Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
Displaying Episode 1 - 10 of 39 in total of Poetry For All with the tag “free verse”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Episode 79: W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts
October 3rd, 2024 | Season 6 | 39 mins 1 sec
20th century, ekphrasis, free verse, guest on the show, lgbtqia month, modernism, word and image
In this episode, Shankar Vendantam joins us to read and discuss "Musee des Beaux Arts," a poem that explores the ways in which humans become indifferent to the suffering of others.
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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.