Poetry and prose: Bishop, Hopkins, Salgādo, Brooks, Victor, Kapil

Ranging from the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, labelled “prosaic” in the pejorative sense, to the experimental, racialized postlyric poetry in prose of Divya Victor and Bhanu Kapil, this talk sees the journal prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins—a hero of Bishop’s—as, more than poem-prep, a stylistic achievement in its own right. He, too, is an author of lineated verse experimenting with prose sonics—like Gwendolyn Brooks in Maud Martha. We’ll also consider Gāmini Salgādo’s long-neglected memoir The True Paradise, whose poetic explorations anticipate today’s nonfiction.