Yanyi – New Growth, or, Uses of Uncertainty (July 2024)

What uses can not understanding, and working with it, have for the reader and writer?  Taking Lyn Hejinian’s “The Rejection of Closure” as a starting point Yanyi’s lecture explores how erasure and rewriting can create works of productive uncertainty: that is, works that both refuse meaning but also excite it, between poetry as the handrail of consciousness and the merits of thinking without a banister.