Poetry For All - Episodes Tagged with “Intimacy”

Episode 67: Alex Dimitrov, Winter Solstice

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 20:00:00 -0500

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

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.

Episode 58: Richie Hofmann, Things That Are Rare

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 10:00:00 -0500

In this episode, we are delighted to have Richie Hofmann as our guest. Richie Hofmann is the author of two collections: Second Empire and A Hundred Lovers. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, and many other literary magazines, and he is the recipient of Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships.

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

Episode 54: Carl Phillips, To Autumn

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 10:00:00 -0500

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.

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.

Episode 52: Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 10:00:00 -0400

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.

To learn more about Shakespeare's sonnets, visit Folger Shakespeare page.

Our favorite editions of Shakespeare's sonnets are edited by Colin Burrow and Stephen Booth.

Sir Patrick Stewart's reading of Sonnet 73 is one of our favorites.

Episode 31: Jane Kenyon, Twilight: After Haying

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 11:00:00 -0400

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.

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.

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Episode 12: James Merrill, Christmas Tree

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 14:00:00 -0500

In this episode, Spencer Reece guides us through a reading of "Christmas Tree," one of the last poems that James Merrill wrote before his death. We learned so much through this conversation--about the friendship between James Merrill and Spencer Reece, the rhetorical force of visual poems, and the emotional power of elegy during the AIDS pandemic as well as in our own moment.

For the full text of "Christmas Tree," please see this page from the September 1995 issue of Poetry magazine.

For more on James Merrill, please see this page from the Poetry Foundation website.

For more on Spencer Reece, please see this page from the Poetry Foundation website.

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

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 11:00:00 -0500

This week Mary Jo Bang joins us! We learn about the Bauhaus movement and an influential photographer named Lucia Moholy, whose works were largely stolen during her lifetime. Mary Jo Bang's collection, A Doll for Throwing uses ekphrastic prose poetry throughout to delve into the riches of the Bauhaus movement which flourished in Germany between the world wars and had longlasting consequences for modern art. With Mary Jo Bang's poem this week, we explore both ekphrasis (poetry about an image) and prose poetry (poetry with no line breaks).

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.

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Episode 7: John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 10:00:00 -0400

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.

John Donne was an influential metaphysical poet who enjoyed wide fame in his own day, then went largely unread for two centuries, and then, saw his reputation radically revived in the early twentieth century. He was born into a Catholic family, converted to Anglicanism, and became a minister. Along the way, he wrote both "secular" erotic love poems and "religious" poems of many forms. This poem is one of the nineteen "Holy Sonnets" he wrote.

For a sequence on sonnets, this episode caps a mini-sequence in Poetry For All, which included a sonnet of Shakespeare's (episode 4), a reconception of the sonnet tradition by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay (episode 5), a set of erasure poems drawn from Shakespeare's sonnets by Jen Bervin (episode 6), and a return to the seventeenth-century sonnet tradition with John Donne (episode 7).

For more on John Donne, please see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne

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Episode 6: Jen Bervin, Nets

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0400

In this episode we learn about erasure poetry and poetic tradition by looking at Jen Bervin's incredible book NETS, composed of erasure poems created from the sonnets of Shakespeare. The erasures are extraordinary--short and moving--and you'll never see Shakespeare the same way again. We also discuss poetic traditions, and the idea of writing into and over top of what has come before.

For an important essay on the political implications of erasure poetry, please see "The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure" by Solmaz Sharif.

For more on Jen Bervin, please visit her website: http://jenbervin.com/

Special thanks this week to Ugly Duckling Presse for giving us permission to read Bervin's poetry aloud. "18" "63" and "64" by Jen Bervin were first published in Nets (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009).

To purchase Nets please visit Ugly Duckling Presse.

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