Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
We found 9 episodes of Poetry For All with the tag “laborers”.
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Episode 91: Joanne Diaz, Two Emergencies
April 24th, 2025 | Season 6 | 24 mins 40 secs
21st century, ekphrasis, free verse, laborers, narrative, violence
In this episode, Katy Didden and Abram Van Engen discuss the extraordinary leaps, narrative disjunctions, and temporal frames that fill Diaz's extraordinary ekphrastic poem, a reflection on Bruegel's painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" written in conversation with W.H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts."
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Episode 86: Gwendolyn Bennett, I Build America
February 20th, 2025 | Season 6 | 25 mins 19 secs
free verse, harlem renaissance, labor day, laborers, persona poem, social justice and advocacy, twentieth century, violence, women's history month
Gwendolyn Bennett was a poet, journalist, editor, and activist whose contributions helped to fuel the Harlem Renaissance. In this episode, we read "I Build America," a poem that exposes and critiques the exploitation and suffering of ordinary workers.
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Episode 76: Philip Levine, What Work Is
August 22nd, 2024 | Season 6 | 24 mins 56 secs
20th century, labor day, laborers, narrative, poet laureate, work
In this episode, we read and discuss Philip Levine's most famous poem, "What Work Is." We consider his deft use of the second-person perspective, the sociability and narrative energy of his poetry, and his deep concern for the insecurity that defines the lives of so working-class laborers.
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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 51: Martín Espada, Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge
October 10th, 2022 | Season 5 | 30 mins 20 secs
21st century, anger, city, guest on the show, hispanic heritage month, laborers, narrative, repetition or refrain, social justice and advocacy
In this episode, we talk with the 2021 winner of the National Book Award, Martín Espada, about narrative poetry, poetry of engagement, and the witness of poetry as a work of advocacy.
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Episode 44: Ann Hudson, Soap
March 16th, 2022 | Season 4 | 23 mins 19 secs
21st century, body in pain, grief and loss, guest on the show, laborers, narrative, science and medicine, social justice and advocacy, women's history month
In this episode, Ann Hudson joins us to read her poem “Soap” and discuss how its narrative structure allows her to explore the history of science, technology, and our notions of progress and beauty, even when those notions do great harm to ordinary workers.
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Episode 35: Matthew Zapruder, Poem for Wisconsin
December 15th, 2021 | Season 3 | 22 mins 56 secs
21st century, free verse, laborers, surprise, winter, wonder
In this episode, we discuss the way in which Matthew Zapruder attends to vivid, specific details to create a sense of wonder, connection, and surprise.
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Episode 23: Langston Hughes, "Johannesburg Mines"
May 21st, 2021 | Season 2 | 19 mins 29 secs
20th century, anger, black history month, free verse, grief and loss, laborers, modernism, repetition or refrain, social justice and advocacy
In this episode, we discuss social poetics, poetry of witness, and the places where poetry speaks loudly of silence -- where language fails in the face of trauma. "The worst is not, so long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'"
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Episode 1: Seamus Heaney, Digging
August 31st, 2020 | Season 1 | 14 mins 44 secs
20th century, ars poetica, free verse, laborers, wonder
We begin Poetry for All by teaching and talking about a great poem on poetry itself: Seamus Heaney's "Digging."