Marianne Boruch: Is and Was (January 2007)

If meaning, as George Oppen argued, is “the instant of meaning,” then, Marianne Boruch remarks, “that instant, that click, involves time.”  It also, in our representation of it, involves verbs—a whole category of language that “we’ve invented to mime that click.”  In this lecture, Boruch looks at poems by Eavan Boland, William Stafford, and Carl Phillips to consider how poems can manage shifts between the present and past tense as a way to open up into the “potentially infinite.”