Poetry For All

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 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 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 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 59: Tichborne's Elegy

April 7th, 2023  |  Season 5  |  21 mins 25 secs

16th century, christianity, elegy, grief and loss, repetition or refrain, rhymed verse

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.

Episode 49: Lisel Mueller, When I am Asked

September 12th, 2022  |  Season 5  |  19 mins 57 secs

20th century, ars poetica, elegy, free verse, grief and loss, repetition or refrain

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.

Episode 45: Ben Jonson, On My First Son

March 23rd, 2022  |  Season 4  |  21 mins 18 secs

17th century, children, christianity, elegy, grief and loss, loneliness, rhymed verse

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.

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

January 26th, 2022  |  Season 4  |  29 mins 16 secs

21st century, aging, children, elegy, free verse, gratitude, grief and loss, guest on the show, love, mother's day

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.

Episode 12: James Merrill, Christmas Tree

December 2nd, 2020  |  Season 1  |  21 mins 37 secs

20th century, advent/christmas, aging, body in pain, elegy, friendship, grief and loss, guest on the show, intimacy, lgbtqia month, love, science and medicine, visual poetry