Maureen McLane
November 15-18, 2021
4:30-6 P.M. CST
Swift Hall, Third Floor Lecture Room*
*The reading on Thursday, November 18th will be livestreamed, with live captioning provided.
More information below.
All lecture attendees must follow the university’s COVID-19 guidelines and safety precautions (https://goforward.uchicago.edu/). People who require social distancing accommodation should contact englishsupport@uchicago.edu
Monday, November 15th, 4:30-6 P.M. CDT
Notational/Poetics: or, Noting, Citing, Gleaning, Itinerary
*followed by an opening reception
Taking wing from Roland Barthes’s meditation on “the minimal act of writing that is Notation,” this talk will ponder the status of “the notational” in and for poetics. Among the writers, thinkers, works, and phenomena discussed: Bashō, Barthes, W. S. Graham, Claudia Rankine; McLane’s notebooks, annotations and poems; haiku, the note, the fragment; circumstance, the surround, the polis.
Wednesday, November 17th, 4:30-6 P.M. CDT
Conditional/Poetics: or, Parameter, Mode, Instrument
Taking wing from Hannah Arendt’s formidable injunction “to think what we are doing,” this talk will explore poems as “things of thought” and as speculative instruments. Among the writers, thinkers, works, and phenomena discussed: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ariana Reines, the ballad “The Wind and Rain”; aeolianism, weather, climate; futurity, contingency, necessity; wind, rain, bones.
Thursday, November 18th, 4:30-6 P.M. CDT
More Anon
A reading of Poems and Divagations, in conversation with Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit.
This event will be livestreamed and live captioned.
Livestream Here:
https://livestream.com/accounts/2831368/events/9923011
Captions are available here:
https://www.streamtext.net/player?event=CFI-UofC2
Maureen N. McLane is the author of seven books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of two monographs on British romantic poetics, an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism (My Poets), and numerous essays on romantic and contemporary literature and culture. Her most recent book is More Anon: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021). She is Professor of English at New York University.
Please contact englishsupport@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.