“But I also wanted there to be enough translated material that people could browse and get a sense of something different that was also accessible.”Ĭreating the collection, Ramachandran experienced the kinds of new insights she hopes her students will find in the research process. “I really wanted people to see, on the shelf, that languages are different, and poems come in many shapes and characters,” she said. Ramachandran selected a mix of works in original languages and works in translation. “I’m curious and I read widely, but a lot of what I found was new to me,” Ramachandran said. Selecting the 1,100 books (plus a handful of audiovisual resources) featured in “Lyric Thinking” was unexpectedly challenging. “When the library approached me about curating the Model Research Collection, I realized that this is actually an interesting problem for undergraduates because it touches on several key questions in the humanities-questions about high and low culture, and about how we access cultural traditions that seem alien from us.” “I have been trying to think about a very old problem in literary study, which is how do we think about poetry in genuinely global terms?” she said. Ramachandran’s scholarship focuses on 16th and 17th century literature and the moment in history that is often described as the beginning of modern lyric poetry. For people who are religious or have some devotional faith, lyric poetry is the backbone of liturgy and ritual incantation.” There’s also a way in which lyric poetry is baked into the quality of our lives. It’s what motivates people to use those poems in weddings and in funerals. “It’s the thing that animates song lyrics and the kinds of poems that people write to each other that are often not great, but are emotionally meaningful. “There’s something very populist about lyric poetry,” Ramachandran said. For Ramachandran, the collection is “a constellation of ideas” and “a set of intellectual tentacles.” One of her goals, she said in an interview, is “to give students a sense of how expansively you can think about something that, when you start out, might seem pretty narrow.”Īs a form, lyric poetry is generally short, has a musical or rhythmic quality, and expresses the poet’s personal emotions and view of the world. Each year’s collection has a different topic, and a different faculty curator. The Model Research Collection was introduced in 2019 to show students how a researcher might draw on library resources to investigate a research topic. Now, with a new online exhibit and three related events in April, she is bringing new perspectives to the collection and the questions it explores.
These questions were a starting point for Ayesha Ramachandran, associate professor of Comparative Literature, when she curated “Lyric Thinking: Poetry in the World,” the 2022-23 Model Research Collection on view in Bass Library this academic year.
“How does lyric poetry move through the world? What place does it have in our cultural, social, political worlds? And why do lyrics-whether understood as literary masterpieces or the words to our favorite songs-continue to touch us in both ‘body and soul’?”
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