Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
Displaying items 1-10 of 43 in total of Poetry For All with the tag "free verse".
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Episode 104: Jane Zwart, I read that the moon is rusting
January 31st, 2026 | Season 8 | 24 mins 28 secs
21st century, children, free verse, grief and loss, guest on the show, spirituality, surprise, wonder
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.
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Episode 103: Dinah Maria Craik, Friendship
January 16th, 2026 | Season 8 | 14 mins 48 secs
19th century, free verse, friendship, gratitude, joy, love, thanksgiving, women's history month
In a short, simple, well-loved poem, Dinah Maria Craik names one aspect of friendship that many have found true. A great way to start the new year and launch the season. Find a friend and listen in.
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Episode 101: Emerald GoingSnake, Someday I'll Love--
November 19th, 2025 | Season 7 | 23 mins 53 secs
21st century, aging, elegy, free verse, gratitude, grief and loss, guest on the show, love, native american heritage month
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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.