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Dr. Matte Robinson, Department of English, will deliver the 2026 Annual John McKendy Memorial Lecture, entitled, "Uncontained multitudes: the lyric and the poetics of aging" on Thursday, October 29 at 7:00 PM in the Ted Daigle Auditorium.

While the lyric is not narrative in itself, lyric poetry implies stories and has an immense power on the sense of self and our stories precisely because it pulls us out of our narrativised self.

Sacred literature from around the world emphasizes moments of “connectedness”—to the larger world, to a moment, to the spiritual—as transformative (rebirth, enlightenment, oneness) and yet nearly indescribable. Prayer, meditation, or psychedelics are used in attempts to induce them, but the moments themselves cannot be arrived at through the narrative self, and the one who experiences them is not a separate ego. Research in several fields continues to find that moments of dissolution of the narrativized self—connection and/or ego death—are strong predictors for healing from conditions that keep us stuck in unproductive stories.

The lyric is the mode par excellence of how humans have tried to capture these moments. The technology of the lyric—its play with rhythm and sound, its temporality, its repeatability—is what enables us to feel, as Jorge Luis Borges remarked, that we are Sappho or Shakespeare when we read their lyric poetry. Drawing on thinkers such as Jonathan Culler, Karen Barad, and Arthur Frank and considering ancient spiritual practices and interdisciplinary scholarship, Matte Robinson explores the ways in which lyric utterances are crucial to the generativity our stories require and considers the ways in which one might improve one’s lyric literacy.

Dr. Matte Robinson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at STU. A scholar of literary modernism, Robinson has studied occult and religious practices within the modernist period and has worked on numerous annotated scholarly editions of the works of the poet H.D. A member of CIRN, Robinson has worked on several interdisciplinary narrative projects; with Bill Randall he has co-edited and contributed to Things That Matter: Special Objects in our Stories as we Age (UTP 2023) and most recently contributed a chapter, co-authored with Oddgeir Synnes, to the latest volume in Oxford UP’s Explorations in Narrative Psychology series, Storied Complexities of Later Life: Narrative Gerontology Comes of Age (Medeiros et al. 2026).