Joan Aleshire: The Miner’s Lamp (July 2001)

“We write to understand,” poet Joan Aleshire argues in this lecture, which examines the work of writers who use their writing as a kind of “miner’s lamp,” a way to go deeper into their subject matter and draw something unexpected out of it. Focusing in particular on the fiction of Henry James, Aleshire also considers work by Shakespeare, Rilke, Stanley Kunitz and Louise Glück, tracing how such genuine insight can arise from sustained, close attention to the material at hand.