The Poetry Magazine Podcast

This week, Charif Shanahan asks Marie Howe the Big Questions about writing into the unknown, losing oneself in poems, spirituality, the ineffable, teaching and mentorship, and more. Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently  Magdalene  (W.W. Norton, 2017), which imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contempora...

This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from a Ruth Lilly Prize winner who’s worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual sinc...

This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from one of these winners, someone who’s been illuminating a way forward for poetry for over fifty...

On this episode, Lindsay Garbutt speaks with Nam Le, whose debut book, the short story collection The Boat , was translated into fourteen languages and received over a dozen major awards. We hear poems from his much anticipated first poetry collection, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem , out from Knopf this year. The book is incredibly polyvocal, unpredictable, and intimate, yet also politicall...

This week, Holly Amos speaks with KB Brookins, a writer, cultural worker, and artist living in Austin, TX, and the author of the chapbook How to Identify Yourself with a Wound,  as well as the forthcoming full-length collection Freedom House . Brookins talks about the power of insisting on their transness, getting to know the plants in their neighborhood, being a “career Texan,” and more. We also...

This week, Holly Amos speaks with Joanna Klink, who joins us from Austin, Texas. Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields , and she shares some new poems that appear in the February 2023 issue of Poetry . If described directly, the poems feature the mundane, yet they carry a deep sense of unease. Amos states, “The unease is gorgeous, and the gorgeous is uneasy.” S...

This week, Adrian Matejka sits down with poet and guest editor of the magazine, Charif Shanahan, to talk about oneness, the shifting of identity, and centering love. Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Shanahan’s poems meditate on mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. Shanahan shares how a class...

For the month of January, we’re focusing on what keeps us writing. How do we refresh our writing habits and routines? How do poets sustain their writing practices? Today, Holly Amos enlists the help of poets and educators Stefania Gomez and Maggie Queeney. Stefania and Maggie both work in the Poetry Foundation library, and they share some of their inspirations, tips, challenges, and resources. Hol...

For the month of January, we’re focusing on what keeps us writing. How do poets sustain their writing practices? Are there generative tips and tricks we can learn from them? Today, Holly Amos enlists the help of poet, writer, and dancer Tishani Doshi, whose essay in the December 2022 issue of  Poetry  is about shape or concrete poetry. Doshi lives in Tamil Nadu, India, and is joining us today from...

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Diné poet Tacey M. Atsitty. Atsitty’s debut full-length collection, Rain Scald , was published in 2018, and Arthur Sze described the book as filled with a poetry “where rain, expected to be nourishing, is also a torrent, burning with sensation.” Today, we’ll hear two new poems by Atsitty, “Things to Do with a Monster” and “Lady Birds’ Evening Meetings” from the...

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Diamond Forde, who joins us from Asheville, North Carolina, which she describes as a sort of homecoming. One of five recent recipients of the 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body , is described as “an intersectional exploration of the trauma and agency held within a body defined by its potential...

This week, Ashley M. Jones speaks with Marcus Wicker about a project he began early in the pandemic while looking for sources of calm in books and music. Many of these were space-influenced—OutKast’s album  ATLiens , Robert Hayden’s poem “American Journal”—and Wicker began exploring what an extraterrestrial who lands in Atlanta in 2020 would think of America and the way humans treat one another. W...

On this week’s episode, Su Cho speaks with Tariq Luthun, a Palestinian writer and community organizer based in metro Detroit. Luthun is the author of  How the Water Holds Me , out from Bull City Press in 2020, and we hear his poem, “I Want to Die,” from the November 2022 issue of  Poetry . Cho and Luthun delight us with a brief Pokémon sing-along and discuss hiding bad grades as children in the Mi...

This week, Su Cho sits down with Taneum Bambrick to talk about two of her favorite things: poetry and intimacy. Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received , recently out from Copper Canyon Press, and Vantage . Their chapbook, Reservoir , was selected by Ocean Vuong for the Yemassee Chapbook Prize. Vuong wrote, “This is poetry that encompasses, that let's no one turn away.” That’s exactly how C...

This week, Poetry ’s new editor, Adrian Matejka, sits down with Nikky Finney and Ross Gay for a joy-filled conversation about time and how we catalog it with artifacts, heartbeats, and, of course, poems.   Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements, and we’ll hear from her most recent collection, Love Child's Hotbed...

Delve into the life and poetry of one of the chief architects of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, Carolyn Marie Rodgers (1940-2010), with a very special guest: Carolyn’s sister, Nina Rodgers Gordon. Born in Bronzeville, Carolyn Marie Rodgers cofounded Third World Press, which remains the largest independent Black-owned press in the United States. Rodgers’s poetry is widely anthologized, and in...

This week, Esther Belin and Beth Piatote map out some unique qualities of the Navajo and Nez Perce languages. Piatote is a writer, scholar, and member of the Nez Perce nation, and she offers insight into the embodied experience of language revitalization. We hear her poem “1855,” which borrows language from—and interrupts—Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The year 1855 marks both the publication of...

This week, Esther Belin speaks with A. Van Jordan about his forthcoming book,  When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again . The title comes from The Tempest , and the book celebrates Black youth while complicating contemporary understandings of Shakespearian characters and influence. Jordan shares two poems from that forthcoming book: “Airsoft” and “Such Sweet Thunder.” “Airsoft” begins with the epigrap...

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach. Dasbach emigrated to the United States from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. Her scholarly research focuses on contemporary American poetry related to the Holocaust, and pays particular attention to atrocities in the former Soviet territories. Her first book,  The Many Names for Mother , hovers around intergenerat...

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Toni Giselle Stuart, a South African poet, performer, and facilitator. Belin says, “When I first heard Stuart’s poetry, I was moved by her use of sound and breath to create tension and emphasis. She works against fractionating the whole person in ways that offer healing.” We hear two poems by Stuart, “maghrib” and “midnight,” from the July/August 2022 issue of ...

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Allison Akootchook Warden, an interdisciplinary artist from the Alaskan Native village of Kaktovik. They discuss the practice of acknowledging land before events and Warden’s poem “we acknowledge ourselves,” which opens the Land Acknowledgments special issue of Poetry magazine. Warden’s writing process for this poem was incredibly collaborative, involving many m...

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Manny Loley, a Diné poet and storyteller who writes in both the Navajo and English languages. Belin and Loley talk about stories as medicine, the unique poetics of the Navajo language and the meanings and musicality that don’t translate into English, and the importance and industriousness of queer people in Diné creation stories and in the Navajo Nation today. L...

This week, guest editor Esther Belin speaks with poet and scholar Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Although Belin’s and Wesley’s homelands are far from each other—Wesley’s in Liberia and Belin’s in Diné bikéyah of the Navajo people—they share a deep commitment to their roles as storytellers, and their writing bears witness to the effects of war and invasion in their homelands. Wesley, who now lives in Alto...

In our very first mini episode, Esther Belin shares two writing prompts to help propel you to a place that comforts and aligns you back to center. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week, Esther Belin and Orlando White talk about Diné thought and poetics, sound and breath in Diné bizaad, the Navajo language, and what it means, as Indigenous writers, to use the English language as a vessel to integrate tribal concepts. They also discuss one of White’s one-word poems, “Water.” Although the poem is only six letters long, there was barely enough time to unpack its complexity...