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.

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

Friendship

Oh, the comfort—
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

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.

Copyright © 2024 by Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 7, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. Used by permission.

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/

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.

“Singer” appears in LIFE ON EARTH by Dorianne Laux. Copyright © 2024 by Dorianne Laux. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

"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

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.

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.

Monica Ong is the author of two books: Silent Anatomies, which was the winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in 2015; and Planetaria, which will be released in May 2025. Last year, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow. Ong’s visual poetry has been published in many literary magazines and exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world.

To learn more about Ong's work, please visit her website.

To purchase a copy of Planetaria, visit the Proxima Vera website.

To learn more about Gwendolyn Bennett, see Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Gwendolyn Bennett's Selected Writings, edited by Belinda Wheeler and Louis J. Parascandola (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). Thanks to Pennsylvania State University Press for granting us permission to read this poem.

You can also click here to read a brief biography of Bennett.

To learn more about Ted Kooser, visit his website.

If you like these poems that we discussed in this episode, please read Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001). Thanks to Carnegie Mellon Press for granting us permission to read these poems aloud.

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

To learn more about Shankar Vendantam and the Hidden Brain podcast, visit his website.

To read Auden's poem, click here.

Thanks to Curtis Brown Ltd. for granting us permission to read this poem.

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).

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.

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.

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

See also The Poetry Foundation.

The poem originally appeared in Present Company (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Thanks to the Wylie Agency for granting us permission to read this poem on the episode.

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.

"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

For more on Li-Young Lee, see The Poetry Foundation here.

Thanks to BOA Editions for granting us permission to read Li-Young Lee's work on our podcast. "From Blossoms" and "The Weight of Sweetness" originally appeared in Rose (BOA Editions, 1986).

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

"Crib" appears in The Best of It © 2010 by Kay Ryan. Used by permissions of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

For more on Kay Ryan and her work, you can visit the Poetry Foundation website.

Our favorite interview with Kay Ryan appears in the Paris Review.

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.

"When I Am Asked" appears in Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, published by Louisiana State University Press (1996). Thanks to LSU Press for granting us permission to read this poem on the podcast.

For the text of the poem, click here: "When I Am Asked"

Note: When out of copyright, we reproduce the text of the poem ourselves. When still in copyright, we link to the text of the poem elsewhere.

For more on Lisel Mueller, see the Poetry Foundation.

To read the text of this poem, click here or see below:

To learn more about Walt Whitman and his work, visit the Walt Whitman Archive, a magnificent compendium of information about Whitman's life, cultural context, and editions of Leaves of Grass.

To learn more about scholar Christopher Hanlon, click here.

Text from Leaves of Grass:

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Clifton wrote from the perspective of a Black woman and many of her most famous poems address race and gender. Clear-eyed about struggles and hardships, insistent in her calls for justice and equality, Clifton's poetry carries a consistent joy and hope, which is apparent (and abundant) in "spring song."

Clifton's poetry was known for its lean style, paring everything down to its essential elements. In addition to award-winning collections of poetry, Clifton also wrote sixteen books for children (and had six children herself).

For the text of "spring song," and for a recording of Lucille Clifton reading it, see The Poetry Foundation.

For more on Lucille Clifton see her biography at The Poetry Foundation.

For an introduction to Lucille Clifton, see the poem sampler "Lucille Clifton 101" by Benjamin Voigt.

Links:

• spring song by Lucille Clifton | Poetry Foundation
• Poetry Foundation
• About Lucille Clifton | Academy of American Poets
• Lucille Clifton 101 by Benjamin Voigt | Poetry Foundation

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.

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.

To read "On the Mystery of the Incarnation," click here.

To read Levertov's essay "Some Notes on Organic Form," click here.

''On the Mystery of the Incarnation'' by Denise Levertov comes from her book A DOOR IN THE HIVE, copyright ©1989 by Denise Levertov. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Photo of Denise Levertov © David Geier. For more information see National Portrait Gallery at The Smithsonian Institution: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2011.103

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.

Stephanie Burt's excellent book Don't Read Poetry ends with an examination of this poem by Adrienne Rich. The book, which can be found at the link, offers an introduction to reading poems and different ways of approaching them.

For the text of the poem, see here.

For more on Adrienne Rich, please see the Poetry Foundation.

For more on Stephanie Burt, please see the Poetry Foundation.

Photograph of Adrienne Rich by Robert Giard.

Links:

• Power by Adrienne Rich - Famous poems, famous poets. - All Poetry
• Adrienne Rich | Poetry Foundation
• Stephanie Burt | Poetry Foundation

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

Thank you to Graywolf Press for permission to read this poem from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems by Jane Kenyon.

Click here for the full text of Twilight: After Haying.

See the Poetry Foundation for more on Jane Kenyon.

Links:

• Twilight: After Haying by Jane Kenyon - Poems | poets.org
• Otherwise | Graywolf Press
• Jane Kenyon | Poetry Foundation

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

For more on William Carlos Williams, see the Poetry Foundation. See the text of "This is Just to Say" there as well.

“This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909-1939, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

For the text of Langston Hughes's poem "Johannesburg Mines," see here.

For more on Langston Hughes, see the Poetry Foundation.

For more on social poetics, see Mark Nowak's book by that name.

For more on the poetry of witness, see Sandra Beasley's essay "Flint and Tinder."

For Anna Akhmatova's "Instead of a Preface" in her great work Requiem as an alternative approach, see here.

Thanks to Harold Ober Associates, Inc., for granting us permission to read this poem on our podcast.

Links:

• Poem: Johannesburg Mines by Langston Hughes
• Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundation
• Social Poetics – Coffee House Press
• Sandra Beasley: “Flint and Tinder – Understanding the Difference Between ‘Poetry of Witness’ and ‘Documentary Poetics’”
• Requiem Poem by Anna Akhmatova - Poem Hunter

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:

• Survival Is a Style | Christian Wiman | Macmillan
• Christian Wiman | Poetry Foundation

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

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

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.

Links:

• The Head of a Dancer | The New Yorker
• Head of a Dancer, Berlin | Saint Louis Art Museum
• Lucia Moholy | MoMA
• Mary Jo Bang | Poetry Foundation
• A Doll for Throwing | Graywolf Press

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

For the text of Heaney's poem, please see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47555/digging

To hear Seamus Heaney reading this poem himself, please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNRkPU1LSUg

For more on Seamus Heaney, please visit: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/seamus-heaney

Links:

• Digging by Seamus Heaney | Poetry Foundation
• Seamus Heaney reading "Digging"
• More on Seamus Heaney
• Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist