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This event will be recorded

Stephaine Burt: Professor of English, Harvard University

Shipping containers mean industry, design, engineering, and capital, protecting their contents (which could be almost anything) while taking part in intermodal transport, the vital exchanges, and the toxic commerce that creates the modern world. Lyric poems mean feeling, individuality, privacy, and a tradition that’s arguably ancient, or (at the least) a few hundred years old. And yet lyric poems can speak to international shipping, modern design, and life amid global capital, not least by addressing, troping, consciously imitating or simply resembling shipping containers. Containers—as contemporary poets from the United States, New Zealand, and other nations now imply—give us a useful figure for what lyric poems do and for what they fail to do: for how they protect their individual contents, for how they travel, and above all for how they let us repurpose their traveling structures, finding means and ends their first builders and users could never have foreseen. 

Reception & Book Sales
A reception will follow this event at 4:30 p.m. CT. 
Book sales provided courtesy of the University of Minnesota Bookstore, in store or online.

Presented in partnership by the Institute for Advanced Study and the Creative Writing Program through the Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer Series.