Poetry For All

In this episode, our guest Laura Van Prooyen reads "Elegy for My Mother's Mind," a poem that navigates the complexities of memory, loss, and familial relationships. Laura's poem gives us an opportunity to think about the deep sources of poetic inspiration, the revision process, and the power of metaphor. To learn more about Laura's work, check her website . Click here to see the version of the poe...

Joanne and Abram launch the fourth season of Poetry For All with a short discussion about what this podcast is all about and how it relates to all the other great poetry podcasts in the world. This conversation is an excerpt from our virtual visit with the students in Grace Talusan's creative writing workshop at Brandeis University. Grace uses our podcast in her course, and her students have gone...

In this episode, we discuss Denise Levertov's powerful meditation on the horrors of the twentieth century, and how the mystery of the incarnation might provide humanity with some hope. Our close reading of this poem is informed by Eavan Boland's Preface and Anne Dewey and Paul A. Lacey's Afterword in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (New Directions, 2013). To read "On the Mystery of the Inca...

In this episode, we discuss the way in which Matthew Zapruder attends to vivid, specific details to create a sense of wonder, connection, and surprise. To read "Poem for Wisconsin," click here . "Poem for Wisconsin" originally appeared in the collection Sun Bear . Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem on the podcast. For a glimpse of the "Bronze Fonz," click he...

In this episode, we discuss erasure poetry and its power to reveal hidden histories and redacted stories through Tracy K. Smith's erasure of the Declaration of Independence. For the poem (including a reading and discussion of the poem by Tracy Smith), see the Poetry Foundation . For Solmaz Sharif's discussion of the political implications of erasure poetry, see "The Near Transitive Properties of t...

This week, the poet and scholar Stephanie Burt joins us to discuss the extraordinary power of Adrienne Rich. We think through how the spacing and stanzas of a poem can draw out denials and divulgences, while also exploring the life and writing of Rich. Stephanie Burt's excellent book Don't Read Poetry ends with an examination of this poem by Adrienne Rich. The book, which can be found at the link,...

In this episode, poet Rick Barot guides us in our reading of his poem "Cascades 501" from The Galleons, his most recent collection. Rick's insights into how poets engage with place, create juxtapositions, and arrive at insights taught us so much about how poets create their best work. To learn more about Rick Barot, you can visit his website: https://www.rickbarot.com/about/ To learn more about Th...

This week we take a closer look at another autumn poem, this one by Jane Kenyon from her wonderful book Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. Kenyon builds from and transforms the same tradition of the autumn ode we examined last week with John Keats. Thank you to Graywolf Press for permission to read this poem from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems by Jane Kenyon. Click here for the full text of Twi...

To Autumn by John Keats Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, lat...

Elizabeth Bishop was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and "One Art" is certainly one of the greatest villanelles. In this episode, we talk about the poetic form and its constraints. We also draw upon recent scholarship that has revealed a great deal about Elizabeth Bishop's life and work in order to understand the power of poetic constraint. Click here to read "One Art": https:/...

Countee Cullen was a major voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Joined by the renowned cultural critic Gerald Early, we here examine together story of Countee Cullen and the astounding sonnet that opens his main collection of poetry, My Soul's High Song. For more on Countee Cullen , see the Poetry Foundation. Here is the text of the sonnet: Yet Do I Marvel Countee Cullen I doubt not God is good, well-...

In this episode, we read and discuss the influential modernist poet Marianne Moore and her witty, wonderful poem called "Poetry," a classic ars poetica (a poem about writing poetry). This poem has gone through many different editions. We take an earlier, longer version and ask how it participated in the modernist practice of "making it new" in the early 1900s. Marianne Moore was a technical master...

In this episode, Brenda Cárdenas guides us through a reading of "Our Lady of Sorrows," an ekphrastic poem that is inspired by the work of Ana Mendieta. To read more of Brenda Cárdenas's work, click here: https://uwm.edu/english/our-people/cardenas-brenda/ To learn more about Ana Mendieta's work, click here: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/ana-mendieta

In this episode, we discuss a simple, iconic, "sorry-not sorry" poem from the early age of American modernism, which has taken on new life in the age of Twitter and the pandemic. For more on William Carlos Williams , see the Poetry Foundation. See the text of " This is Just to Say " there as well. “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909-1939 , cop...

Robert Hayden was one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. His poems are known for their formal grace and his deep and broad explorations of the African American experience. "Those Winter Sundays" is one of our all-time favorite poems. We hope you enjoy this conversation. For the text of "Those Winter Sundays," click here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-wint...

In this episode, we discuss social poetics, the poetry of witness, and the way poets can speak of the failure of language and the need for silence in the face of trauma. "The worst is not, so long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'" For the text of Langston Hughes's poem "Johannesburg Mines," see here . For more on Langston Hughes, see the Poetry Foundation . For more on social poetics, see Mark...

In this episode, we talk with Vince Sherry about two poems of WWI: Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" and Ivor Gurney's "To His Love." The first poem, a stately beauty, imagines war almost peacefully; the second poem, scarred by combat, speaks back nervously and angrily. We talk through this remarkable set of poems and experiences and examine how a careful use of language conveys their effects. "The So...

In this episode we talk with Christian Wiman about the arc of a book of poetry, the structure of an individual poem, the desire for openness and accessibility, and the surprising shifts from levity to seriousness that take even the writer by surprise. The episode considers how poets construct and organize their poems, and it also touches on differing approaches poets take across their career. Chri...

Wendy Wall joins us to discuss an extraordinary poet whose works went unknown for over three hundred years. Hester Pulter brought together science, religion, poetic traditions and so much more. Her 120 remarkable poems are now available at the award-winning Pulter Project website. In this episode we discuss her work with emblems, her scientific chemistry experiment with flowers, and her wonderment...

Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American poet born in St. Louis and raised in Jerusalem and San Antonio, focuses on the ordinary to observe the extraordinary. Her poetry often speaks of cultural encounters and celebrates different cultures. She is the recipient of many awards and is currently the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate. In this poem, we explore what makes a poem "poetry"...

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review,...

Pied Beauty Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift...

The episode explores Milton's great sonnet spun from the difficulties of middle age and new disappointments. We consider how he pulls consolation from his sense of defeat and near despair. Faced with his coming blindness, he hears the voice of Patience giving him the strength to wait. THE TEXT John Milton, "When I Consider How My Light is Spent" When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my d...

Amanda Gorman became the first poet ever to perform at the Super Bowl on February 7, 2021. In this episode we talk about poetry for the masses, mass media, genres of poetry, spoken word, the visual and the verbal, and the mix of ancient methods with emergent forms. See her poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ejbSCjg2qo See this great article by Virginia Jackson and Meredith Martin about Am...

In this episode, we look at "The Collar"--a famous single-stanza poem, playing with meter, rhythm, and rhyme by the seventeenth-century priest and poet, George Herbert. Here is the poem in full: THE COLLAR I struck the board, and cried, "No more; I will abroad! What? shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free, free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store. Shall I be still in...