This is a test video for a series of video-podcast discussions of poems and of media for my courses this fall. In April, for National Poetry Month, I decided to discuss and then read one of my favourite poems, the sonnet “Fourteen” by Marilyn Hacker. (A blog post here re-types the text of the poem.) There is plenty that I leave out in what I say: the poem is a brilliantly complex and resonant piece of writing, a kind of “presentation piece” as Hacker might have put it. The last line always moves me in ways that are difficult to capture in any formal analysis. And here I don’t really broach the difficult gender-politics that the poem interrogates. I have taught this poem a number of times in first-year lecture courses, introductions to literary studies, so the video is pitched as a kind of introduction to the text.
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 