This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Kiki Petrosino, who has published five elegant and remarkable books, all with Sarabande, including the memoir Bright (2022) and the poetry collection White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (2020). Petrosino speaks about crestfallenness and her new essay in the October issue of Poetry, “On Crestfallenness: A Pilgrim, Not a Tractor,” which appeared as part of the Hard Feelings series. She also talks about having her mother join her for her research, teaching across languages, and her love of cookbooks and the stories they tell. With thanks to Danelle Cadena Deulen for the clip of her reading Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Closing Time; Iskandariya” on the podcast Lit from the Basement. And to Sarabande Books, Inc. for permission to include Kiki Petrosino’s poem “Pergatorio” from Witch Wife (2020).

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Kimiko Hahn, who won the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and who is featured in the October 2023 issue of Poetry. Hahn talks about how her work has changed over the years, including her current love of form, and how she’s been mentoring her younger self while putting together her forthcoming new and selected, The Ghost Forest (W.W. Norton). She also discusses being wrong about Elizabeth Bishop, not getting an MFA, and what it was like studying at the University of Iowa as an undergraduate while the graduate program was filled with now-canonical poets like Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Tess Gallagher, and others. Hahn shares two of her incredible poems from the October issue with listeners.

This week, Cindy Juyong Ok talks with Cathy Park Hong, who has published three volumes of poetry and the collection of essays Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Hong introduces us to a new selection from “Spring and All,” featured in the September 2023 issue of Poetry. She discusses how feeling like a “shit mom” during the early days of the pandemic has influenced her new writing, as did the work of other artists and writers who address “failing” at motherhood, like that of visual artist Tala Madani and her “Shit Moms” series.

On this week’s episode, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with poet, essayist, and translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha about the life and work of the renowned Palestinian poet and writer Zakaria Mohammed. Born in Nablus, Palestine, Mohammed was a freelance journalist, editor, and poet who authored nine volumes of poetry. In 1994, after twenty-five years in exile, he returned to his homeland to live in Ramallah where he recently died at the age of seventy-three. Ok and Khalaf Tuffaha discuss Mohammed’s rebelliousness, his democratizing practice of posting early drafts of his poems to Facebook, and how he approached writing in the shadow of Mahmoud Darwish. They also talk about grief, the politics of translation, and the always tricky task of composing an email. Finally, Khalaf Tuffaha treats us to some of Mohammed’s poems in Arabic and English translation that appear in the September 2023 issue of Poetry.

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Kevin Young, who has authored or edited over twenty books including the poetry collection Stones (Knopf, 2021) and the nonfiction investigation Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017). In addition to directing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Young is also the poetry editor at the New Yorker, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the conversation today focuses on all that poetry does. As Young says: “It does the most important things … It’s waiting for you.” We’ll also hear two new gorgeous poems by Young from the July/August 2023 issue of Poetry: “The Stair” (4:20) and “Diptych” (38:06).

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok talks with Richie Hofmann, whose latest book is A Hundred Lovers (Knopf, 2022), about the ancient tale of Hermias of Iasos which informs Hofmann’s poem “Dolphin.” The poem appears in the July/August issue of Poetry alongside “Breed Me,” and we’ll hear both on today’s episode. Hofmann and Ok reveal they are both “Cavafy heads,” and Hofmann discusses the influence of Robert Mapplethorpe on his poems, as well as why lineation is one of the “erotic touchstones” of poetry.

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok talks with torrin a. greathouse, a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist who is the author of the forthcoming DEED (Wesleyan University Press), as well as Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020). Ok and greathouse get into poetic forms—which they liken to open-source software—particularly the beloved “burning haibun” form that greathouse created and that she wrote about for Poetry’s “Not Too Hard to Master” series. The essay appears in the July/August issue of Poetry alongside their Springsteen-inspired burning haibun, “Dancing in the Dark,” which greathouse reads on the podcast. They also interrogate the anti-trans rhetoric and language of radical white feminist poets, and greathouse reads “There’s No Trace of the Word ‘Transgender’ in Adrienne Rich’s Biography,” which previously appeared in Poetry. 

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Douglas Kearney, who joins from Saint Paul, Minnesota. Kearney is the author of eight books of poetry, prose, and libretti, and his poems are often highly distinctive both on and off the page. Today’s conversation begins with spite and Scrabble, which Kearney writes about in his new essay in the July/August issue of Poetry, a continuation of the “Hard Feelings” series. They also talk about the changing topographies in Kearney’s work, the “dintelligibility” of his new poems, and the vital importance of discomfort. Thanks to Douglas Kearney and Wave Books for permission to include Kearney’s reading of “Sand Fire (or The Pool, 2016)” from his book Sho, and to Fonograf Editions for permission to include clips from Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty’s Fodder.

