The Poetry Magazine Podcast

This week, we return to the little-known world of Margaret Danner with guest editor Srikanth Reddy, historian Liesl Olson, and poet Ed Roberson. Olson and Roberson were the people who first introduced Reddy to Margaret Danner’s poetry. Olson is the Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library, the building where Margaret Danner worked as an editor of Poetry magazine from 1951 to 1956. Rober...

Today we explore the Popol Vuh , the foundational sacred narrative of the K’iche people. This Mayan epic tells the story of creation, the role of the gods in human affairs, and the history of migration and settlement in Central America up to the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. The story of the Popol Vuh is pretty amazing itself. It was passed down from generation to generation for hundr...

This week, Srikanth Reddy talks shit, quite literally, with the poet and translator James Shea. Shea recently co-translated, with Ikuho Amano, a little-known essay by the Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki titled “ Haiku on Shit .” It’s a surprisingly serious, if not a little deadpan, essay about art and reality, beauty and ugliness, and poop and poetry. One favorite that’s shared in the episode is this...

Srikanth Reddy first encountered the complex poetic world of Don Mee Choi as a translator of avant-garde Korean poetry before reading Choi’s own poetry. As a poet, Choi invites readers into her personal history—which is also the history of her father and of war. Even if you haven’t read Choi’s poetry, you’ve probably seen the work of her father—a photojournalist who filmed much of the news footage...

When Srikanth Reddy was reading about Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis’s work as a curator at the Smithsonian, he was surprised to learn about Davis’s interest in ghosts.  Th is week on the podcast, Reddy speaks with Davis about ghosts and “ghost practice,” and about the unusual way Davis ’ s  novel is being haunted by other writers.  They also talk about the Center for Refugee Poetics, founded by Davis wi...

This week, guest editor Srikanth Reddy and poet CM Burroughs dive into the world of Margaret Danner. Danner was a contemporary of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, whom she knew personally, but she never achieved the recognition she deserved in her lifetime. If you look for Danner’s poetry in your local bookstore, you won’t find anything in print. Recently, Burroughs connected with Danner, a p...

When Jay Hopler received a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2017, he was told he had two years to live. He thought, “I have to write a book in twenty-four months.” We’ll hear two poems from that book today. Still Life , out in June from McSweeney’s, is a “violently funny but playfully serious fulfillment of what Arseny Tarkovsky called the fundamental purpose of art: a way to prepare for death, be it...

This week, Suzi F. Garcia sits down with Jennifer Shyue, a translator focusing on contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers. We hear two poems by Julia Wong Kcomt, whose work Shyue has been translating for the past three years. Kcomt was born into a Chinese Peruvian family in 1965, and although Shyue was born in the US decades later, they share many obsessions. Kcomt traveled from an early age...

This week, Suzi F. Garcia speaks with one of her literary sheroes, Ada Limón. They talk about the importance of seeing but also being seen, the complexity of avoiding a trauma-porn poetics, and naps as part of the creative process.  We hear two poems from Limón’s newest book, The Hurting Kind, including “Foaling Season” from the February 2022 issue of Poetry .  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz com...

This week, Suzi F. Garcia had the honor of speaking with Kay Ulanday Barrett, a self-described queer brown Filipinx disabled transgender boi. Barrett is one of the most generous people we have ever encountered, no doubt due to their commitment to care work—which is another way of saying his commitment to collective survival. Their essay “To Hold the Grief & the Growth: On Crip Ecologies” in the Ja...

Today on the podcast: Joy Harjo. Harjo is the nation's first Native American poet laureate and a playwright, musician, author, and editor. Not everyone knows that Harjo also started playing saxophone at the age of forty. Today, we have the pleasure of hearing from her new album, I Pray for My Enemies , which features musicians from some of the biggest bands of the nineties grunge scene—including R...

In today’s episode, Suzi F. Garcia sits down with poet Paul Hlava Ceballos to discuss writing against monoculture. They also dig into the history of banana workers in Ecuador, propaganda, and the art of citation. Ceballos reads from his forthcoming book, banana [ ] , which includes images and a mix of handwritten and typed text. If you’d like to read along while you listen, excerpts of the book-le...

For guest editor Suzi F. Garcia, getting to know Taylor Johnson’s poetry was a highlight of 2021. Garcia says Johnson’s debut book, Inheritance , absolutely blew her away. The book is described as a “black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence.” Fred Moten said about the book: “I’m singing. I’m singing with them, about...

