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This podcast is for those who already love poetry and for those who know very little about it. In this podcast, we read a poem, discuss it, see what makes it tick, learn how it works, grow from it, and then read it one more time.
Introducing our brand new Poetry For All website: https://poetryforallpod.com! Please visit the new website to learn more about our guests, search for thematic episodes (ranging from Black History Month to the season of autumn), and subscribe to our newsletter.
The podcast Poetry For All is created by Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Oksana Maksymchuk joins us for a reading and discussion of "Tempo," a poem that explores the how war causes us to "whirl with / planets and stars that coil / around our fragile core."
Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, published by University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). And while Still City is Oksana’s first poem in English, she is an accomplished poet in the Ukrainian as well. She is also the co-editor of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry.
In this episode, Monica Ong joins us to discuss "Her Gaze," a visual poem that celebrates the achievements of astronomer Caroline Herschel. "Her Gaze" appears in Planetaria, Ong's new collection that merges archival materials with striking lyric poems.
Monica Ong is the author of two books: Silent Anatomies, which was the winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in 2015; and Planetaria, which will be released in May 2025. Last year, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow. Ong’s visual poetry has been published in many literary magazines and exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world.
To learn more about Ong's work, please visit her website.
To purchase a copy of Planetaria, visit the Proxima Vera website.
Gwendolyn Bennett was a poet, journalist, editor, and activist whose contributions helped to fuel the Harlem Renaissance. In this episode, we read "I Build America," a poem that exposes and critiques the exploitation and suffering of ordinary workers.
To learn more about Gwendolyn Bennett, see Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Gwendolyn Bennett's Selected Writings, edited by Belinda Wheeler and Louis J. Parascandola (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). Thanks to Pennsylvania State University Press for granting us permission to read this poem.
You can also click here to read a brief biography of Bennett.
In this episode, we read and discuss a poem that takes its inspiration from a painting by Andrew Wyeth. The poem provides a meditation on what we perceive and interpret when we look at a painting, and at one another.
In this episode, we offer close readings of poems from Ted Kooser's_ Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison_. Kooser's poems allow us to think about the poem as a social act, as a form of healing, and as a kind of meditation.
To learn more about Ted Kooser, visit his website.
If you like these poems that we discussed in this episode, please read Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001). Thanks to Carnegie Mellon Press for granting us permission to read these poems aloud.
In this episode, we read and discuss Emily Dickinson's poem about the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We discuss Dickinson's innovative syntax, her use of deep pauses, and her meditations on death and grief that create surprising effects in this short lyric.
I went to thank Her
I went to thank Her—
But She Slept—
Her Bed—a funneled Stone—
With Nosegays at the Head and Foot—
That Travellers—had thrown—
Who went to thank Her—
But She Slept—
'Twas Short—to cross the Sea—
To look upon Her like—alive—
But turning back—'twas slow—
Psalm 52 concerns a lying tyrant and God's impending judgment. Mary Sidney, who lived 1561-1621, was an extraordinary writer, editor, and literary patron. Like many talented writers of her time, she translated all the psalms. Here we talk about translation, early modern women's writing, religious engagements with politics, and the power of Psalm 52.
For more on Mary Sidney, see The Poetry Foundation page: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-sidney-herbert
For the Geneva translation of Psalm 52, which Mary Sidney would have known, see here:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2052&version=GNV
For a new collection of English translations of the psalms in the early modern era, see The Psalms in English 1530-1633 (Tudor and Stuart Translations), edited by Hannibal Hamlin.
Psalm 52
translated by Mary Sidney
Tyrant, why swell’st thou thus,
Of mischief vaunting?
Since help from God to us
Is never wanting.
Lewd lies thy tongue contrives,
Loud lies it soundeth;
Sharper than sharpest knives
With lies it woundeth.
Falsehood thy wit approves,
All truth rejected:
Thy will all vices loves,
Virtue neglected.
Not words from cursed thee,
But gulfs are poured;
Gulfs wherein daily be
Good men devoured.
Think’st thou to bear it so?
God shall displace thee;
God shall thee overthrow,
Crush thee, deface thee.
The just shall fearing see
These fearful chances,
And laughing shoot at thee
With scornful glances.
Lo, lo, the wretched wight,
Who God disdaining,
His mischief made his might,
His guard his gaining.
I as an olive tree
Still green shall flourish:
God’s house the soil shall be
My roots to nourish.
My trust in his true love
Truly attending,
Shall never thence remove,
Never see ending.
Thee will I honour still,
Lord, for this justice;
There fix my hopes I will
Where thy saints’ trust is.
Thy saints trust in thy name,
Therein they joy them:
Protected by the same,
Naught can annoy them.
In this episode, Niki Herd joins us to read and discuss an excerpt from The Stuff of Hollywood, a collection in which Herd experiments with a range of forms and procedures to examine the history of violence in America.
To learn more about Niki Herd, you can visit her website.
The Stuff of Hollywood was just published by Copper Canyon Website. Please visit their website to purchase a copy.
Photo credit: Madeline Brenner
In this episode, we closely read Shelley's "Ozymandias," a poem written in a time of revolution and social protest. We focus on the poem's sonnet structure, its engagement with--and critique of--empire, its meditation on the bust of Ramses II, and its afterlife in an episode of _Breaking Bad. _
To learn more about Percy Bysshe Shelley, click here.
Here is the text of the poem:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Photo: Ramses II, British Museum
In this episode, Shankar Vendantam joins us to read and discuss "Musee des Beaux Arts," a poem that explores the ways in which humans become indifferent to the suffering of others.
To learn more about Shankar Vendantam and the Hidden Brain podcast, visit his website.
