On The Metaphysics of Deep Gossip: Bagley Wright Lecture Series

In this memoir and craft talk, Lisa Jarnot reflects on her entanglement in the New York poetry scene over twenty-five years. Beginning with the proposition that deep gossip and urban mindfulness are sacred practices, she explores the places where the New York School’s feminine, marvelous, and tough irreverence opens into a deeper mystery that is passed down as a liturgy of ecstatic connectedness.

The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry supports contemporary poets as they explore in-depth their own thinking on poetry and poetics, and give a series of lectures resulting from these investigations. Lectures are delivered publicly in partnership with institutions and organizations nationwide. Find out more about past, present, and future lecturers, and explore the archive at www.bagleywrightlectures.org.

Charlie Wright, Publisher of Wave Books, established the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry (BWLS) in memory of his late father, the businessman and philanthropist Bagley Wright.

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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, is a Masters of Divinity candidate at New York Theological Seminary, and is a minister at Safe Haven United Church of Christ.