Poetry For All

Episode 100: Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

October 29th, 2025  |  Season 7  |  34 mins 53 secs

18th century, elegy, grief and loss, melancholy, night, rhymed verse

This episode takes us to a graveyard for Halloween and explores one of the most canonical poems in the English language, poised between two huge eras of poetry as it meditates on how "the paths of glory lead but to the grave."

Episode 75: Du Fu, Passing the Night by White Sands Post Station

August 7th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  18 mins 16 secs

aging, chinese poetry, loneliness, nature poetry, night, poetry in translation, restlessness, world poetry

What is a good life, and how do we make sense of the world when it seems like society is collapsing? In this episode, Lucas Bender joins us once again to discuss the work of Du Fu, the great Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. Luke helps us to see how Du Fu’s “Passing the Night by White Sands Post Station” can be read in multiple ways depending on how one translates each word of the poem. In doing so, he reveals the poem’s concerns with aging, disappointment, and the possibility of hope in difficult times.

Episode 70: Lauren Camp, Inner Planets

March 19th, 2024  |  Season 6  |  28 mins 29 secs

21st century, free verse, nature poetry, night, poet laureate, wonder

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 57: Edna St. Vincent Millay, She had forgotten how the August night

February 14th, 2023  |  Season 5  |  23 mins 46 secs

20th century, eros and desire, modernism, night, repetition or refrain, rhymed verse, sonnet, summer, women's history month

Edna St. Vincent Millay was the emblem of the "New Woman" and one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. In this episode, we focus on a sonnet that showcases how Millay approached desire and eros in her poetry.

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.