Oren Izenberg on Allen Grossman ("The Life and Death Kisses")

Close Readings

What do poems require of the persons who make them, in order for those persons to be known in them? Oren Izenberg joins the podcast to talk about that question and a strange and wonderful poem by Allen Grossman that takes it on, "The Life and Death Kisses."

Oren Izenberg is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of a monograph, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton UP, 2012). He is currently completing another book, How to Know Everything, about the philosophical significance of poetry’s engagement with “ordinary” mental actions like believing, desiring, perceiving, remembering, and intending.

Oren's teaching spans the long history of the art (from the Iliad to the poem someone is working on right now). He is the author of many essays on poetry and poetics, which have appeared in a variety of journals and collections (Critical Inquiry, Modernism/modernity, PMLA, Modern Philology, Lana Turner, nonsite, and others). He is a poetry editor at nonsite.org, an online journal of art and ideas. You can follow Oren on Twitter.

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