Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
Displaying items 1-10 of 28 in total of Poetry For All with the tag "grief and loss".
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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 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 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."
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Episode 97: Donald Justice, Pantoum of the Great Depression
September 17th, 2025 | Season 7 | 26 mins 46 secs
21st century, grief and loss, labor day, laborers, pantoum, repetition or refrain
This episode begins a three-part series on the pantoum and looks at how the repetitions work especially well for a poem that dwells incessantly in memories of the past, trying to recover, trying to move forward.
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Episode 96: Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur
September 3rd, 2025 | Season 7 | 24 mins 23 secs
19th century, alliterative verse, anger, christianity, climate change, grief and loss, hope, rhymed verse, sonnet, wonder
Today we look at a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins that dwells equally in the grandeur of God and the wreck made of earth. Hopkins wonders how these two aspects of our world could possibly relate, and he holds out hope for the dearest freshness deep down things.
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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.