Abstract
This paper explores self-referentiality in verse autobiography: lifewriting-in-poetry which thematises the poetry-writing-life. It begins with the contention that poiesis (production, making) is redoubled in verse autobiography – producing autobiography and poem, autobiographical-subject and poet-subject. A close reading examines how self-referential comments inhabit language and inscribe the making – and even the unmaking – of subjects in two autobiographies in verse: Alec Choate’s My days were fauve and George Elliott Clarke’s Traverse. Lejeune’s metaphor of poetic autobiography as a ‘Rosetta stone’ helps to foreground the potential of self-referential verse autobiographies – on account of their redoubled poiesis – to yield clues for understanding the tension between referentiality and aesthetic creation. This enables discussion of the interplay between – and affordances of the irony, trope, and intertextual allusions – evident in these texts combining an autobiographical- and a lyrical-‘I’.
Keywords: Autobiography in verse – poetic autobiography – poetic life writing – poeisis – self-referentiality – metapoetic comments – Lejeune – writing
