There are two versions of personal identity that often clash in the artistic process originating in oppression; they destabilize the voice of the “Lyric I". This lecture will raise several questions about the relationship between personal biography and the construction of a lyric speaker, and will explore the notion of a poetics that insists on healing the damage politics does on family; it will discuss what happens when private and public identities become conflated because of politics, and how poetry “acts” on the sense of family as a social microcosm where the battle between political self of the private sense of self takes place.