To read Auden's poem, click here.
Thanks to Curtis Brown Ltd. for granting us permission to read this poem.
In this episode, we read and discuss Jericho Brown's "Duplex," a poetic form that he created in order to explore the complexities of family, violence, and desire.
This is one of several duplex poems that you can find in The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem.
To learn more about Jericho Brown, visit his website.
To learn more about the duplex form, you can read Brown's essay on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog. We also love Jericho Brown's interview with Michael Dumanis in the Bennington Review.
Cover art: Lauren “Ralphi” Burgess. To learn more about her work, visit her website.
Poetry engages in conversation. Today, we explore a long, beautiful, narrative poem weaving together the work of fellow poets while looking carefully at a Caravaggio painting, all reflecting on illness, death, and friendship.
For the poem, see here: https://www.nereview.com/vol-40-no-1-2019/the-conversion-of-paul/
For Grotz's incredible book, Still Falling, see Graywolf Press here: https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/still-falling
“Still Falling is an undeniably gorgeous book of love poems full of grief. In these pages, Jennifer Grotz writes line after line of direct statement in rhythms that would leave any reader breathless and wanting more. . . . I am in awe of Grotz’s power to grow and transform book after book. I cannot read Still Falling without crying.”—Jericho Brown
For the Caravaggio painting, The Conversion on the Way to Damascus, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_on_the_Way_to_Damascus
For more episodes on ekphrasis, please see our website and keywords here:
https://poetryforallpod.com/episodes/
Thanks to Graywolf Press for permission to read this poem on the podcast. Jennifer Grotz's "The Conversation of Paul" was published in her collection titled Still Falling (Graywolf, 2023).
In this episode, we read and discuss Philip Levine's most famous poem, "What Work Is." We consider his deft use of the second-person perspective, the sociability and narrative energy of his poetry, and his deep concern for the insecurity that defines the lives of so working-class laborers.
Click here to read "What Work Is": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52173/what-work-is
Photo credit: Geoffrey Berliner
"What Work Is" was published in What Work Is (Knopf, 1991). Thanks to Penguin Random House for granting us permission to read this poem.
What is a good life, and how do we make sense of the world when it seems like society is collapsing? In this episode, Lucas Bender joins us once again to discuss the work of Du Fu (712-770 C.E.), the great Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. Luke helps us to see how Du Fu’s “Passing the Night by White Sands Post Station” can be read in multiple ways depending on how one translates each word of the poem. In doing so, he reveals the poem’s concerns with aging, disappointment, and the possibility of hope in difficult times.
Click here to learn more about Du Fu.
Lucas Bender is the author of Du Fu Transforms: Tradition and Ethics amid Societal Collapse (Harvard University Press, 2021).
To learn more about Luke Bender, visit his website.
Cover art: Wang Hui, Ten Thousand Li up the Yangtze River, Qing Dynasty. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
This remarkable sonnet dives into issues of poverty, poetry, and grief. We talk about the pedagogy of constraint, while exploring the achievements, including the hardbitten gratitude, embedded in this poem.
Thank you to Graywolf Press for permission to read and discuss the poem. Diane Seuss's "[The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do]" was published in her collection titled frank: sonnets (Graywolf, 2021).
See the work (and buy it!) here: https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/frank-sonnets
For more on Diane Seuss, see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/diane-seuss
For more on the Sealey Challenge, see here: https://www.thesealeychallenge.com/
In this episode, Professor Stephanie Kirk guides our reading of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz’s “Sonnet 189.” Her scholarly insights help us to appreciate the nuances of Sor Juana’s poetry and her importance in her own lifetime and beyond.
Professor Kirk read Edith Grossman's translation of "Sonnet 189" from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works. Copyright (c) 2014 by Edith Grossman. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
To learn more about Stephanie Kirk’s scholarship, you can click here.
Cover image: Miguel Cabrera, posthumous portrait of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, 1750. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City, Mexico. Public domain.
We're interrupting your summer this week with a few exciting updates about Poetry For All and an excerpt from Abram Van Engen's newly released book, Word Made Fresh.
If you want to join Abram for a book launch online on July 9 at 4pm Eastern, register for free by clicking this link.
And if you want a free subscription to Image Journal, which is an incredible faith and arts magazine, check out this offer here by clicking this link.
You can see the book here: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802883605/word-made-fresh/
Or at Amazon: https://a.co/d/0j5d3utJ
If you read it, leave a review!
Thanks for listening.
Links:
In this episode, we read one of Victoria Chang’s moving poems from her collection OBIT, and discuss how the poem explores the interplay between life, death, grieving, and memory as the poet tries to process her mother’s passing.
Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem, which was originally published in OBIT.
Victoria’s newest collection of poems, With My Back to the World,was inspired by the work of Agnes Martin and published earlier this year.
To learn more about Victoria Chang, visit her website.
This episode dives into the wonderful world of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the musicality of his language, and the vision he has of becoming what we already are.
This poem illustrates the cover of Abram Van Engen's new book, Word Made Fresh. The book explores connections between poetry and faith, and it serves as an invitation to reading poetry of all kinds--with tools and tips for how to get started and explore broadly.
Special thanks to John Hendrix for the cover illustration of Word Made Fresh, which is an illustration of "As Kingfishers Catch Fire."
Here is the poem by Hopkins:
As Kingfishers Catch Fire
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
See the poem at the Poetry Foundation.
For more on Hopkins, see here.
The last chapter of Word Made Fresh dwells at length on this poem by Hopkins as an expression of what poetry does and can do in the world.
Links:
In this episode, Lauren Camp joins us to read and discuss "Inner Planets," a poem that she wrote during her time as the astronomer in residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She describes her poetic process and the value of solitude in a place full of wonderment.
