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

This online 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, “Lyric Thinking: Poetry in the World,” currently on view in Bass Library. Register for the Zoom event.

“Lyric Thinking” is a curated collection and a thought experiment. It asks how lyric poetry moves through the world, and investigates its place does in our cultural, social, and 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.

Mondays at Beinecke talks focus on materials from Yale Library collections. The opening presentation at 4 pm is followed by conversation and question and answer from about 4:30 pm until 5 pm.

Ayesha Ramachandran, associate professor of Comparative Literature, is the curator of the 2022-23 Model Research Collection.  The collection 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 Yale University Library: the curator chooses resources from across the Yale Library system and in a variety of circulating formats.