Linda Gregerson: Poetic Embodiment (January 2005)

“The body’s extraordinary intelligence is nowhere more legible,” Linda Gregerson argues, “than at those junctures where ordinary well-being is disrupted”; in this lecture, Gregerson looks at how poets have written about this disruption to powerful effect.  Drawing on work by Michael Collier, Alan Shapiro, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gregerson considers how the “body-under-assault” can serve as an occasion for new encounters between consciousness and embodiment.