For the full text of the poem, see here:
https://mail.readwildness.com/25/zwart-rusting

For more on the poet Jane Zwart, see her personal website:
https://www.janezwart.com/

To see her new book and purchase a copy, see "Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best" at Orison Books:
https://www.orisonbooks.com/product-page/oddest-oldest-saddest-best-poems-by-jane-zwart

God's Grandeur
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Special thanks to Universty of California Television (UCTV) for permission to share the audio of Momaday's reading. For the interview with Momaday from which this reading has been pulled, see "A Conversation with N. Scott Momaday -- Writer's Symposium by the Sea 2023" on Youtube. "The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee" appears in In the Presence of the Sun by N. Scott Momaday. Copyright © 2009 University of New Mexico Press, 2009.

For the text of the poem, see The Poetry Foundation here.

For more on Momaday, see his biography at the Poetry Foundation.

Monica Ong is the author of two books: Silent Anatomies, which was the winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in 2015; and Planetaria, which will be released in May 2025. Last year, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow. Ong’s visual poetry has been published in many literary magazines and exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world.

To learn more about Ong's work, please visit her website.

To purchase a copy of Planetaria, visit the Proxima Vera website.

To learn more about Ted Kooser, visit his website.

If you like these poems that we discussed in this episode, please read Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001). Thanks to Carnegie Mellon Press for granting us permission to read these poems aloud.

This poem illustrates the cover of Abram Van Engen's new book, Word Made Fresh. The book explores connections between poetry and faith, and it serves as an invitation to reading poetry of all kinds--with tools and tips for how to get started and explore broadly.

Special thanks to John Hendrix for the cover illustration of Word Made Fresh, which is an illustration of "As Kingfishers Catch Fire."

Here is the poem by Hopkins:

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

See the poem at the Poetry Foundation.

For more on Hopkins, see here.

The last chapter of Word Made Fresh dwells at length on this poem by Hopkins as an expression of what poetry does and can do in the world.

Links:

• Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church — Have you ever read a book that turned your world upside down? What about a poem? Poetry has the power to enliven, challenge, change, and enrich our lives. But it can also feel intimidating, confusing, or simply “not for us.” In these joyful and wise reflections, Abram Van Engen shows readers how poetry is for everyone—and how it can reinvigorate our Christian faith. Intertwining close readings with personal storytelling, Van Engen explains how and why to read poems as a spiritual practice. Far from dry, academic instruction, his approach encourages readers to delight in poetry, even as they come to understand its form. He also opens up the meaning of poetry and parables in Scripture, revealing the deep connection between literature and theology. Word Made Fresh is more than a guide to poetry—it’s an invitation to wonder, to speak up, to lament, to praise. Including dozens of poems from diverse authors, this book will inspire curious and thoughtful readers to see God and God’s creation in surprising new ways.

To learn more about the Grand Canyon Astronomer in Residence program, click here.

To learn more about Lauren Camp, visit her website.

Lauren's newest collection, In Old Sky, is a collection of the poems that were inspired by the Grand Canyon.

On January 31, we met at Calvin University for its January Series and spoke with Marilyn Nelson about poetry and her work for a live audience.

For more on Marilyn Nelson, visit her website or The Poetry Foundation.

This poem is the title poem of an extraordinary book called How I Discovered Poetry

It was originally published in The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems

Thank you to LSU Press for permission to read and discussion this poem on our podcast.

In this episode, we quote a few pieces from The New Yorker. Here they are, plus a few other resources.

"The Aesthetic Insight of W.S. Merwin" by Dan Chiasson

"The Final Prophecy of W.S. Merwin" by Dan Chiasson

"The Palm Trees and Poetry of W.S. Merwin" by Casey Cep

"When You Go Away: Remembering W.S. Merwin" by Kevin Young

See also The Poetry Foundation.

The poem originally appeared in Present Company (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Thanks to the Wylie Agency for granting us permission to read this poem on the episode.

Haleh Liza Gafori's translations of Rumi's poetry appear in Gold (NYRB Press, 2022).

You can learn more about her work as a vocalist, poet, translator and performer here.

To learn more about Rumi, visit the Poetry Foundation website.

Cover photo from The Walters Art Museum

"The Raincoat" appears in Ada Limón's book The Carrying by Milkweed Editions. Thank you to Milkweed Editions for permission to read the poem on this podcast.

You can find the "The Raincoat" on the Poetry Foundation website.

To learn more about Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, visit the Library of Congress website.

Ada Limón's author website includes information about her six books of poetry as well as interviews, press releases, and her calendar of events.

Photo credit: Shawn Miller, Library of Congress

For more on Li-Young Lee, see The Poetry Foundation here.

Thanks to BOA Editions for granting us permission to read Li-Young Lee's work on our podcast. "From Blossoms" and "The Weight of Sweetness" originally appeared in Rose (BOA Editions, 1986).

"Crib" appears in The Best of It © 2010 by Kay Ryan. Used by permissions of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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.

Thanks to the Georges Borchardt, Inc. for granting us permission to read this poem. You can find "Primary Care" in Alternative Medicine (Duke University Press, 2013).

