Poetry For All

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 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 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 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 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.

Episode 72: Victoria Chang, My Mother--died unpeacefully...

May 22nd, 2024  |  Season 6  |  20 mins 1 sec

21st century, aging, asian american, elegy, free verse, grief and loss

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.

Episode 70: Lauren Camp, Inner Planets

March 19th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  28 mins 29 secs

21st century, free verse, nature poetry, night, poet laureate, wonder

Episode 69: Live with Marilyn Nelson!

February 11th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  55 mins 17 secs

21st century, anger, ars poetica, black history month, children, guest on the show, poet laureate, sonnet, surprise, wonder

Our first live performance of the podcast, featuring Marilyn Nelson and a discussion or her amazing poem "How I Discovered Poetry."