Welcome to the fifth episode of Season Eight of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry podcast.

Season Eight is comprised of lectures written and delivered by Rachel Zucker during her tenure as a Bagley Wright Lecturer.

Rachel Zucker’s lectures ask questions about obedience, wrongness, and decorum. Like her poetry, the lectures are borne from a long lineage of female writers and artists who ask What now? What next? and Am I allowed to do this? To break that? Rachel considers the history of Confessional poetry, the ethical consequences of representing real people in art, and the other great medium that has influenced her work—photography—exploring how it taught her to look for, but also question, truth and permission in art.

Today we'll hear "Poetry and Photography," given March 9, 2016, in partnership with Yale University. This talk includes many references to the aesthetics of photographers with whom Zucker identifies or does not identify. As accompaniment to this lecture, we offer the following list–by no means comprehensive–with links to some of these photographers' works.

book review of Robert Frank's The Americans, at Lens Culture

Walker Evans, at artnet

Henri Cartier-Bresson, at the International Center of Photography

Edward Weston, at Weston Gallery

Ansel Adams, at artnet

Roger Fenton's Valley of the Shadow of Death at Public Domain Review

The Dead of Antietam, by Mathew Brady and associates

Robert Capa, at artnet

Dorothea Lange, at MoMA

William Eggleston at Eggleston Art Foundation

Sally Mann

Visit us at our website, www.bagleywrightlectures.org, for more information about Bagley Wright lecturers, as well as links to supplementary materials on each lecturer’s archive page, including selected writings.

Rachel Zucker's book based on her BWLS lectures, The Poetics of Wrongness (Wave Books, 2023), is available here.

Music: "I Recall" by Blue Dot Sessions

from the Free Music Archive

CC BY NC

4.5 Cedar Sigo: "Shadows Crossing: Tones of Voice Continued"

The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry PodcastBy Bagley Wright Lecture Series on PoetryMay 24, 2021