Heather McHugh: The Garden Path: Poems by Gaspara Stampa and Su Tung P’o (July 2011)

In this lecture, Heather McHugh examines the work of two largely unknown poets, Gaspara Stampa and Su Tung P’o.  McHugh conducts close readings of a range of poems by both writers and considers the ghost meanings, or multiple meanings, of the words in the poems; she suggests that this multiplicity allows the poems to work like “garden paths,” taking readers in unexpected directions.