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Elisa Gabbert, who joins us from Providence, Rhode Island. Gabbert is the author of six, soon to be seven, collections of essays and poems, including Normal Distance (Soft Skull Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Any Person Is the Only Self (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Ok writes, “For Elisa, seemingly no field, no form, no fondness, is exempt from her thought or, lucky for us, her writing. She is a lover of surprising etymology and misunderstood quotes. She works toward clarity in play and in study.” Today, the two discuss Gabbert’s essay “On Self-Pity: Go Eat Worms,” which is part of a new series called “Hard Feelings” that makes its debut in the July/August 2023 issue of Poetry. Gabbert explains why she was excited to write a “spirited defense” of self-pity, and more.

This week, new host Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Omar Sakr, who joins us from Sydney, Australia. Sakr tends to the in between, writing prose and poetry, and moving between poetic and political urges, and through queerness and diasporic experience. On this episode, we spend time with a series from Sakr’s newest collection, Non-Essential Work (UQP, 2023). The series, “On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno,’” reflects on and challenges Canto XXVIII, in which Dante comes upon the Prophet in the eighth level of hell. You can read three poems from the series in the June 2023 issue of Poetry. We also continue our new segment, in which guests answer a question from the void, and the episode ends with a surprise visitor. 

This week, new host Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Donika Kelly. The author of two poetry collections, The Renunciations and Bestiary, Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. Rita Dove called The Renunciations, “poetry of the highest order,” and Nikki Finney, who selected Kelly’s first book for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, wrote, “Bestiary’s lesson is complicated and also simple. Love can be hunted down.” Using erasures or Greek myths, writing from terror and travel, Kelly never approaches an event, state, or image in only one way. Today, we hear from a new sequence of poems featured in the June issue of Poetry, and Kelly also answers a question from the void. 

This week, Charif Shanahan speaks with Cynthia Cruz, who joins us from Berlin, Germany. Born on a US military base in Wiesbaden and raised in Northern California, she is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School where her research focuses on Hegel and madness. Cruz is the author of seven poetry collections, as well as two collections of critical work, including The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class. In the book, Cruz writes, “To be working-class in a middle-class world is to be a ghost,” and the book analyzes how the choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers. Her newest collection of poems, Back to the Woods (forthcoming from Four Way Books) was written alongside A Manifesto for the Working Class and shares references with it while also circulating around Freud’s concept of the death drive. According to Cruz, “In its simplest iteration the death drive is an attempt to begin again through the act of self annihilation.” Today, we’ll hear two poems from the new collection, including “Dark Register” from the May issue of Poetry.

This week, Charif Shanahan continues asking the Big Questions, this time with Brian Tierney, who joins us from Oakland, California. They get into poetry as a way to pursue truth, living in a time of ruin, and more. We hear poems from Tierney’s debut collection, Rise and Float (Milkweed Editions, 2022), as well as poems from the May issue of Poetry. In keeping true to Tierney’s complex poetics, this new work emerges from a world of dystopian exhaustion while also insisting on love.

This week, Charif Shanahan asks Marie Howe the Big Questions about writing into the unknown, losing oneself in poems, spirituality, the ineffable, teaching and mentorship, and more. Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Magdalene (W.W. Norton, 2017), which imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape—hailing a cab, raising a child, listening to news on the radio. Howe also co-edited (with Michael Klein) the book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1994). In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship, and from 2012-2014, served as the poet laureate of New York State. Today, we’ll hear two new poems by Howe from the May issue of Poetry, as well as two older poems, including “Prayer,” which lives above Shanahan’s desk. With thanks to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. for permission to include  “Prayer” from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, copyright © 2008 by Marie Howe, and “The Gate” from What the Living Do: Poems, copyright © 1998 by Marie Howe. All rights reserved.

This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from a Ruth Lilly Prize winner who’s worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975: CAConrad. The poet Hoa Nguyen writes of them: “A queer activist, a diviner, and a visionary from beyond the veil, Conrad brings shape to the whispers of the cosmos.... You could say that CAConrad’s practice is a form of magical studies, a practice in dialogue with the ineffable.” We asked Nguyen if she would interview CAConrad for the podcast, and they get into crow justice, poem orgies, and the fact that we are all collaborating whether we think we are or not. We also hear several poems from CAConrad’s forthcoming book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books, 2024).

This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from one of these winners, someone who’s been illuminating a way forward for poetry for over fifty years: Arthur Sze. Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He’s authored eleven books of poetry, most recently The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems out from Copper Canyon Press. We asked his friend, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Forrest Gander, to speak with Sze for this episode of the podcast. Sze shares the story of how he became a poet, which included encouragement from poets and teachers Denise Levertov and Josephine Miles, and the two recall how their friendship started through publication. Not surprisingly, they also lead us into the cosmos. Sze introduces the ancient Sanskrit idea of Indra's net: Everything that happens in the cosmos is like a crystal. If you imagine the cosmos as an immense chandelier and shine light into it, each hanging jewel reflects and absorbs the light of every other. “That’s one of the things poetry does,” Sze says. “We’re not writing in competition—we’re all trying to create poems, and they’re all shining light on each other.

