Chris Forhan: A Careful Disorderliness: Being Not Quite In Control of Your Poems (July 2001)

“It is often the hint of disorder in a poem,” Chris Forhan remarks, “that persuades me the poem is getting at the truth”; in this lecture, Forhan examines how that “hint of disorder” can convey complexity of meaning, accommodate uncertainty and what borders on the inexpressible. Focusing on two versions of Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death,” Forhan looks, too, at examples of “careful disorderliness” in poems by Hopkins, Berryman, Stevens and Franz Wright.