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Four Lectures by Lisa Jarnot is the seventh book in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, comprising autobiographical essays that form an intimate, uncompromising, and generous glimpse into a remarkable life in poetry.
Across the lectures, or talks, given between October of 2020 and December of 2021, Jarnot examines what it means to be a woman in a male-centered experimental tradition, to have white privilege, and to write poetry. With colloquial ease and wit, Jarnot investigates the generative tensions at the intersections of traditional and experimental forms, develops relationships between ‘deep gossip’ and ecstatic connectedness, and considers the prophetic tradition in American poetry as inflected through counter-cultural spirituality. Ultimately, Jarnot presents poetry as a calling, asking us to consider the means by which poets can envision a new heaven and a new earth.
“Lisa Jarnot . . . suggests that Language Poetry may be mutating, back to the modernism of Stein and Joyce, having been permanently inflected (or deflected) by a late twentieth-century sharpness and exasperation. . . . These are haunting, perplexing narratives of the inenarrable.” —John Ashbery, Times Literary Supplement
“Her best effects arrive as you zoom headlong right through her high-energy tangle of dissociation . . . in a particle accelerator where connective sense is bombarded by shards of broken grammar. . . .” —Albert Mobilio, Village Voice
“Adjective-noun combinations, such as “offending purple snow suit” and “oaxacan space dog,” are the norm, summoning the childlike enthusiasm and pleasure derived from recontextualizing words and their possible combinations.” – Publishers Weekly on A Princess Magic Presto Spell
Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, NY and educated at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Some Other Kind of Mission (1996), Ring of Fire (2001), Black Dog Songs (2003), Night Scenes (2008), Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (2013) and A Princess Magic Presto Spell (2019). She co-edited An Anthology of New (American) Poets (1997), and her biography of San Francisco poet Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, was published by the University of California Press in 2012. She has been a visiting professor at Naropa University, Brooklyn College, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, holds a Masters of Divinity degree from New York Theological Seminary and is a minister at Safe Haven United Church of Christ.
I: White Men, White Whales, and Whitehead
II: Abandon the Creeping Meatball: An Anarcho-Spiritual Treatise
III: Epistle to the Summer Writing Program (on the Metaphysics of Deep Gossip)
IV: Is That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up?
Selected Bibliography and Works Cited
Acknowledgments