Welcome to the third and final episode of Season One of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series podcast. This week, we’ll hear Joshua Beckman give his lecture “Friendship, Porousness, and the Intimate Experience of Poetry.” This lecture was given May 22, 2014, at the Poetry Foundation.

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 Poetry Foundation for partnering with the Series for this event, and thank you for listening. Please stay tuned-and subscribe-for Season Two, coming soon.

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

Music: "I Recall" by Blue Dot Sessions

From the Free Music Archive