Mary Ruefle's encyclopedic, sagacious, hilarious and humane "28 Short Lectures" include meditations on such subjects as prayer, Shakespeare, Van Morrison, lying, evolution, hypocrisy, and loneliness. This presentation served as the inaugural lecture in the Woodberry Poetry Room's series, "Discursives"—which invites poets to wax Emersonian in the very chapel where Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his provocative Divinity School Address and to speak on subjects within and beyond the bounds of poetry and literature.

For more information, visit hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom.

Date: September 19, 2013, recorded at Emerson Chapel, Harvard Divinity School.