MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES

GRAND NARRATIVES/MODEST PROPOSALS

Twitter Stevens, Tumblr Stevens

April 23 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

What can present-day social media, Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram and those of us whose social lives take place there, learn from the poetry of Wallace Stevens? What can readers and critics of modern poetry—especially readers of Stevens—learn from how we now use social media? The answer turns out to be: a lot; more than you'd think; and in ways specific to Stevens, specific to his unusually quotable, eminently shareable, perhaps notably disembodied, complicated, and (for all their intricacies) emotionally urgent poems.