Poetics of Scale

What is a poetics of scale? This talk draws on Mina Gorji’s practice as a poet and literary critic to explore the affordances of lyric to move between multiple scales of perception, experience, and time. Between sound and history, insect and constellation, crystal and volcano, the temporality of a verse line and deep time, how can poetry disrupt and expand the ways in which we understand belonging? At what scale of time, for example, is a person, a wasp, a word or plant — native/ atopic/ extant/ extinct? To examine such questions, Mina Gorji will read from a variety of poems to think about how the experience of lyric listening activates different registers of scale.

Mina Gorji is Associate Professor in English at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Pembroke College.   She has published widely on lyric poetry of the Romantic period, and is co-director of the Centre for John Clare Studies. She is currently completing a book on Listening in and to Romantic Lyric poetry, funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. She has two collections of poetry with Carcanet: Art of Escape (2020), which recently, in translation, won the International Award for Womens’ Writing in Italy (Premio di Scrittura femminile) and Scale (2022) a White Review Book of the Year, and was described in Poetry Review as ‘a gorgeous book of miniatures’ and in the Irish Times as ‘a book of deep sonic attention’.