Poetry For All - Episodes Tagged with “21st Century”

Episode 106: Jane Mead, I wonder if I will miss the moss

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:00:00 -0400

This poem offers a humble love of the world and a leave-taking of it. It was found in the papers of Jane Mead (1958-2019), which were left to her great friend Kathleen Finneran (1957-2026), and it was published in the New Yorker in 2021 through Kathleen's efforts. The poem was read at the memorial for Mead in 2021 and then again at the funeral for Finneran in 2026.

Here is the poem:

I Wonder If I Will Miss the Moss
—Jane Mead (1958-2019)

I wonder if I will miss the moss
after I fly off as much as I miss it now
just thinking about leaving.

There were stones of many colors.
There were sticks holding both
lichen and moss.
There were red gates with old
hand-forged hardware.
There were fields of dry grass
smelling of first rain
then of new mud. There was mud,
and there was the walking,
all the beautiful walking,
and it alone filled me—
the smells, the scratchy grass heads.
All the sleeping under bushes,
once waking to vultures above, peering down
with their bent heads the way they do,
caricatures of interest and curiosity.
Once too a lizard.
Once too a kangaroo rat.
Once too a rat.
They did not say I belonged to them,
but I did.

Whenever the experiment on and of
my life begins to draw to a close
I’ll go back to the place that held me
and be held. It’s O.K. I think
I did what I could. I think
I sang some, I think I held my hand out.

For The New Yorker, see here.

For a reflection on the poem by the poet Devin Kelly, see Kelly's Substack Ordinary Plots.

For more on Jane Mead, see The Poetry Foundation.

For the memorial service and the tribute by Kathleen Finneran, see Mead's personal webpage.

Episode 104: Jane Zwart, I read that the moon is rusting

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0500

This episode brings together a collage of images to explore the meaning of time, the emergence of events from one to another, and the wonder of the unknown.

For the full text of the poem, see here:
https://mail.readwildness.com/25/zwart-rusting

For more on the poet Jane Zwart, see her personal website:
https://www.janezwart.com/

To see her new book and purchase a copy, see "Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best" at Orison Books:
https://www.orisonbooks.com/product-page/oddest-oldest-saddest-best-poems-by-jane-zwart

Episode 101: Emerald GoingSnake, Someday I'll Love--

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 08:00:00 -0500

This episode opens "Someday I'll Love" poems through the vivid imagery of a young poet's connection with their grandmother, remembering in love as memory begins to slip.

Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake is an Indigenous poet from the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma. Winner of the 2024 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for poetry and the recipient of the 2023 Indigenous Nations Poets fellowship, they live in St. Louis.

Portrait by Erin Lewis Photography

The poem was featured on Poem-a-Day and can be found at the Academy of American Poets.

See here for the poem online.

Someday I’ll Love—

Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake
—after Frank O’Hara

like I dreamt of the lamb—slaughtered,
forgotten,
lying on porcelain tile, on crimson-filled grout—
and woke up thinking of my grandmother,
of her Betty Boop hands that held
marbled stone, held dough-balled flour,
held the first strands of my hair floating atop the river—

like winter apples, the ones that hang outside
my living room window and survive first snowfall
to feed the neighborhood crows,
how they fall
beneath my boots, staining my rubber
soles with epigraphs of rot, epigraphs
of fors, of dears, of holding on till frost’s end.

Someday I will see long-forgotten fingerprints
on the inside of my eyelids as I go to sleep,
as I close my eyes for silence on a Wednesday,
mourning—seeking—creases and smile lines,
porch lights and swing sets,
summer nights of lightning bugs and Johnny Cash.

I think it will be a Tuesday, or maybe someday
is yesterday, is two months from now, is going
to be a day when I forget what I’m supposed
to be remembering.

For now, I will paint my nails cradle, adorn
my skin in cloth that doesn’t choke,
tell my bones that they are each
a lamb
remembered.

Episode 97: Donald Justice, Pantoum of the Great Depression

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0400

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.

For the text of the poem, see The Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58080/pantoum-of-the-great-depression

For more on Donald Justice, see The Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/donald-justice

Episode 95: Ted Kooser, Student

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0400

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.

This poem comes from Ted Kooser's Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Delights and Shadows, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2004. Thank you to Copper Canyon Press for permission to read the poem for this episode.

For the text of the poem, see here: https://www.versedaily.org/student.shtml

For Ted Kooser's personal webpage, see here: https://www.tedkooser.net/

Episode 92: Dorianne Laux, Singer

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 08 May 2025 08:00:00 -0400

In this episode, we read and discuss "Singer," a narrative poem that celebrates the poetic speaker's mother in all of her complexity.

