POETICS: Poetry Podcast

Poetry is a solitary practice with a communal spine. The page is quiet. The community around the page does not have to be. This week, as the United States turns 250, we follow that idea across two thousand years. A famous sentence about free speech, written by a woman named Evelyn Beatrice Hall and handed by history to Voltaire. Ovid exiled to the edge of the world for a poem. Dante writing the Di...

Every poetry book you've ever held was shaped twice. Once by the poet, once by the press. Last episode, Ben Rockwood took us into the first half of the second shaping: layout, the work of the page. Today, he widens the lens. What a press is actually looking for in a submission, how to prepare a manuscript so it survives the trip into production, and a page-by-page tour of how a poetry book gets bu...

Available in POETICS Bookstore: Muscle Memory of Love and Disaster, poetry by Tim Mayo If you open this book in the bookstore, open it to "At the Chemo Clinic" –– a powerful elegy that refuses to go quietly as a father accompanies his daughter to the chemo ward, and likens it to a kind of gas station, where nurses "attach the clear plastic hose to her chest and start the pump." In his poem "Self-p...

Ever wondered why a poem feels different on the page than it does in your head? Join Ben Rockwood for a deep dive into the silent art of the layout. From the precise geometry of margins to the philosophy behind font selection, we explore how a press transforms a raw manuscript into a physical work of art. If you've ever wanted to know how an editor actually "builds" a page for poetry, this episode...

Six hundred and fifty years after his death, Petrarch is still teaching us how to navigate a hostile sea. In this rain-paired episode, Tamarah opens A.M. Juster's new translation of the Canzoniere , out this April from Liveright with an introduction by Andrew Frisardi, and finds herself unexpectedly in love with the man who invented the European love sonnet. Three things about the poems. Three sur...

Episode 41: Poetry That Pairs With Bread What do a Brooklyn bakery at dawn, the bones beneath the soil, and a political manifesto have in common? They’re all hiding inside a loaf of bread—at least when poets get their hands on it. This episode, we’re pulling three poems warm from the oven: Richard Levine’s tender portrait of a grandfather whose night shifts fed more than just his family, Margaret...

Five poems walked into a rainstorm. One sat in a hut during a war and thought about dying. One stayed in bed and didn’t apologize. One woke up next to someone and watched the cage break open. One wandered a muddy field looking for arrowheads. And one, the oldest of the bunch, told us what we already knew: into each life, some rain must fall. This episode is for the gray days. The ones where you lo...

Where Literature Meets the Cheese Board Indulge your mind and your palate. This episode pairs timeless works from literary masters—Doyle’s mysteries, Chesterton’s wit, Hall’s bold verse—with the perfect artisanal cheese. Discover Gorgonzola, Pont l’Évêque, Port du Salut, Caprice des Dieux, and the mighty Stilton. It’s the podcast for readers who savor every bite. Subscribe and taste the classics a...

Why does white space on the page make so many poets nervous? In this episode, we explore Amy Wright’s chapbook “Wildlife” and her poetry that trusts silence, embraces the margin, and lets the page breathe. We dig into why some poems pack every line tight while others invite readers into the open spaces. If you’ve ever wondered what a poem leaves unsaid – and why that matters – this one’s for you....

As autumn deepens, we explore four poets who understand that soup is never just soup. Soup is comfort, ritual, and sustenance for the soul. Join us for Pablo Neruda’s Chilean chowder, Carl Sandburg’s working-class honesty, Louis Simpson’s wartime soup, and Joy Harjo’s celebration of the kitchen table where the world begins. Get full access to Bainbridge Island Press at bainbridgeislandpress.substa...

Join us for an intimate hour-long conversation with poet Wally Swist about his powerful new collection, Discovering What to Say . Available Now! https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/discovering-what-to-say What do we choose to say when time becomes precious and every word must count? Written over five years as his spouse, Tevis, lives with Alzheimer’s in care, Swist’s poems don’t dwell on illne...

Join us for an intimate hour-long conversation with poet Wally Swist about his powerful new collection, Discovering What to Say . Available Now! https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/discovering-what-to-say What do we choose to say when time becomes precious and every word must count? Written over five years as his spouse, Tevis, lives with Alzheimer’s in care, Swist’s poems don’t dwell on illne...

