Conditional/Poetics: or, Parameter, Mode, Instrument
4:30-6 P.M. CDT
Swift Hall, Third Floor Lecture Room
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.
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.
If you require any assistance in order to participate in this event, please email englishsupport@uchicago.edu