Kay Gabriel on Addressing Others in Letters

Poet and critic Kay Gabriel has some theses on the epistolary poem. As she explains in The Brooklyn Rail: "The epistolary is an elaborate ruse. I write in the second person, but even if I pose you very interesting questions I'm indulging an excuse to talk about myself—maybe in the anticipation that you care about what I have to say, certain in my knowledge that if you don't I'll get away with it first." We've given you no. 1; here are a couple more:

6. Bernadette Mayer removes the addressee line from her letters in Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. Generalizing her address absolutely, Mayer swaps the gossipy thrill of biography in exchange for (her words) a "plural dream of social life."

7. Mayer thereby literalizes Lacan's aphorism from the seminar on the purloined letter, that "a letter always reaches its destination." For Lacan letter-writing furnishes, mostly, a convenient metaphor: the failure of language to communicate its intended content to its desired target is just language doing the only thing it can do, communicate permissively to anybody who intercepts it. Still, why not take Lacan at his word? It doesn't matter very much, for instance, that Mayer's letters were "written, but never sent." They're already here.

Read more of "The Purloined Lyric" here.