Alan Shapiro: On Convention and Self-Expression (July 2015)

Shapiro’s lecture explores the paradoxical ways in which individual expressiveness can arise from and depend on impersonal conventions in such a way that the privacy of inner life is socialized (made available to others) while the conventions themselves are made fresh and new.  Among the poems discussed are works by Ben Jonson, J.V. Cunningham, Philip Larkin, and Natalie Diaz.