Close Looking: Ishion Hutchinson on William Blake

Ishion Hutchinson and Leah Mirakhor discuss the poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake’s illustrations of religious and mythological subjects. Taking together Blake’s aesthetic and lyric form, Hutchinson examines how they enact a poetics of contrariness vital to our contemporary moment.

Leah Mirakhor teaches in the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration. Her essays on twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone literature and visual culture have appeared in African American Review, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Bookforum, Artforum, The Yale Review, The James Baldwin Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.