To learn more about the Grand Canyon Astronomer in Residence program, click here.
To learn more about Lauren Camp, visit her website.
Lauren's newest collection, In Old Sky, is a collection of the poems that were inspired by the Grand Canyon.
Our first live performance of the podcast, featuring Marilyn Nelson and a discussion or her amazing poem "How I Discovered Poetry."
On January 31, we met at Calvin University for its January Series and spoke with Marilyn Nelson about poetry and her work for a live audience.
For more on Marilyn Nelson, visit her website or The Poetry Foundation.
This poem is the title poem of an extraordinary book called How I Discovered Poetry
It was originally published in The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems
Thank you to LSU Press for permission to read and discussion this poem on our podcast.
We share some news about a new website at poetryforallpod.com and a live event next week!
In the first episode of 2024, we read one of the great poets of the past century, W.S. Merwin, and his address to the new year, considering his attentiveness, his style, and his wondrous mood and mode of contemplation and surprise. Picking up on the "radical hope" we discussed in Dimitrov's "Winter Solstice," we turn to Merwin's sense of what is untouched but still possible as he greets the new year.
In this episode, we quote a few pieces from The New Yorker. Here they are, plus a few other resources.
"The Aesthetic Insight of W.S. Merwin" by Dan Chiasson
"The Final Prophecy of W.S. Merwin" by Dan Chiasson
"The Palm Trees and Poetry of W.S. Merwin" by Casey Cep
"When You Go Away: Remembering W.S. Merwin" by Kevin Young
See also The Poetry Foundation.
The poem originally appeared in Present Company (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Thanks to the Wylie Agency for granting us permission to read this poem on the episode.
In this episode, we read and discuss a poem that provides a powerful meditation on the longest night of the year.
To learn more about Alex Dimitrov, please visit his website.
Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem from Love and Other Poems.
During our conversation, we briefly allude to "Love," Dimitrov's wonderful poem that he continues to write each day. To read the original poem, you can check the American Poetry Review; and to read Dimitrov's additional lines on Twitter, you can follow him at @apoemcalledlove on Twitter.
In our discussion of "The Priest Questions the Lava," Katy describes the sentience of the natural world, her erasure of documentary texts, her interest in visual poetry, and the importance of poems that examine ethical and spiritual questions in an era of climate change.
To see Katy's erasure, click on the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature.
Visit the Tupelo Press website to purchase a copy of Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland.
The website includes a lesson plan for those who might want to introduce Katy's poetry into the classroom.
In this episode, Lucas Bender guides us through his translation of Du Fu's "Facing Snow," one of the most famous poems in the Chinese language.
To learn more about Du Fu's life, work, and cultural significance, please see Lucas Bender's Du Fu Transforms: Tradition and Ethics amid Societal Collapse (Harvard University Press, 2021).
In episode 64, we talk about Shakespeare's sonnet 29, a poem about comparison and competition, leading the poet almost to despise himself before, by chance, he remembers his dear friend and is lifted by the deep joy of that relationship.
We link our discussion to present-day concerns about social media, the Surgeon General's warning about an epidemic of loneliness in this country, and a long-term Harvard study of happiness. Links below.
Here is the poem:
Sonnet 29
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Links to the Surgeon General's Warning about Social Media
Various Links on the Harvard Happiness Study
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/harvard-happiness-study-relationships/672753/
Links:
Poet and translator Haleh Liza Gafori joins us to closely read and discuss a poem by Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207-1273 CE), one of the greatest of all Sufi poets. We discuss the poetic constraints of the ghazal form, Rumi's encounters with the divine, and the significance of his friendship with Shams, a man who transformed his life and poetic practice.
Haleh Liza Gafori's translations of Rumi's poetry appear in Gold (NYRB Press, 2022).
You can learn more about her work as a vocalist, poet, translator and performer here.
To learn more about Rumi, visit the Poetry Foundation website.
Cover photo from The Walters Art Museum
What makes haiku "the perfect poetic form"? This episode reads three wonderful haiku by Kobayashi Issa and explores what makes them so moving and fun.
We use the beautiful translations of award-winning poet Robert Haas in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. To see these haiku and others online, visit The Poetry Foundation here.
To see (and purchase) the book, see HarperCollins here.
Thank you to HarperCollins for permission to read these translations on our podcast.
For more on Kobayashi Issa, visit the Poetry Foundation here.
With her quality of attention and focus on vivid, specific images, Ada Limón brings us to a moment of surprising insight in "The Raincoat."
"The Raincoat" appears in Ada Limón's book The Carrying by Milkweed Editions. Thank you to Milkweed Editions for permission to read the poem on this podcast.
You can find the "The Raincoat" on the Poetry Foundation website.
To learn more about Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, visit the Library of Congress website.
Ada Limón's author website includes information about her six books of poetry as well as interviews, press releases, and her calendar of events.
Photo credit: Shawn Miller, Library of Congress
In this episode, we explore the poetry of joy in a world of shade and death, looking to sounds and repetitions while examining how "From Blossoms" speaks back to the poem that immediately precedes it in Lee's great book Rose.
For more on Li-Young Lee, see The Poetry Foundation here.
Thanks to BOA Editions for granting us permission to read Li-Young Lee's work on our podcast. "From Blossoms" and "The Weight of Sweetness" originally appeared in Rose (BOA Editions, 1986).
In this episode, we read the elegy of Chidiock Tichborne, written the night before his execution, and contemplate the power of repetitions, the balanced precision of a man facing his end, and the drumbeat of monosyllables that takes his imagination beyond the moment of his death.