Links:

• Campo reads Primary Care
• Campo Author Page
• Campo at the Poetry Foundation

To read the text of this poem, click here or see below:

To learn more about Walt Whitman and his work, visit the Walt Whitman Archive, a magnificent compendium of information about Whitman's life, cultural context, and editions of Leaves of Grass.

To learn more about scholar Christopher Hanlon, click here.

Text from Leaves of Grass:

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Clifton wrote from the perspective of a Black woman and many of her most famous poems address race and gender. Clear-eyed about struggles and hardships, insistent in her calls for justice and equality, Clifton's poetry carries a consistent joy and hope, which is apparent (and abundant) in "spring song."

Clifton's poetry was known for its lean style, paring everything down to its essential elements. In addition to award-winning collections of poetry, Clifton also wrote sixteen books for children (and had six children herself).

For the text of "spring song," and for a recording of Lucille Clifton reading it, see The Poetry Foundation.

For more on Lucille Clifton see her biography at The Poetry Foundation.

For an introduction to Lucille Clifton, see the poem sampler "Lucille Clifton 101" by Benjamin Voigt.

Links:

• spring song by Lucille Clifton | Poetry Foundation
• Poetry Foundation
• About Lucille Clifton | Academy of American Poets
• Lucille Clifton 101 by Benjamin Voigt | Poetry Foundation

Margaret Noodin is the author of two bilingual collections of poetry in both Anishinaabemowin and English: Weweni and What the Chickadee Knows. She is a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she also serves as director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education.

To learn more about Ahishinaabemowin, visit ojibwe.net.

To hear the sound of the spring peeper, click on this link.

Photo of Margaret Noodin © Troye Fox.

To read "On the Mystery of the Incarnation," click here.

To read Levertov's essay "Some Notes on Organic Form," click here.

''On the Mystery of the Incarnation'' by Denise Levertov comes from her book A DOOR IN THE HIVE, copyright ©1989 by Denise Levertov. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Photo of Denise Levertov © David Geier. For more information see National Portrait Gallery at The Smithsonian Institution: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2011.103

To read "Poem for Wisconsin," click here.

"Poem for Wisconsin" originally appeared in the collection Sun Bear. Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem on the podcast.

For a glimpse of the "Bronze Fonz," click here.

To see how the Milwaukee Art Museum opens its wings, watch this time-lapse video.

For a sense of the "many moods" of Lake Michigan, see the photography of the wonderful Jin Lee.

For more on William Carlos Williams, see the Poetry Foundation. See the text of "This is Just to Say" there as well.

“This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909-1939, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

For the text of "Those Winter Sundays," click here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays

For more about Robert Hayden, click here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-hayden

We love Reginald Dwayne Betts's introduction to the Centenary Edition of Robert Hayden's Collected Poems, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Please do find a copy at your local library or at your favorite bookstore: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780871406798

In this poem, we explore what makes a poem "poetry" versus some other genre, and we consider what difference such designations make while walking through a longer, narrative poem.

For the text of the poem, see here: https://poets.org/poem/gate-4

For more on Naomi Shihab Nye, see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/naomi-shihab-nye

This poem comes from Honeybee: Poems and Short Prose.

The image has a creative commons license and can be found here.

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

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

In this extraordinary curtal sonnet (a shortened sonnet, curtailed), Hopkins packs immense power. He uses the shortened form to heighten the emotion, drawing himself up short in the end with nothing else that can be said other than "Praise him." This week, we walk through these short lines and unfold some of the ways that Hopkins works.

Hopkins was an immensely influential poet of the Victorian era (late 1800s) whose work was not published or encountered until 1918 in the modernist era. He was a reclusive, Jesuit priest who struggled with depression, but who could also be given over to incredible acts of wonder and praise (as in this poem). He stands outside his time, and has been read and loved by poets of all different persuasions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

For more informaiton on Hopkins, please see The Poetry Foundation.

Toi Derricotte is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of prose called The Black Notebooks. She has won numerous awards and fellowhips, including the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists, the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. With Cornelius Eady she co-founded Cave Canem in 1996, an organization committed to furthering the artistic and professional opportunities for African American poets. "The Minks" comes from her 1990 book Captivity, which explores the legacies of slavery and its impact on African American families in the present day. It is included in I: New and Selected Poems published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which granted us permission to read it for this podcast.

Carl Phillips, our guest for this episode, is also an award-winning poet of multiple collections, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (2020). He has had three books nominated for a National Book Award and has won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, the Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award, and numerous fellowships and other awards. Thank you to Carl for joining us today as our first guest!

For more on Toi Derricotte, please see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/toi-derricotte

For more on Carl Phillips, please see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carl-phillips

For the full text of "The Minks," please see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42872/the-minks

Links:

• The Minks by Toi Derricotte | Poetry Foundation
• Toi Derricotte | Poetry Foundation
• I - University of Pittsburgh Press
• Carl Phillips | Poetry Foundation — the Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award

For the text of Heaney's poem, please see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47555/digging

To hear Seamus Heaney reading this poem himself, please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNRkPU1LSUg

For more on Seamus Heaney, please visit: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/seamus-heaney

Links:

• Digging by Seamus Heaney | Poetry Foundation
• Seamus Heaney reading "Digging"
• More on Seamus Heaney
• Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist