Marianne Boruch: Heavy Lifting (January 2006)

“Let’s face it,” Marianne Boruch remarks, “a poem matters because it’s about eternal things: death, love, knowledge, time.” Using metaphors of lightness and weight, Boruch asks how poets can lift these heavy subjects and give them new life, how poems can manage “the problem of flying.” To consider this question, she turns to Leonardo Da Vinci’s journals, accounts of the Wright brothers, as well as poems by Adrien Stoutenburg, Robert Hayden, Philip Larkin, John Berryman, and Emily Dickinson.