Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
We found 10 episodes of Poetry For All with the tag “spirituality”.
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Episode 68: W.S. Merwin, To the New Year
January 18th, 2024 | Season 6 | 22 mins 48 secs
21st century, free verse, hope, nature poetry, new year’s day, ode, poet laureate, spirituality, surprise, winter, wonder
In the first episode of 2024, we read one of the great poets of the past century, W.S. Merwin, and his address to the new year, considering his attentiveness, his style, and his wondrous mood and mode of contemplation and surprise.
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Episode 66: Katy Didden, The Priest Questions the Lava
November 21st, 2023 | Season 6 | 26 mins 10 secs
21st century, christianity, climate change, erasure, grief and loss, guest on the show, nature poetry, spirituality, visual poetry, word and image
In our discussion of "The Priest Questions the Lava," Katy describes her interest in the sentience of the natural world, her erasure of documentary texts, her interest in visual poetry, and the importance of poems that examine ethical and spiritual questions in an era of climate change.
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Episode 63: Rumi, Colorless, Nameless, Free
August 29th, 2023 | Season 6 | 29 mins 56 secs
13th century, ghazal, guest on the show, islam, joy, poetry in translation, restlessness, rhymed verse, spirituality, surprise, wonder, world poetry
In this episode, poet and translator Haleh Liza Gafori joins us to closely read and discuss a poem by Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207-1273 CE), one of the greatest of all Sufi poets. We discuss the poetic constraints of the ghazal form, Rumi's encounters with the divine, and the significance of his friendship with Shams, a man who transformed his life and poetic practice.
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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.
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Episode 53: Carter Revard, What the Eagle Fan Says
November 7th, 2022 | Season 5 | 25 mins 38 secs
20th century, alliterative verse, guest on the show, native american heritage month, nature poetry, spirituality
In this episode, we focus on the life and work of Carter Revard, an Osage poet whose medieval scholarship informs the structure of "What the Eagle Fan Says." Jessica Rosenfeld, a professor of medieval literature at Washington University in St. Louis, joins us for this discussion.
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Episode 50: Rafael Campo, Primary Care
September 26th, 2022 | Season 5 | 22 mins 24 secs
21st century, aging, blank verse, body in pain, gratitude, hispanic heritage month, repetition or refrain, science and medicine, spirituality, wonder
In this episode, we discuss how Rafael Campo, a practicing physician, uses blank verse to explore the experience of illness and suffering.
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Episode 48: Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise
April 28th, 2022 | Season 4 | 21 mins 47 secs
21st century, anger, golden shovel, grief and loss, hope, joy, native american heritage month, poet laureate, social justice and advocacy, spirituality
In this episode, we examine The Golden Shovel form and discuss the idea of "survivance" through the work of Muscogee (Creek) poet Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States.
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Episode 47: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
April 22nd, 2022 | Season 4 | 26 mins 39 secs
19th century, ars poetica, children, free verse, guest on the show, nature poetry, repetition or refrain, spirituality, wonder
In this episode, Christopher Hanlon joins us to discuss an excerpt from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. We discuss the poem's prophetic voice, its patterns of repetition, the connective tissue that binds his ideas and invites readers in, and the cultural context in which Whitman produced his work.
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Episode 43: Margaret Noodin, What the Peepers Say
March 2nd, 2022 | Season 4 | 24 mins 22 secs
21st century, alliterative verse, free verse, guest on the show, native american heritage month, nature poetry, poetry in translation, repetition or refrain, spirituality, spring, wonder
In this episode, Margaret Noodin joins us to discuss her poem "What the Peepers Say." In our conversation, we talk about Margaret's writing in both Anishinaabemowin and English, her attention to sounds and rhythms, and what the peeper--a tiny springtime frog--can teach us about presence and listening.
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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.