Tichborne's Elegy
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain:
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green,
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seen:
My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death, and found it in my womb,
I looked for life, and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth, and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
The glass is full, and now the glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
For more on Tichborne, see The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/chidiock-tichborne
See also all the related content at The Poetry Foundation
In this episode, we are delighted to have Richie Hofmann as our guest. Richie Hofmann is the author of two collections: Second Empire and A Hundred Lovers. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, and many other literary magazines, and he is the recipient of Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships.
To learn more about Richie, visit his website.
To learn more about Richie Hofmann's poetry and process, read Jesse Nathan's interview with Richie Hoffman in McSweeney's.
Richie Hofmann photo credit: Marcus Jackson
She called herself Vincent, she smoked cigarettes, and she wore shimmery golden evening gowns when she read her poetry to sold-out crowds. Edna St. Vincent Millay was the emblem of the "New Woman" and one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century...but in years after her death, her literary reputation suffered, and only recently have critics and historians revisited and properly celebrated her work.
In this episode, we focus on a sonnet that showcases the ways in which Millay approached desire and eros in her poetry.
To learn more about Edna St. Vincent Millay and her life and times, take a look Burning Candles: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, an informative documentary available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9ItdEiBR-o&t=2901s
Here is the poem:
She had forgotten how the August night
Was level as a lake beneath the moon,
In which she swam a little, losing sight
Of shore; and how the boy, who was at noon
Simple enough, not different from the rest,
Wore now a pleasant mystery as he went,
Which seemed to her an honest enough test
Whether she loved him, and she was content.
So loud, so loud the million crickets’ choir. . .
So sweet the night, so long-drawn-out and late. . .
And if the man were not her spirit’s mate,
Why was her body sluggish with desire?
Stark on the open field the moonlight fell,
But the oak tree’s shadow was deep and black and
secret as a well.
We so admire the podcast Poem Talk. In this episode, Al Filreis, Elisa New, Jane Malcolm, and Sophia DuRose offer a close reading of two more poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/155947/biologically-speaking-a-discussion-of-love-is-not-all-and-i-shall-forget-you-presently-by-edna-st-vincent-millay
photo by Carl Van Vechten
Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was one of the longest-reigning monarchs in all of British history, but she was also a gifted poet. In this episode, we discuss "On Monsieur's Departure," a poem that is inspired by Petrarchan conventions and gives insight into the public and private selves of a powerful queen.
(For the text of the poem, scroll to the bottom.)
In this episode, we attempt to describe the magnificence of some of Queen Elizabeth's portraiture. To learn more, visit the National Portrait Gallery of London:
To learn more about Petrarch and his poems that were such an enormous influence on English poets of the sixteenth century, please read this book, which provides Petrarch's original poems in Italian and Robert Durling's stunning translations into English.
To learn more about what it meant to "fashion a self" in the Renaissance, see Stephen Greenblatt's foundational work on this idea .
On Monsieur’s Departure
BY QUEEN ELIZABETH I
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.
Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.
In this episode, we discuss Kay Ryan's "Crib," a brief poem that begins with an interest in the deep archaeology of language and shifts to a powerful meditation on theft, innocence, and guilt.
"Crib" appears in The Best of It © 2010 by Kay Ryan. Used by permissions of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
For more on Kay Ryan and her work, you can visit the Poetry Foundation website.
Our favorite interview with Kay Ryan appears in the Paris Review.
This week, Joanne and Abram take a break to write a grant for the podcast. We very much hope you enjoy Poetry For All. And if you do, please leave us a review, share it with a friend, and let us know! Thank you all for listening.
In this episode, we talk with David Baker about "To Autumn" by Carl Phillips, exploring the way Phillips masterfully achieves a sense of intimacy and restlessness in a lyric ode that tosses between two parts while incorporating the sonnet tradition.
For more on Carl Phillips, please visit the Poetry Foundation.
For more on David Baker, please visit the Poetry Foundation.
"To Autumn" has been read from Carl Phillips' latest book of poetry, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
The latest book by Carl Phillips is a collection of essays called My Trade Is Mystery. Purchase at Yale University Press or Amazon or wherever you get your books.
In this episode, we focus on the life and work of Carter Revard, an Osage poet whose medieval scholarship informs the structure of "What the Eagle Fan Says." Jessica Rosenfeld, a professor of medieval literature at Washington University in St. Louis, joins us for this discussion.
Carter Revard was a prolific poet and scholar. To learn more about his work, click here.
"What the Eagle Fan Says" was published in How the Songs Came Down (Salt Publishing, 2005).
To learn more about accentual verse, read this brief treatment by poet Dana Gioia.
This sonnet reflects on the autumn of life and an intimate love, and it turns on that love growing stronger in and through its age, even as the body decays.
To learn more about Shakespeare's sonnets, visit Folger Shakespeare page.
Our favorite editions of Shakespeare's sonnets are edited by Colin Burrow and Stephen Booth.
Sir Patrick Stewart's reading of Sonnet 73 is one of our favorites.
In this episode, we discuss how Rafael Campo, a practicing physician, uses blank verse to explore the experience of illness and suffering.
Thanks to the Georges Borchardt, Inc. for granting us permission to read this poem. You can find "Primary Care" in Alternative Medicine (Duke University Press, 2013).
Links:
In this episode, we closely read Lisel Mueller's "When I am Asked" in order to better understand grief as a deep source of artistic expression. We look at language as a source of connection and hope, even in the midst of sorrow and solitude. With this poem about the making of poetry (an_ ars poetica_), we come to see how one artist turned to the intricacies of language in the face of a nature that seemed indifferent to her loss.
"When I Am Asked" appears in Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, published by Louisiana State University Press (1996). Thanks to LSU Press for granting us permission to read this poem on the podcast.
For the text of the poem, click here: "When I Am Asked"
Note: When out of copyright, we reproduce the text of the poem ourselves. When still in copyright, we link to the text of the poem elsewhere.
For more on Lisel Mueller, see the Poetry Foundation.
In this episode, we examine The Golden Shovel form and discuss the idea of "survivance" through the work of Muscogee (Creek) poet Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States.
You can find the text of "An American Sunrise" here, though this is an earlier version of the poem. The final version appears in her finished book of the same title, which you can find here.
For an introduction to The Golden Shovel form, see here.
Links:
In this episode, Christopher Hanlon joins us to discuss an excerpt from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. We discuss the poem's prophetic voice, its patterns of repetition, the connective tissue that binds his ideas and invites readers in, and the cultural context in which Whitman produced his work.
To read the text of this poem, click here or see below:
To learn more about Walt Whitman and his work, visit the Walt Whitman Archive, a magnificent compendium of information about Whitman's life, cultural context, and editions of Leaves of Grass.
To learn more about scholar Christopher Hanlon, click here.
Text from Leaves of Grass:
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was one of the most powerful poets of the twentieth century. This joyful poem caps a sequence of sixteen poems called "some jesus," which walks through biblical characters (beginning with Adam and Eve) and ends on four poems for Holy Week and Easter. She wrote other poems on the Bible as well, including "john" and "my dream about the second coming," which reimagine a way into biblical characters to make their stories fresh.
Clifton wrote from the perspective of a Black woman and many of her most famous poems address race and gender. Clear-eyed about struggles and hardships, insistent in her calls for justice and equality, Clifton's poetry carries a consistent joy and hope, which is apparent (and abundant) in "spring song."
Clifton's poetry was known for its lean style, paring everything down to its essential elements. In addition to award-winning collections of poetry, Clifton also wrote sixteen books for children (and had six children herself).
For the text of "spring song," and for a recording of Lucille Clifton reading it, see The Poetry Foundation.
For more on Lucille Clifton see her biography at The Poetry Foundation.
For an introduction to Lucille Clifton, see the poem sampler "Lucille Clifton 101" by Benjamin Voigt.
Links:
We’re sharing a special preview of a podcast we’ve been enjoying, Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, from Pushkin Industries. Talk Easy is a weekly interview podcast, where writer Sam Fragoso invites actors, writers, activists, and musicians to come to the table and speak from the heart in ways you probably haven't heard from them before. Driven by curiosity, he’s had revealing conversations with everyone from George Saunders and Cate Blanchett to Ocean Vuong and Gloria Steinem. In this preview, Sam talks with poet Claudia Rankine about her book Just Us: An American Conversation, how history remains present for black people, and why we must repeatedly unpack what privilege looks and sounds like in America. You can listen to Talk Easy at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/tepoetryforall.
Links:
In this episode, we look at Ben Jonson's elegy for his son who died of the plague at the age of 7. This poem is so brief, and yet, it manages to cross a lot of emotional terrain as Jonson struggles to understand the profundity of his loss.
Here is the poem:
On my First Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
To learn more about the magnificent Ben Jonson, check this page on the British Library website.
To learn more about couplets, epigrams, elegies, and apostrophes, click this page on the Academy of American Poets website.
In this episode, Ann Hudson joins us to read her poem “Soap” and discuss how its narrative structure allows her to explore the history of science, technology, and our notions of progress and beauty, even when those notions do great harm to ordinary workers.
Ann is the author of two collections of poetry: The Armillary Sphere, which was selected by Mary Kinzie as the winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and published by Ohio University Press; and Glow, published by Next Page Press. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, North American Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, and The Seattle Review. Ann is senior editor for RHINO.
To learn more about Ann's work, please visit her website.
In this episode, Margaret Noodin joins us to discuss her poem "What the Peepers Say." In our conversation, we talk about Margaret's writing in both Anishinaabemowin and English, her attention to sounds and rhythms, and what the peeper--a tiny springtime frog--can teach us about presence and listening.
Margaret Noodin is the author of two bilingual collections of poetry in both Anishinaabemowin and English: Weweni and What the Chickadee Knows. She is a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she also serves as director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education.
To learn more about Ahishinaabemowin, visit ojibwe.net.
To hear the sound of the spring peeper, click on this link.
Photo of Margaret Noodin © Troye Fox.
To read Hayden's poem, click here.
Thanks to W.W. Norton & Company for granting us permission to read this poem. Reginald Dwayne Betts's introduction to the Collected Poems of Robert Hayden is very moving, as is the afterword by Arnold Rampersad.
For a series of insightful observations about Hayden's sonnet, see Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Patrick Rosal, and Ira Sadoff, "Poets Respond: A Discussion of "Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden." American Poetry Review, 38.3 (2009): 25-28.
For a helpful close reading of the poem, see Fred M. Fetrow, "Robert Hayden's 'Frederick Douglass': Form and Meaning in a Modern Sonnet." CLA Journal 17.1 (September 1973): 78-84.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a prolific writer and activist of the nineteenth century. In this episode, Professor Janaka Bowman Lewis joins us to discuss her power, influence, voice, and work. "Learning to Read" foregrounds the ballad style in a narrative poem designed to keep alive the memories of fighting for both literacy and liberation.
For the full text of the poem, see here: "Learning to Read"
Janaka Bowman Lewis is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina--Charlotte, and she includes a chapter on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Freedom Narratives of African American Women: A Study of 19th Century Writings.
For a good recent article about this poem by Madeline Zehnder, see Commonplace.
For more on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, see the Poetry Foundation.
