Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
We found 10 episodes of Poetry For All with the tag “narrative”.
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Episode 92: Dorianne Laux, Singer
May 8th, 2025 | Season 6 | 25 mins 44 secs
21st century, elegy, free verse, gratitude, joy, love, mother's day, narrative, ode, women's history month
In this episode, we read and discuss "Singer," a narrative poem that creates a catalog of details that celebrates the poetic speaker's mother in all of her complexity.
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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 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 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 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 41: F.E.W. Harper, Learning to Read
February 16th, 2022 | Season 4 | 23 mins 27 secs
19th century, anger, black history month, guest on the show, narrative, social justice and advocacy
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a prolific writer and activist of the nineteenth century. In this episode, Professor Janaka Bowman Lewis joins us to discuss her power, influence, voice, and work. "Learning to Read" foregrounds the ballad style in a narrative poem designed to keep alive the memories of fighting for both literacy and liberation.
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Episode 32: Rick Barot, Cascades 501
November 3rd, 2021 | Season 3 | 38 mins 32 secs
21st century, asian american & pacific islander month, free verse, guest on the show, lgbtqia month, narrative, nature poetry, surprise
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Episode 19: Naomi Shihab Nye, Gate A-4
March 9th, 2021 | Season 2 | 18 mins 59 secs
21st century, hope, joy, narrative, social justice and advocacy, spirituality, surprise, wonder
Remember airports? In this wonderful, narrative poem, Nye speaks of the remarkable capacity for community in a world of strangers.
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Episode 15: Amanda Gorman, Chorus of the Captains
February 9th, 2021 | Season 2 | 17 mins 56 secs
21st century, alliterative verse, black history month, free verse, gratitude, narrative, social justice and advocacy
Amanda Gorman became the first poet ever to perform at the Super Bowl on February 7, 2021. In this episode we talk about poetry for the masses, mass media, genres of poetry, spoken word, the visual and the verbal, and the mix of ancient methods with emergent forms.