Poetry For All

Episode 89: Pádraig Ó Tuama, excerpts from Kitchen Hymns

April 3rd, 2025  |  Season 6  |  54 mins 50 secs

belief, christianity, doubt, lyric, mythology, nature

This episode was recorded on March 2, 2025 at the Phillis Wheatley Heritage Center in St. Louis., Missouri. In this conversation, Pádraig Ó Tuama reads several poems from Kitchen Hymns (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), his newest collection. We discuss subversive speech, belief and doubt, lyrical poetry, the psychology of poetic forms, and the power of ancient myths.

Episode 88: Oksana Maksymchuk, Tempo

March 20th, 2025  |  Season 6  |  29 mins 12 secs

21st century, free verse, grief and loss, surprise, ukraine, violence, war

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."

Episode 87: Monica Ong, Her Gaze

March 6th, 2025  |  Season 6  |  35 mins 21 secs

children, ekphrasis, free verse, science, visual poetry, wonder, word and image

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.

Episode 86: Gwendolyn Bennett, I Build America

February 20th, 2025  |  Season 6  |  25 mins 19 secs

free verse, harlem renaissance, labor day, laborers, persona poem, social justice and advocacy, twentieth century, violence, women's history month

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.

Episode 85: Jacob Stratman, To Momento Mori

January 21st, 2025  |  Season 6  |  20 mins 20 secs

ekphrasis

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.

Episode 84: Ted Kooser, excerpts from Winter Morning Walks

December 12th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  21 mins 10 secs

free verse, loneliness, nature poetry, poet laureate, winter, wonder

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.

Episode 83: Emily Dickinson, "I went to thank Her–"

November 27th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  20 mins

elegy, grief and loss, nineteenth century, rhymed verse, women's history month

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.

Episode 82: Sidney, Translation of Psalm 52

November 14th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  26 mins 33 secs

16th century, anger, christianity, hope, poetry in translation, rhymed verse, social justice and advocacy, women's history month

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.

Episode 81: Niki Herd, The Stuff of Hollywood

October 31st, 2024  |  Season 6  |  37 mins 37 secs

21st century, black history month, found poetry, free verse, guest on the show, social justice and advocacy, violence, word and image

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.

Episode 80: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

October 17th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  21 mins 11 secs

19th century, sonnet, word and image

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.

Episode 79: W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

October 3rd, 2024  |  Season 6  |  39 mins 1 sec

20th century, ekphrasis, free verse, guest on the show, lgbtqia month, modernism, word and image

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.

Episode 78: Jericho Brown, Duplex

September 20th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  22 mins 16 secs

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.

Episode 77: Jennifer Grotz, The Conversion of Paul

September 5th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  26 mins 14 secs

21st century, body in pain, christianity, ekphrasis, free verse, friendship, grief and loss, narrative

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.

Episode 76: Philip Levine, What Work Is

August 22nd, 2024  |  Season 6  |  24 mins 56 secs

20th century, labor day, laborers, narrative, poet laureate, work

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.

Episode 75: Du Fu, Passing the Night by White Sands Post Station

August 7th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  18 mins 16 secs

aging, chinese poetry, loneliness, nature poetry, night, poetry in translation, restlessness, world poetry

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, 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.

Episode 74: Diane Seuss, [The sonnet, like poverty]

July 26th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  24 mins 22 secs

21st century, ars poetica, elegy, gratitude, grief and loss, labor day, laborers, repetition or refrain, sonnet

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.