For good resources on F.E.W. Harper, especially materials related to the recovery and teaching of her first book of poems, Forest Leaves, see the Just Teach One archive at Commonplace.
For the best collection of Harper's work, see Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader
For further reading, see Harper's most famous novel, Iola Leroy.
Links:
In this episode, we provide a close reading of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, which allows us to consider the poem's definition of a love that is enduring. In addition, though, we consider a reading of the poem which foregrounds a disappointed poetic speaker who can see the love's transience, too.
For the text of this poem, click here.
Colin Burrow and Stephen Booth's editions of Shakespeare's sonnets are essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about this amazing sonnet sequence.
During the pandemic, Sir Patrick Stewart has read one Shakespeare sonnet each day and share it on YouTube. To hear him read Sonnet 116 and so many others, click here.
This week, Rafia Zafar joins us to discuss "We Wear the Mask" by the great poet and writer Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). Rafia leads us in a discussion of Dunbar's fame and influence while opening up broader themes of African American history and literature.
We Wear the Mask
BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
For more on Paul Laurence Dunbar, visit The Poetry Foundation.
For more on Rafia Zafar, see her personal website at Washington University in St. Louis.
Youtube has a brief clip from the Library of America hosting Kevin Young's discussion of "We Wear the Mask."
Elizabeth Alexander also discusses this poem for the Library of America.
For more on the poetic form of the rondeau, see the Academy of American Poets.
Links:
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 poem that appeared in Prairie Schooner.
Our two favorite books on elegy are Jahan Ramazani's Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney and Peter Sacks's The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats.
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 on to create their own podcasts that focus on close readings of poems. If you want more information on how to use our podcast in the classroom, please reach out to us via Facebook, Twitter, or our gmail account (poetryforall2020).
For more on Grace Talusan and her excellent work, please see here.
Links:
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 Incarnation," click here.
To read Levertov's essay "Some Notes on Organic Form," click here.
''On the Mystery of the Incarnation'' by Denise Levertov comes from her book A DOOR IN THE HIVE, copyright ©1989 by Denise Levertov. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Photo of Denise Levertov © David Geier. For more information see National Portrait Gallery at The Smithsonian Institution: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2011.103
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 here.
To see how the Milwaukee Art Museum opens its wings, watch this time-lapse video.
For a sense of the "many moods" of Lake Michigan, see the photography of the wonderful Jin Lee.
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 the Political and Poetical: Erasure": https://thevolta.org/ewc28-ssharif-p1.html
See also "Erasure in Three Acts" by Muriel Leung.
For more on Tracy K. Smith, see The Library of Congress.
For a look at the various drafts of the Declaration of Independence, visit this page on the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffdec.html
Thanks to Graywolf Press for granting us permission to read this poem, which appears in Wade in the Water (2018).
Thanks to Harvard University and photographer Stephanie Mitchell for granting us permission to reproduce Tracy Smith's photo.
Links:
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, offers an introduction to reading poems and different ways of approaching them.
For the text of the poem, see here.
For more on Adrienne Rich, please see the Poetry Foundation.
For more on Stephanie Burt, please see the Poetry Foundation.
Photograph of Adrienne Rich by Robert Giard.
Links:
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 The Galleons, you can visit the Milkweed Editions website:
https://milkweed.org/book/the-galleons
To read "Cascade 501," visit the Academy of American Poets website:
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 Twilight: After Haying.
See the Poetry Foundation for more on Jane Kenyon.
Links:
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, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
For more on John Keats, see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats
Further Resources:
Keats's Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives, ed. Brian Rejack and Michael Theune:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/keatss-negative-capability-9781786941817?cc=us&lang=en&
Keats Letters Project:
https://keatslettersproject.com/
Anahid Nersessian, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo77573957.html
Links:
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://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art
For more about Elizabeth Bishop's life and the cultural context that informed her work, read Megan Marshall's Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast.
To learn more about the correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, read Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.
“One Art” from POEMS by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher's Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
For the main collection of Countee Cullen's poetry, edited by Gerald Early, see My Soul's High Song.
Links:
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 with widespread influence who was at the very center of American modernism -- friends with William Carlos Williams (see episode 25), Ezra Pound, H.D., and many others, as well as a mentor to Elizabeth Bishop (who we'll have an episode on soon!). An ardent Presbyterian who wore a cape and tri-cornered hat and who carefully curated her public image, Marianne Moore became a sought-after celebrity in her own day.
For more on Marianne Moore, see the Poetry Foundation.
For the text of "Poetry," see here.
Links:
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:
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, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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-winter-sundays
For more about Robert Hayden, click here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-hayden
We love Reginald Dwayne Betts's introduction to the Centenary Edition of Robert Hayden's Collected Poems, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Please do find a copy at your local library or at your favorite bookstore: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780871406798
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 Nowak's book by that name.
For more on the poetry of witness, see Sandra Beasley's essay "Flint and Tinder."
For Anna Akhmatova's "Instead of a Preface" in her great work Requiem as an alternative approach, see here.
Thanks to Harold Ober Associates, Inc., for granting us permission to read this poem on our podcast.
Links:
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 Soldier"
by Rupert Brooke
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
To His Love
by Ivor Gurney
He's gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed.
We'll walk no more on Cotswold
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.
His body that was so quick
Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn river
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.
You would not know him now ...
But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.
Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers—
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.
For more on Rupert Brooke, see The Poetry Foundation.
For more on Ivor Gurney, see The Poetry Foundation.
Gurney was also a prolific composer. For a sample of his music, see his Goucestershire Rhapsody.
Links:
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.
Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School, the former editor of Poetry magazine, and the author, editor, and translator of multiple books. He has won countless awards for his poetry and also has extraordinary books of prose, including My Bright Abyss and He Held Radical Light. Today, we talk with him about his poem “I Don’t Want to be a Spice Store” from his latest book of poetry, Survival is a Style.
For more on Christian Wiman, please see The Poetry Foundation.
This poem comes from Survival is a Style.
Links:
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 (both worried and confident, doubtful and awestruck) about the resurrection of the body and its reunification with the soul after death.
For a biography of Hester Pulter, see here:
https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/about-hester-pulter-and-the-manuscript.html
For her poems, see the Pulter Project here:
https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/
Here is the text of today's poem:
"View But This Tulip" (Emblem 40)
View but this tulip, rose, or gillyflower,
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
These flowers into their chaos were retired
Till human art them raised and reinspired
With beating, macerating, fermentation,
Calcining, chemically, with segregation;
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
Shut up the ashes under Hermes’s seal;
Then, with a candle or a gentle fire,
You may reanimate at your desire
These gallant plants; but if you cool the glass,
To their first principles they’ll quickly pass:
From sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
Then, seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
To recreate a Virbius of a flower,
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
Into our cause? Our God will reinspire
Our dormant dust, and keep alive the same
With an all-quick’ning, everlasting flame.
Then, though I into atoms scattered be,
In indivisibles I’ll trust in Thee.
Then let this comfort me in my sad story:
Dust is but four degrees removed from glory
By Nature’s paths, but God from death and night
Can raise this flesh to endless life and light.
Then, my impatient soul, contented be,
For thou a glorious spring ere long shalt see.
After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow,
Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow.
As wheat in new-plowed furrows rotting lies,
Incapable of quick’ning till it dies,
So into dust this flesh of mine must turn
And lie a while forgotten in my urn.
Yet when the sea, and earth, and Hell shall give
Their treasures up, my body too shall live:
Not like the resurrection at Grand Caire,
Where men revive, then straight of life despair;
But, with my soul, my flesh shall reunite
And ne’er involvéd be with death and night,
But live in endless pleasure, love, and light.
Then hallelujahs will I sing to thee,
My gracious God, to all eternity.
Then at thy dissolution patient be:
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.
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" versus some other genre, and we consider what difference such designations make while walking through a longer, narrative poem.
For the text of the poem, see here: https://poets.org/poem/gate-4
For more on Naomi Shihab Nye, see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/naomi-shihab-nye
This poem comes from Honeybee: Poems and Short Prose.
The image has a creative commons license and can be found here.
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, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. After earning a BA/MT in English Education from the University of Virginia, she taught public school for several years in San Francisco, and she spent ten summers on the staff of the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.
For more about Jenny, please visit her website: https://www.jennyjohnsonpoet.com/
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, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
In this extraordinary curtal sonnet (a shortened sonnet, curtailed), Hopkins packs immense power. He uses the shortened form to heighten the emotion, drawing himself up short in the end with nothing else that can be said other than "Praise him." This week, we walk through these short lines and unfold some of the ways that Hopkins works.
Hopkins was an immensely influential poet of the Victorian era (late 1800s) whose work was not published or encountered until 1918 in the modernist era. He was a reclusive, Jesuit priest who struggled with depression, but who could also be given over to incredible acts of wonder and praise (as in this poem). He stands outside his time, and has been read and loved by poets of all different persuasions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
For more informaiton on Hopkins, please see The Poetry Foundation.
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.
John Milton, "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
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 Amanda Gorman's Inauguration Poem at Avidly:
The Poetry of the Future
For more on Amanda Gorman, see The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amanda-gorman
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 suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away! take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears;
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load."
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied My Lord.
For more on George Herbert, visit the poetry foundation.
In this episode, we discuss Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb," the poem that she recited at the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. We discuss how well suited the poem is to its occasion, Gorman's powerful use of sound, and the conversation that she engages in--with John Winthrop, the Constitution, the Bible, George Washington, Maya Angelou, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Like everyone else in America, we are in love with this poem and hope you enjoy the discussion.
In this episode, Spencer Reece guides us through a reading of "Christmas Tree," one of the last poems that James Merrill wrote before his death. We learned so much through this conversation--about the friendship between James Merrill and Spencer Reece, the rhetorical force of visual poems, and the emotional power of elegy during the AIDS pandemic as well as in our own moment.
For the full text of "Christmas Tree," please see this page from the September 1995 issue of Poetry magazine.
For more on James Merrill, please see this page from the Poetry Foundation website.
For more on Spencer Reece, please see this page from the Poetry Foundation website.
In this episode, we think with the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona, Alberto Ríos, about the meaning of giving. Why do we give? What is giving? And what are its consequences? Ríos wrote this poem for a broad audience and has shared it with many different groups. It is, on the one hand, a very simple and accessible poem, easy to understand. And it is also, on the other hand, filled with rich layers, structures, images, and contexts. We explore here how simplicity and complexity work together.
For the full text of the poem, see here.
For more on Alberto Ríos, see the Poetry Foundation here.
Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem in this episode. You can find "When Giving Is All We Have" in A Small Story about the Sky: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/a-small-story-about-the-sky-by-alberto-rios/
Links:
This week Mary Jo Bang joins us! We learn about the Bauhaus movement and an influential photographer named Lucia Moholy, whose works were largely stolen during her lifetime. Mary Jo Bang's collection, A Doll for Throwing uses ekphrastic prose poetry throughout to delve into the riches of the Bauhaus movement which flourished in Germany between the world wars and had longlasting consequences for modern art. With Mary Jo Bang's poem this week, we explore both ekphrasis (poetry about an image) and prose poetry (poetry with no line breaks).
