Mondays at Beinecke - Lyric Thinking: Poetry in the World with Ayesha Ramachandran

Event time: 
Monday, April 10, 2023 - 4:00pm to 4:30pm
Location: 
Online () See map
Event description: 

This presentation will explore the Beinecke Library’s rich holdings in lyric poetry from literary traditions across the world in conjunction with the Model Research Collection on “Lyric Thinking,” currently on view in Bass Library.
Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/3mrr7YD
Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and question and answer beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.
“Lyric Thinking” is a curated collection and a thought experiment. It asks how lyric poetry moves through the world, and investigates the place does it has in our cultural, social, political worlds. All cultures have shortish, first-person poems that reflect an experience of the world—in the West we have come to call this “lyric,” a term that goes back at least to Horace, but that is certainly centered by Petrarch. Is this a term that can be used to describe poems in non-Western languages, in traditions that do not have a name for lyric? Can poems speak to each other and to readers across linguistic divides? Do poems matter in the real world, in the roughness of political struggle and the poignancy of social belonging? These are some of the questions this session will foreground through a range of materials in various languages.
Ayesha Ramachandran, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, is this year’s curator of the Bass Library Model Research Collection (MRC). The MRC is a manifestation of a researcher’s process of investigation of a particular topic expressed physically through a collection of library resources. Materials are selected from the breadth and depth of what is available in the Yale University Library: the curator chooses resources from across the Yale Library system and in a variety of circulating formats.

Admission: 
Free but register in advance
Open To: