Poetry For All - Episodes Tagged with “Lgbtqia Month”

Episode 79: W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0400

In this episode, Shankar Vendantam joins us to read and discuss "Musee des Beaux Arts," a poem that explores the ways in which humans become indifferent to the suffering of others.

To learn more about Shankar Vendantam and the Hidden Brain podcast, visit his website.

To read Auden's poem, click here.

Thanks to Curtis Brown Ltd. for granting us permission to read this poem.

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 55: Kay Ryan, Crib

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 10:00:00 -0500

In this episode, we discuss Kay Ryan's "Crib," a brief poem that begins with an interest in the deep archaeology of language and shifts to a powerful meditation on theft, innocence, and guilt.

For more on Kay Ryan and her work, you can visit the Poetry Foundation website.

Our favorite interview with Kay Ryan appears in the Paris Review.

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 40: William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0500

In this episode, we provide a close reading of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, which allows us to consider the poem's definition of a love that is enduring. In addition, though, we consider a reading of the poem which foregrounds a disappointed poetic speaker who can see the love's transience, too.

For the text of this poem, click here.

Colin Burrow and Stephen Booth's editions of Shakespeare's sonnets are essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about this amazing sonnet sequence.

During the pandemic, Sir Patrick Stewart has read one Shakespeare sonnet each day and share it on YouTube. To hear him read Sonnet 116 and so many others, click here.

Episode 33: Adrienne Rich, Power

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 13:00:00 -0500

This week, the poet and scholar Stephanie Burt joins us to discuss the extraordinary power of Adrienne Rich. We think through how the spacing and stanzas of a poem can draw out denials and divulgences, while also exploring the life and writing of Rich.

Stephanie Burt's excellent book Don't Read Poetry ends with an examination of this poem by Adrienne Rich. The book, which can be found at the link, offers an introduction to reading poems and different ways of approaching them.

For the text of the poem, see here.

For more on Adrienne Rich, please see the Poetry Foundation.

For more on Stephanie Burt, please see the Poetry Foundation.

Photograph of Adrienne Rich by Robert Giard.

Links:

Episode 32: Rick Barot, Cascades 501

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 12:00:00 -0400

In this episode, poet Rick Barot guides us in our reading of his poem "Cascades 501" from The Galleons, his most recent collection. Rick's insights into how poets engage with place, create juxtapositions, and arrive at insights taught us so much about how poets create their best work.

To learn more about Rick Barot, you can visit his website:

https://www.rickbarot.com/about/

To learn more about The Galleons, you can visit the Milkweed Editions website:

https://milkweed.org/book/the-galleons

To read "Cascade 501," visit the Academy of American Poets website:

https://poets.org/poem/cascades-501

Episode 29: Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 10:00:00 -0400

Elizabeth Bishop was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and "One Art" is certainly one of the greatest villanelles. In this episode, we talk about the poetic form and its constraints. We also draw upon recent scholarship that has revealed a great deal about Elizabeth Bishop's life and work in order to understand the power of poetic constraint.

Click here to read "One Art": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art

For more about Elizabeth Bishop's life and the cultural context that informed her work, read Megan Marshall's Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast.

To learn more about the correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, read Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.

“One Art” from POEMS by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher's Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Episode 18: Jenny Johnson, Dappled Things

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 11:30:00 -0500

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. After earning a BA/MT in English Education from the University of Virginia, she taught public school for several years in San Francisco, and she spent ten summers on the staff of the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.

For more about Jenny, please visit her website: https://www.jennyjohnsonpoet.com/

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.