Chancellor Conversations: Tracing the Lyric

At the 2015 Poets Forum, the Academy of American Poets annual poetry conference held in New York City, Chancellors Mark Doty, Linda Gregerson, and Jane Hirshfield sat down together to talk about the lyric poem.

Their conversation covers the deep history of the lyric poem, beginning with its possible origins and continuing through the golden age of the sonnet to the present day. Through their discussion, the lyric poem’s history comes alive; as Doty says, “the poet is present in 1856 and 2015. Present for the reader on West 13th Street and the reader in Reykjavik. The poem inscribes an attentive presence in the world, and its act of attention, once launched, does not stop until there are no more readers.”

Hirshfield says, “Writing a lyric, reading a lyric, makes us more capacious and subtle. They trick us into knowing more than we know, feeling more than we knew we felt.”

For more information about the Academy of American Poets, and poets such as Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, and Linda Gregerson, visit www.poets.org.