Marianne Boruch: The Little Death of the Self (January 2010)

Framed as a response to the contemporary impulse to “kill the ‘I’ in the poem,” Marianne Boruch’s lecture considers the possibilities of the lyric voice. What if, rather than narrowing the poem, the “I” opened it up to a wider perspective? Boruch looks at footage from the Hindenburg disaster and at poems by Perillo, Dickinson, Plath, Frost, Hopkins, and others to demonstrate ways in which the “I” can be both personal and more than personal.