Kaveh Akbar: Sell Your Cleverness and Buy Bewilderment: On the Poetics of Wonder (July 2018)

Akbar’s lecture tracks a certain strand of poetics orbiting a nucleus of wonder–at being, at nature, grief, love, memory, desire, loss. Drawing from works by Marlowe to Wheatley, Sappho to Szymborska, Rumi to Ross Gay, Akbar examines the human project of astonishment through its poetic record through four millennia of ecstatic and bewildered verse.