Daisy Fried: Breaking Waves, Brussels Sprouts, Circling Drains, Maypoles, Daisy Chains: Structures for Restlessness and Complication (July 2025)

A lecture about structure: the order in which things happen; the ways we get from beginning to end and the ways that trajectory is disrupted, out of restlessness and complication; the ways a poem—or prose work—might move in and out of sequence, chronology, causality; the way it might invite in throngs of registers, tones, foci, disrupting orderliness and moving flamboyantly against simplicity. Considering poems by Zbigniew Herbert, Pablo Neruda, Francis Ponge, and Harryette Mullen, and excerpts from Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, we’ll consider how, and why, one might insert into one’s work a hunger for breaking free of limitations, an appetite for doing more than one thing at a time, and an understanding that seeing clearly must mean seeing things that are not at all clear?