Eleanor Wilner: Making Waves (January 2014)

Wilner’s lecture considers what wave-watching can tell us about the powers of poetry and the shaping of story, what the physics of wave motion can tell us about the action of imagination, and how what moves us in a poem is connected to how it moves, and whose boat it rocks. Texts discussed include “Saturday, Early April” by William Kloefkorn, Larry Levis’s “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” and Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West.”