Poetry For All
Episode Archive
Episode Archive
103 episodes of Poetry For All since the first episode, which aired on August 31st, 2020.
-
Episode 100: Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
October 29th, 2025 | Season 7 | 34 mins 53 secs
18th century, elegy, grief and loss, melancholy, night, rhymed verse
This episode takes us to a graveyard for Halloween and explores one of the most canonical poems in the English language, poised between two huge eras of poetry as it meditates on how "the paths of glory lead but to the grave."
-
Episode 99: Oliver de la Paz, Pantoum Beginning and Ending with Thorns
October 15th, 2025 | Season 7 | 33 mins 3 secs
asian american literature, diaspora, exile, filipino american literature, immigrant experience, migration, pantoum, poetic form
In this third episode in our series on the pantoum, we read and discuss Oliver de la Paz's "Pantoum Beginning and Ending with Thorns," a poem that draws its inspiration from a visual art object as well as the story of migration that shapes the poetic speaker's lived experience.
-
Episode 98: Arthur Sze, Papyrus Pantoum
October 1st, 2025 | Season 7 | 28 mins 38 secs
asian american, climate change, ecopoetry, nature, pantoum, poet laureate
In this episode, we continue our three-part series on the pantoum, this time focusing on Arthur Sze's "Papyrus Pantoum." We consider the poem's collage-like qualities, Sze's ability to juxtapose abundance and scarcity, and the way he attends to both beauty and danger in the natural world.
-
Episode 97: Donald Justice, Pantoum of the Great Depression
September 17th, 2025 | Season 7 | 26 mins 46 secs
21st century, grief and loss, labor day, laborers, pantoum, repetition or refrain
This episode begins a three-part series on the pantoum and looks at how the repetitions work especially well for a poem that dwells incessantly in memories of the past, trying to recover, trying to move forward.
-
Episode 96: Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur
September 3rd, 2025 | Season 7 | 24 mins 23 secs
19th century, alliterative verse, anger, christianity, climate change, grief and loss, hope, rhymed verse, sonnet, wonder
Today we look at a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins that dwells equally in the grandeur of God and the wreck made of earth. Hopkins wonders how these two aspects of our world could possibly relate, and he holds out hope for the dearest freshness deep down things.
-
Episode 95: Ted Kooser, Student
August 20th, 2025 | Season 7 | 22 mins 38 secs
21st century, free verse, hope, poet laureate
It's back to school time, and we're back at Poetry For All, heavy with hope for another season. Today we look at a poem unified by an extended metaphor describing a student who makes his heroic way to the library. Short and simple--and so much to love.
-
Episode 94: Sumer is icumen in
June 19th, 2025 | Season 6 | 25 mins 6 secs
13th century, joy, middle english, nature, round
In this episode, we offer a close reading of "Sumer is icumen in," a Middle English song that anticipates the abundant joys of summer.
-
Episode 92: Dorianne Laux, Singer
May 8th, 2025 | Season 6 | 25 mins 44 secs
21st century, elegy, free verse, gratitude, joy, love, mother's day, narrative, ode, women's history month
In this episode, we read and discuss "Singer," a narrative poem that creates a catalog of details that celebrates the poetic speaker's mother in all of her complexity.
-
Episode 91: Joanne Diaz, Two Emergencies
April 24th, 2025 | Season 6 | 24 mins 40 secs
21st century, ekphrasis, free verse, laborers, narrative, violence
In this episode, Katy Didden and Abram Van Engen discuss the extraordinary leaps, narrative disjunctions, and temporal frames that fill Diaz's extraordinary ekphrastic poem, a reflection on Bruegel's painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" written in conversation with W.H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts."
-
Episode 90: N. Scott Momaday, The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee
April 16th, 2025 | Season 6 | 20 mins 23 secs
21st century, free verse, joy, native american heritage month, repetition or refrain, spirituality, wonder
This episode explores the incantation and mystic union of Momaday's famous delight poem, ending with a recorded recitation in his own rich voice.
-
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.