For the full text of the "Head of the Dancer," please see here.
For the image by Lotte Jacobi about which this poem is written, please see here.
For more on Lucia Moholy, please see the MoMA here..
For more on Mary Jo Bang, please see the Poetry Foundation here.
Links:
This week we read Anne Bradstreet's elegy for her grandchild Elizabeth and draw out the multiple voices (both faith and doubt, both grief and consolation) and the tensions and deep emotions in the work of this talented Puritan poet--the first woman from British North America to publish a book of poems.
"In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665 Being a Year and a Half Old"
Farewell dear babe, my heart's too much content,
Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye,
Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,
Then ta'en away unto eternity.
Blest babe why should I once bewail thy fate,
Or sigh the days so soon were terminate;
Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state.
By nature trees do rot when they are grown.
And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown, to have so short a date,
Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.
For more on Anne Bradstreet, please see the Poetry Foundation.
For an essay on Anne Bradstreet's art, please see this short piece by Kevin Prufer.
For an essay on Anne Bradstreet's publication of The Tenth Muse (the first published book by a woman from British North America) and her ambitions as a poet, see this piece by Charlotte Gordon.
For an understanding of Puritan spirituality, please see this short review essay by Abram Van Engen.
Links:
Carl Phillips joins us this week to take a close look at Toi Derricotte's "The Minks." Together we consider the art of narrative poetry, the movements of a single-stanza poem, and the meaning of line breaks.
Toi Derricotte is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of prose called The Black Notebooks. She has won numerous awards and fellowhips, including the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists, the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. With Cornelius Eady she co-founded Cave Canem in 1996, an organization committed to furthering the artistic and professional opportunities for African American poets. "The Minks" comes from her 1990 book Captivity, which explores the legacies of slavery and its impact on African American families in the present day. It is included in I: New and Selected Poems published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which granted us permission to read it for this podcast.
Carl Phillips, our guest for this episode, is also an award-winning poet of multiple collections, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (2020). He has had three books nominated for a National Book Award and has won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, the Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award, and numerous fellowships and other awards. Thank you to Carl for joining us today as our first guest!
For more on Toi Derricotte, please see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/toi-derricotte
For more on Carl Phillips, please see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carl-phillips
For the full text of "The Minks," please see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42872/the-minks
Links:
This week we look at one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets from the seventeenth century. This famous poem (#14, "Batter my heart") turns a poetic tradition of love and longing to religious ends, earnestly seeking God and questioning whether union with God will ever be achieved.
John Donne was an influential metaphysical poet who enjoyed wide fame in his own day, then went largely unread for two centuries, and then, saw his reputation radically revived in the early twentieth century. He was born into a Catholic family, converted to Anglicanism, and became a minister. Along the way, he wrote both "secular" erotic love poems and "religious" poems of many forms. This poem is one of the nineteen "Holy Sonnets" he wrote.
For a sequence on sonnets, this episode caps a mini-sequence in Poetry For All, which included a sonnet of Shakespeare's (episode 4), a reconception of the sonnet tradition by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay (episode 5), a set of erasure poems drawn from Shakespeare's sonnets by Jen Bervin (episode 6), and a return to the seventeenth-century sonnet tradition with John Donne (episode 7).
For more on John Donne, please see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne
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In this episode we learn about erasure poetry and poetic tradition by looking at Jen Bervin's incredible book NETS, composed of erasure poems created from the sonnets of Shakespeare. The erasures are extraordinary--short and moving--and you'll never see Shakespeare the same way again. We also discuss poetic traditions, and the idea of writing into and over top of what has come before.
For an important essay on the political implications of erasure poetry, please see "The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure" by Solmaz Sharif.
For more on Jen Bervin, please visit her website: http://jenbervin.com/
Special thanks this week to Ugly Duckling Presse for giving us permission to read Bervin's poetry aloud. "18" "63" and "64" by Jen Bervin were first published in Nets (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009).
To purchase Nets please visit Ugly Duckling Presse.
Links:
In this episode, we discuss Claude McKay, an influential poet of the Harlem Renaissance, taking a close look at his incredible sonnet "America."
For help in our preparations for this podcast, we want to thank Professors Bill Maxwell and Vince Sherry at Washington University in St. Louis, both of whom have often taught Claude McKay and this poem in particular. Bill Maxwell in addition has written extensively on McKay, and we encourage you to look up his work.
For the complete collection of McKay's poetry, see Bill Maxwell's edited volume:
Claude McKay, Complete Poems
And for more information on McKay, please visit the Poetry Foundation:
Links:
In this episode we introduce listeners to one of the most resilient forms in English-language poetry: the sonnet. And we do it with one of the most famous sonnets Shakespeare wrote.
For the sonnet in full, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day
For helpful works on Shakespeare's sonnets, see:
Stephen Booth's edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets
and
To view the poem, please see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45465/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america
To hear Cornelius Eady reading the poem and discussing it, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QezAVP_HiY
For a foundational essay about Phillis Wheatley and her work, please see June Jordan's essay, "The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America."
For two examples of the way Wheatley has inspired other artists and writers, please see the work of Cornelius Eady and Honoree Fanonne Jeffers.
Eady, "Diabolic"
Eady, "To Phillis Wheatley's Mother"
Eady, Interview
Jeffers, The Age of Phillis
Links:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)
by Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
For more on Emily Dickinson, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson
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In this episode, we begin learning about poetry through Seamus Heaney's great poem "Digging."
For the text of Heaney's poem, please see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47555/digging
To hear Seamus Heaney reading this poem himself, please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNRkPU1LSUg
For more on Seamus Heaney, please visit: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/seamus-heaney
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En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.
