So many of the poems that we read for today are allegories for the act of art-making and meditations on containment and its effects–and often both at the same time. In other words these highly formalist poems also interrogate what it means to be controlled and contained. What it means to stifle emotions and “mourn” successfully. Ultimately, the address how experience is contained when a break-through back into life, as Lowell would put it, seems like it doesn’t provide an appropriate sense of tension.
Choose a poem and read it as a meditation on art and containment. Walk us through the poem. What do you notice that you didn’t before?