This week, Gabrielle Bates and Jennifer Cheng read from their epistolary exchange, “So We Must Meet Apart,” published in the November 2021 issue of Poetry . Hosted by Su Cho, this conversation unabashedly feels through infertility, what no one tells you about giving birth, our fraught relationships to perfection, the experience of being in a body, and how distance can create even more possibilitie...

This week, a celebration of collaboration. Su Cho had the honor of speaking with poets and scholars Kimberly Blaeser, Molly McGlennen, and Margaret Noodin. They talk about how language is a kind of time travel; it helps us preserve our memories, but also puts us in conversation with our ancestors and larger histories. You’ll hear from their collaborative poem in the November issue of Poetry , writ...

This week, Holly Amos speaks with poet Su Cho. Cho guest edited the magazine and hosted the podcast for the last few months. They talk about loneliness, anger as a secret weapon, and food! It’s all about food really. Cho reveals her love of Cool Whip on white bread, and she makes Amos cry—though those two things are totally unrelated. We hear several poems from The Symmetry of Fish , Cho’s first b...

This week, poet, memoirist, and translator E.J. Koh on the untranslatability of Han. “Han is very difficult for me to define,” Su Cho agrees. “The dictionary definition is ‘an internalized feeling of deep grief, regret, anger, and sorrow, which is felt by all Koreans,’ but this is complicated because what does it mean to define an entire country by its trauma? And how can those of us who feel the...

This week, Gabrielle Calvocoressi talks about their series of “Miss you” poems. The poems exist as a kind of spell or enchantment, a way to create an actual space for the dead to inhabit. We also hear the incredible poem, “My Perimenopausal Body Cistern Disappointing How Surprising.” Gabrielle was nervous to share the poem but read it anyway, and how lucky we are. This conversation holds a lot of...

This week, Su Cho had the honor of speaking with Eugenia Leigh. Cho says reading Leigh’s work changed her: “I was a shy poet, and reading her work emboldened me to say what I needed to say.” They talk about Leigh’s research into attachment theory, the authentic self, healing, hindsight, and how we can accept our past selves. Note: This episode mentions child abuse. Eugenia Leigh reads “My Whole Li...

This week, a conversation on worldbuilding. Su Cho hosts a roundtable of sorts on what it’s like growing up Asian American in white suburbia with poets Marianne Chan and Lisa Low. They also get into armpit hair, sad mom poems, and how motherhood means having a constant audience–whether we want one or not.  Marianne Chan and Lisa Low read poems from the September 2021 issue of Poetry . Hosted by Si...

This week, Fred Sasaki had the very special honor of interviewing his friend and colleague, Ashley M. Jones. Jones guest edited the late spring and summer issues of  Poetry  magazine during a remarkable time in the publication’s history. In this conversation, we hear Jones read from her new book,  Reparations Now!  Sasaki asks, what are reparations and what do they mean? When did that idea materia...

When Ashley M. Jones first heard the poetry of Jacqueline Allen Trimble, Jones says she heard something “Southern, unapologetically Black, fierce, sweet, and strong.” This week, Jones and Trimble talk about Alabama, activism, and the under-recognized power of historically Black colleges and universities in America. You’ll hear Trimble’s poems “This Is Why People Burning Down Fast Food Joints and W...

This week, Ashley M. Jones and JoAnn Balingit talk about where poetry lives in the face of loss and grief, and how that intimate place can be shared. Balingit’s intimate approach to poetry has had to consider a wider audience during her tenure as poet laureate of Delaware. For example, when Balingit received a request from the Philippine embassy to write a poem, she said yes—but not without pause....

This week, Ashley M. Jones speaks with one of the most important mentors in her life: poet and scholar Dr. Donna Aza Weir-Soley. They speak about protest and power, Weir-Soley’s mentor Audre Lorde, and the legacies they inhabit and continue as Black poets writing toward liberation. Weir-Soley met Audre Lorde as a student at Hunter College, and came to run the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center. Tod...

Ashley M. Jones is interested in the way that poetry can bring loved ones back to life. In this week’s episode, Jones sits down with Cathy Linh Che to talk about resurrections on the page. After fleeing Vietnam as refugees, Che’s parents worked as extras on the film  Apocalypse Now.  Jones and Che talk about the revisionist cinematic history of the film, and the uncanny family story which serves a...