Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
Displaying Episode 1 - 10 of 23 in total of Poetry For All with the tag “grief and loss”.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Episode 66: Katy Didden, The Priest Questions the Lava
November 21st, 2023 | Season 6 | 26 mins 10 secs
21st century, christianity, climate change, erasure, grief and loss, guest on the show, nature poetry, spirituality, visual poetry, word and image
In our discussion of "The Priest Questions the Lava," Katy describes her interest in 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.
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Episode 65: Du Fu, Facing Snow
October 19th, 2023 | Season 6 | 23 mins 57 secs
8th century, grief and loss, guest on the show, poetry in translation, rhymed verse, world poetry
In this episode, Lucas Bender guides us through his translation of Du Fu's "Facing Snow," one of the most famous poems in the Chinese language.
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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.
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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.
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Episode 48: Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise
April 28th, 2022 | Season 4 | 21 mins 47 secs
21st century, anger, golden shovel, grief and loss, hope, joy, native american heritage month, poet laureate, social justice and advocacy, spirituality
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.