Welcome to the second episode of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series podcast. This week, we’ll hear Joshua Beckman give his lecture, “A Talk About Books.” This lecture was given October 16, 2014, at Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room, and was originally called "On the Porous Experience of the Book in Physical and Imagined Space."

To view some of the archival images Beckman refers to in this talk, visit the BWLS blog.

Joshua Beckman’s Bagley Wright lectures attempt to articulate and conjure for the listener the private and shared experiences one can have through reading and listening to poetry. Beckman attends to imaginative reality as well as physical artifacts, including beloved dead poets, friendship as viewed through the lens of reading, the book-object, and his own writing process as seen through ‘the lives of the poems.’

Visit us at our website, www.bagleywrightlectures.org, for more information about Bagley Wright lecturers, as well as links to supplementary materials on each lecturer’s archive page, including selected writings. Thank you to the Woodberry Poetry Room for partnering with the Series for this event, and thank you for listening.

Joshua Beckman's double-book set of collected BWLS lectures, Three Talks and The Lives of the Poems (Wave Books, 2018) is here.

A transcription of the Q&A after Beckman's talk at the Library of Congress is here.

Music: "I Recall" by Blue Dot Sessions

from the Free Music Archive

CC BY NC