Today’s program considers how poetry may serve to identify, comment on, and transcend the varied restrictions placed on us as we work to sustain a civil society and our places in it. Not all of those restrictions are acceptable or palatable. Some of them – beyond the impositions of power, especially political power, that I talked about last time – are quite painful, and the reactions of poets to them are often epiphanic in their lyric expressions. I read poems by Frank O’Hara, Lithuanian poet Marcelijus Martinaitis, Larry Thomas, and Nitoo Das. I end the program with two of my own poems that comment as well on the press of such limitations.