Framing the Self: Voice, Identity, and the Lyric 'I'

Guest teen writer Wenshu Wang, in this thoughtful, meditative craft essay, reflects on what it means to possess an identity in writing, if identity is linear and stable, and why an understanding of one's identity is especially essential in young writers.

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In contemporary writing culture, especially for emerging poets, the first-person voice is often treated as default. We tend to assume the “I” refers directly to the poet, being personal, autobiographical, candid. In practice, however, the “I” in poetry is rarely unfiltered. More often, it is shaped: constructed to create tone, manage distance, or navigate complexity. This, however, doesn’t make the voice inauthentic. Understanding the “I” as a tool rather than only a mirror is essential to writing poems with nuance. The lyric first person can be a frame and a decision about how the speaker meets the world.

This is hardly a recent idea. In fact, most great poets of the past have explored, in some way, how the self can be stylized. Emily Dickinson’s “I”, for example, is inward and elliptical, often speaking obliquely. Frank O’Hara’s first person is spontaneous and companionable, moving through the everyday with immediacy. In these cases, the poet uses the first person to shape their voice with intention in this disclosure of identity.

Today’s poets also continue to examine this. Jericho Brown, in The Tradition, employs the duplex—a form he invented that melds together the sonnet, ghazal, and blues—to build a voice controlling repetition and variation. The “I” in his poems speaks across experiences of race, queerness, and memory, with each return to a line carries a shift in meaning. This is voice as architecture, its power coming from its ability to move fluidly across layers of identity and emotion. Louise Glück, in Meadowlands, writes through Homeric figures such as Penelope and Odysseus. These voices, reclamations of the “I” and the personal, function as emotionally charged intermediaries rather than the distant myths we know them as. Glück uses them to examine power, betrayal, and restraint, with distance she places between speaker and subject using the self to further the sharpened perspective she creates. Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is written as a letter from a fictionalized version of himself. The voice feels close and vulnerable, but it is also lyrical and highly constructed. Vuong’s “I” is attentive to sound, fragmentation, and silence. It reflects memory as an unstable material. The voice is intimate but layered, never static, and never simplified.

Each of these poets shows that the first person functions as a structural element. It is a position taken by the poem, one that shapes tone, intimacy, and perspective. Whether conversational or distant, singular or composite, the “I” carries weight through the choices that surround it.

For newer poets, understanding this opens space for experimentation. Every use of the first person invites questions. Who is speaking, and to whom? What is shared, and what is held back? How much proximity is created between speaker and reader? What kind of authority or vulnerability does the voice carry? Trying a poem from different points of view can help clarify what the voice is doing and what kind of distance or openness the poem needs.

This kind of attention matters. Discussions around identity and authorship are often shaped by rigid expectations. Writers, especially younger ones, are frequently encouraged to draw from experience. Experience, however, is not always linear or easily explained. The lyric “I” offers a way to better map that complexity, making room for shifts in self-perception and expression across the course of a poem. Recognizing this can change how we approach writing from a personal perspective. A poem may reflect lived experience, but it also frames and filters that experience. It may borrow persona, narrative, or tone to do its work. It may begin in the personal and end somewhere else entirely. In many cases, especially for writers navigating identity within public or institutional spaces, there is pressure to make the self legible. The freedom to construct a voice on your own terms allows for an expansion of agency. 

Poetry works through arrangement, tone, image, rhythm, and voice. The lyric “I” is part of that system. This lyric does not need to be tied down to the stable self to be effective— instead, it should be tuned to what the poem is trying to do.

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