanding a new way to be read. Part of our goal in compiling this anthology, then, came from the desire to address the “new” by examining changes in how poems use “I.” Beginning with our conversations, and furthered by the making of a homemade anthology for a creative writing course, we began to uncover a wealth of poems that defy conventional opinions about voice. Most of these poems, as it turns out, are what we now call “cross-gendered verse.”
