Eleanor Wilner: The Closeness of Distance, or Narcissus as Seen By the Lake (July 1997)

What is the difference between clinical detachment and aesthetic distance?  How can distance enable closeness and awareness?  How can we overcome cultural myopia to access the kind of distance from ego necessary to poetic vision?  Through readings of poems by Robert Frost and Alan Shapiro, and by showing how and why a poem of hers caught her by surprise, Eleanor Wilner describes and advocates for a distance that enables creative freedom, discovery of inner truth, the “transmutation” of “suffering into art.”