Rick Barot: Poems and the Impure (January 2006)

Neruda described the “poetry we are seeking” as “corroded as if by acid…a poetry as impure as a suit or a body.” In this lecture, Rick Barot examines the categories of the pure and impure in poetry, and reflects on how a poem might inhabit the “brilliant threshold between these two energies.” Drawing on examples by Petrarch, Susan Stewart, Marianne Moore and Campbell McGrath, Barot argues that it is precisely their thematic and formal “impurities” that make the best poems what they are.