In 1957, a bookstore owner got arrested for selling Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'—today, that same poem is assigned reading in high school English class. The Beat poets thought they were destroying the literary establishment with their wild, spontaneous, sexually explicit poetry, but they just ended up becoming the new establishment of American rebellion. It's the most predictable revolution in literary...

We love to celebrate literary rebels like John Keats and Emily Dickinson, but here's the thing—when they were actually being rebellious, critics hated them. Keats got trashed for being a working-class 'cockney poet' while the aristocrats got all the praise, and Dickinson's wild punctuation and syntax? Her first editors basically sanitized all the weirdness out of it to make it 'acceptable.' Turns...

Big thanks to David J. Rothman and Susan Delaney Spear for writing “Learning the Secrets of English Verse” so we can learn about things like Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter, and how it loosely applies to poems we already know! Like Dickinson! (what) Get full access to Bainbridge Island Press at bainbridgeislandpress.substack.com/subscribe

I am cycling through the maternal worry of the Oaklahoma dust bowl with Dr. Benjamin Myers - Through a kitchen window, Lily observes her daughter drawing farms in dirt then burying them, a child's game that mirrors the agricultural devastation outside—but it's not the environmental crisis that keeps this mother awake, it's something deeper she sees forming in her little girl. Get full access to Ba...

Wallace Stevens argues that poetry can no longer coast on tradition—it must construct entirely new stages and become an 'insatiable actor' speaking directly to the modern moment, finding what will suffice when old scripts no longer work. We argue for this, and against this. Join us! Get full access to Bainbridge Island Press at bainbridgeislandpress.substack.com/subscribe

Episode [30]: "Say It" - Jameson Faber Ikejime https://bainbridgeisland.press/products/ikejime What happens when poetry strips away pretense and simply asks us to speak? We explore "Say It" from Jameson Faber's chapbook Ikejime —a collection that transforms everyday moments into poems that "shout within" the reader. Faber's conversational, stripped-down style gardens those "little, commonplace nug...

Get full access to Bainbridge Island Press at bainbridgeislandpress.substack.com/subscribe

Reclaiming lost voices - In this episode, we explore a poem that weaves Greek mythology with the forgotten history of Chinese silk-making. "Persephone's Testimony" transforms the underworld myth into a meditation on cultural appropriation and lost languages. The poem traces how the materials of creation—silk, paper, ink—were once "ours" before being claimed and renamed. Through Persephone's voice,...

Get full access to Bainbridge Island Press at bainbridgeislandpress.substack.com/subscribe

Host Tamarah Rockwood takes listeners on an intimate journey through four powerful poems from "POETICS: water - life & death." This episode explores the profound connections between water, spirituality, and human experience through Greg Jensen's "Holy Water," Eve Epstein's "I left anyway," Dianne Knox's "He knew water," and Ruth K. Hunt's "Prayer, After Her Death." Join us as we dive deep into how...

Exploring Identity Through Poetry In this episode, we explore the lasting impact of adolescent othering through "Native," a powerful poem set in Antilles High School, Puerto Rico. We examine how a casual classroom moment—a teacher's joke about "restless natives"—reverberates through decades, shaping the speaker's understanding of identity and belonging. The poem captures that vulnerable teenage sp...

Let’s explore the contentious literary world of postmodernist poetry. Shall we? The Sentient Flock, In Simpler and Sexier Times is a single poem in 26 sections; each section is a single sentence. It was created using ad hoc semi-collage techniques, picking up words and phrases from John Ashbery, home decorating magazines, philosophical tomes, black metal songs, fundraising pleas, or whatever thoug...

In The Dance of the Emu , Paul Engel transforms the American pastoral landscape into a realm of living mythology, where Summer awakens as a barefoot goddess on beds of clover, Winter adorns herself in diamond moonlight, and a solitary buck navigates desire and solitude under a half-moon's glow. These luminous poems move seamlessly from intimate Sunday fishing holes to cosmic mythologies, from hay...