Sandra Lim – Constraints: A Love Story (January 2022)

Lim’s lecture contemplates how various poets’ skepticisms, or distinct senses of formal and philosophical constraint, actually lead them to meditative expansiveness and expressive precision in the lyric. We will look at how and why the self-conscious labor of positioning certain poetic elements such as image, syntax, lineation, for example, exercises poets in their attempts to convey and explore a range of meanings, (under)feelings, questions, and arguments.