Matthew Olzmann: What You Know of the World Is Wrong: Some Thoughts on the Nature of Surprise (January 2020)

In “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Robert Frost famously wrote, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” This lecture celebrates the necessity of surprise, and also asks what surprise is, how does it actually it work, and why it is important. Olzmann discusses poems by Lucille Clifton and Rilke as well as a story by Tania James to consider surprise from two directions: how it’s created, and how it might then shape a reader’s experience of the work at hand.