Violence and Voice in Wopko Jensma’s Poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT The imagery of violence, specifically to the face and head, is a recurring motif in Wopko Jensma's poetry. In this article I present a discussion of the poems in which he makes extensive use of such brutal imagery. I describe the development of his use of violence, from its figuration of an ambivalent political symbol to its signification of subjective fragmentation or loss. In doing so I focus on the function of grammatical voice, with its inherent demarcation of agency and subjectivity, as well as its relationship to the less specific meanings of voice in a literary context, in the poems. I argue for a structural connection between textual violence, the power dynamics coded into a text regarding grammatical voice, and its manifestation in the form of a poem's assumed or implied speaker.