Poetry For All

Episode 67: Alex Dimitrov, Winter Solstice

December 18th, 2023  |  Season 6  |  24 mins 27 secs

21st century, city, free verse, hope, intimacy, lgbtqia month, loneliness, night, winter

In this episode, we read and discuss a poem that provides a powerful meditation on the longest night of the year.

Episode 58: Richie Hofmann, Things That Are Rare

February 27th, 2023  |  Season 5  |  23 mins 57 secs

21st century, eros and desire, free verse, guest on the show, intimacy, lgbtqia month, night, sonnet

Episode 54: Carl Phillips, To Autumn

November 21st, 2022  |  Season 5  |  24 mins 47 secs

21st century, autumn, black history month, city, free verse, guest on the show, intimacy, lgbtqia month, nature poetry, night, ode, restlessness, spirituality

In this episode, we talk with David Baker about "To Autumn" by Carl Phillips, exploring the way Phillips masterfully achieves a sense of intimacy and restlessness in a lyric ode that tosses between two parts while incorporating the sonnet tradition.

Episode 52: Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

October 24th, 2022  |  Season 5  |  19 mins 18 secs

17th century, aging, autumn, intimacy, love, night, rhymed verse, sonnet

This sonnet reflects on the autumn of life and an intimate love, and it turns on that love growing stronger in and through its age, even as the body decays.

Episode 31: Jane Kenyon, Twilight: After Haying

October 27th, 2021  |  Season 3  |  16 mins 48 secs

20th century, autumn, christianity, free verse, intimacy, nature poetry, night, spirituality

This week we take a closer look at another autumn poem, this one by Jane Kenyon from her wonderful book Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. Kenyon builds from and transforms the same tradition of the autumn ode we examined last week with John Keats.

Episode 12: James Merrill, Christmas Tree

December 2nd, 2020  |  Season 1  |  21 mins 37 secs

20th century, advent/christmas, aging, body in pain, elegy, friendship, grief and loss, guest on the show, intimacy, lgbtqia month, love, science and medicine, visual poetry

Episode 10: Mary Jo Bang, The Head of a Dancer

November 10th, 2020  |  Season 1  |  22 mins 22 secs

21st century, ekphrasis, free verse, guest on the show, intimacy, visual poetry, word and image

This week Mary Jo Bang joins us! We learn about the Bauhaus movement and a photographer named Lucia Moholy. And we look at both ekphrastic poetry (poetry about an image) and prose poetry (poetry with no line breaks).

Episode 7: John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14

October 14th, 2020  |  Season 1  |  15 mins 54 secs

17th century, christianity, intimacy, restlessness, rhymed verse, sonnet

This week we look at one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets from the seventeenth century. This famous poem (#14, "Batter my heart") turns a poetic tradition of love and longing to religious ends, earnestly seeking God and questioning whether union with God will ever be achieved.

Episode 6: Jen Bervin, Nets

October 6th, 2020  |  Season 1  |  19 mins 13 secs

21st century, erasure, eros and desire, grief and loss, intimacy, women's history month

In this episode we learn about erasure poetry and poetic tradition by looking at Jen Bervin's incredible book NETS, created from the sonnets of Shakespeare.