Dorianne Laux is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Life on Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of a new craft book titled Finger Exercises for Poets.

Episode 91: Joanne Diaz, Two Emergencies

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0400

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."

"Two Emergencies," appears in My Favorite Tyrants (University of Wisconsin Press 2014), winner of the 2014 Brittingham Prize in Poetry.

For more poetry of Joanne Diaz, see also The Lessons (Silverfish Review Press 2011), winner of the Gerald Cable Book Award.

For W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Artes" see The Poetry Foundation

Episode 90: N. Scott Momaday, The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 07:00:00 -0400

This episode explores the incantation and mystic union of Momaday's famous delight poem, ending with a recorded recitation in his own rich voice. We explain anaphora and explore its power, and we trace the links and connections from one thought to the next throughout the poem.

Special thanks to Universty of California Television (UCTV) for permission to share the audio of Momaday's reading. For the interview with Momaday from which this reading has been pulled, see "A Conversation with N. Scott Momaday -- Writer's Symposium by the Sea 2023" on Youtube. "The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee" appears in In the Presence of the Sun by N. Scott Momaday. Copyright © 2009 University of New Mexico Press, 2009.

For the text of the poem, see The Poetry Foundation here.

For more on Momaday, see his biography at the Poetry Foundation.

Episode 88: Oksana Maksymchuk, Tempo

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0400

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.

Episode 81: Niki Herd, The Stuff of Hollywood

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0400

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

Episode 77: Jennifer Grotz, The Conversion of Paul

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

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).

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

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

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/

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

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 22 May 2024 08:00:00 -0400

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.

Episode 70: Lauren Camp, Inner Planets

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0400

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.

Episode 69: Live with Marilyn Nelson!

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

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.

Episode 68: W.S. Merwin, To the New Year

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

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

Episode 67: Alex Dimitrov, Winter Solstice

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 20:00:00 -0500

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.

Episode 66: Katy Didden, The Priest Questions the Lava

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 18:00:00 -0500

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.

Episode 61: Ada Limón, "The Raincoat"

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 11 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

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

Episode 58: Richie Hofmann, Things That Are Rare

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 10:00:00 -0500

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

Episode 54: Carl Phillips, To Autumn

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 10:00:00 -0500

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.

Episode 51: Martín Espada, Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 10:00:00 -0400

To learn more about Martín Espada, click here.

To read the poem, click here.

This is the first poem that appears in Floaters, the winner of the 2021 National Book Award. To purchase a copy of the book, click here.

Photo credit: Lauren Marie Schmidt (cropped to fit dimensions)

Episode 50: Rafael Campo, Primary Care

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 10:00:00 -0400

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:

Episode 48: Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 12:00:00 -0400

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:

Episode 44: Ann Hudson, Soap

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

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.

Episode 43: Margaret Noodin, What the Peepers Say

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

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.

Episode 38: Laura Van Prooyen, Elegy for My Mother's Mind

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 16:00:00 -0500

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.

Episode 35: Matthew Zapruder, Poem for Wisconsin

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 12:00:00 -0500

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.

Episode 34: Tracy K. Smith, Declaration

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0500

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:

Episode 32: Rick Barot, Cascades 501

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 12:00:00 -0400

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:

https://poets.org/poem/cascades-501

Episode 26: Brenda Cárdenas, "Our Lady of Sorrows"

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 12:00:00 -0400

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:

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/ana-mendieta

Episode 21: Christian Wiman, I Don't Want to Be a Spice Store

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:00:00 -0400

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:

Episode 19: Naomi Shihab Nye, Gate A-4

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 18:00:00 -0500

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.

Episode 18: Jenny Johnson, Dappled Things

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 11:30:00 -0500

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/

Episode 15: Amanda Gorman, Chorus of the Captains

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 20:00:00 -0500

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

Episode 13: Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0500

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.

Episode 11: Alberto Ríos, When Giving Is All We Have

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 11:00:00 -0500

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:

When Giving Is All We Have by Alberto Ríos - Poems | poets.org — inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona
Alberto Ríos | Poetry Foundation

Episode 10: Mary Jo Bang, The Head of a Dancer

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 11:00:00 -0500

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.

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Episode 8: Toi Derricotte, "The Minks"

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0400

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:

The Minks by Toi Derricotte | Poetry Foundation
Toi Derricotte | Poetry Foundation
I - University of Pittsburgh Press
Carl Phillips | Poetry Foundation — the Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award

Episode 6: Jen Bervin, Nets

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0400

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.

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