On this episode, Lindsay Garbutt speaks with Nam Le, whose debut book, the short story collection The Boat, was translated into fourteen languages and received over a dozen major awards. We hear poems from his much anticipated first poetry collection, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, out from Knopf this year. The book is incredibly polyvocal, unpredictable, and intimate, yet also politically scathing. Garbutt and Le get into the inherent violence of language and how slippage and ambiguity might be the only way toward truth.

This week, Holly Amos speaks with KB Brookins, a writer, cultural worker, and artist living in Austin, TX, and the author of the chapbook How to Identify Yourself with a Wound, as well as the forthcoming full-length collection Freedom House. Brookins talks about the power of insisting on their transness, getting to know the plants in their neighborhood, being a “career Texan,” and more. We also have the pleasure of hearing poems from Freedom House that appear in the March 2023 issue of Poetry.

This week, Holly Amos speaks with Joanna Klink, who joins us from Austin, Texas. Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields, and she shares some new poems that appear in the February 2023 issue of Poetry. If described directly, the poems feature the mundane, yet they carry a deep sense of unease. Amos states, “The unease is gorgeous, and the gorgeous is uneasy.” Speaking toward that uneasiness, Amos and Klink get into psychic longing, time and aging, attention and attunement, death, and their very different childhood dinner tables. We also hear Muriel Rukeyser, an important influence for Klink’s poem “Called,” speaking in 1959 about the role of the poet in society.

This week, Adrian Matejka sits down with poet and guest editor of the magazine, Charif Shanahan, to talk about oneness, the shifting of identity, and centering love. Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Shanahan’s poems meditate on mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. Shanahan shares how a class he almost dropped with the poet Linda Gregg changed poetry for him forever, and he reads two poems from his new book, Trace Evidence, which is out next month from Tin House Books.

For the month of January, we’re focusing on what keeps us writing. How do we refresh our writing habits and routines? How do poets sustain their writing practices? Today, Holly Amos enlists the help of poets and educators Stefania Gomez and Maggie Queeney. Stefania and Maggie both work in the Poetry Foundation library, and they share some of their inspirations, tips, challenges, and resources. Holly offers two writing prompts, and we hear advice on how to keep making via clips from CAConrad, Jordan Peele, Vi Khi Nao, Ocean Vuong, and Anne Waldman.  Links and writing prompts mentioned in the episode: –Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto –Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom –CAConrad’s website contains many (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual links, and here’s CA speaking about them on Poetry Off the Shelf –Vi Khi Nao on boredom on the Between the Covers podcast from Tin House  –Jordan Peele on writing Get Out at the 2017 Film Independent Forum  –Anne Waldman gives advice to young writers at the Louisiana Channel –Ocean Vuong talks about where he wrote his first book on Late Night with Seth Meyers Boredom Prompt    1. Do something boring. It could be sitting in front of a window, watching a TV show that is boring, listening to a podcast that's not that engaging, but don't multitask—do just the one thing, and do it for as much time as you have (fifteen minutes if that's all you have, or thirty if you've got longer).    2. While you're doing whatever boring thing you're doing, have a timer go off every three minutes, and when it goes off, write down three words.     3. Now, use the words you wrote down to begin your poem. What do they have in common? What's the thread you're finding? Or string them all together for your first line. Dream Writing Space Prompt    1. Envision the place where you're writing in ten years in your dream life. What does that space look like? What's there? Who's there? How tall are the ceilings? What is the light like?    2. Spend ten minutes writing in detail about the space. Embody that future self in that future space.     3. Now write a poem “remembering” your old writing space (so “remembering” your current writing space).

For the month of January, we’re focusing on what keeps us writing. How do poets sustain their writing practices? Are there generative tips and tricks we can learn from them? Today, Holly Amos enlists the help of poet, writer, and dancer Tishani Doshi, whose essay in the December 2022 issue of Poetry is about shape or concrete poetry. Doshi lives in Tamil Nadu, India, and is joining us today from Abu Dhabi, where she is a New York University visiting associate professor. Doshi’s latest book of poetry is A God at the Door (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) and her latest novel is Small Days and Nights (W.W. Norton, 2020). Today, she offers listeners a wonderful writing prompt drawn from one of her favorite concrete poems, which, fascinatingly, is not technically a poem but the dedication that E.E. Cummings included in his book No Thanks.

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Diné poet Tacey M. Atsitty. Atsitty’s debut full-length collection, Rain Scald, was published in 2018, and Arthur Sze described the book as filled with a poetry “where rain, expected to be nourishing, is also a torrent, burning with sensation.” Today, we’ll hear two new poems by Atsitty, “Things to Do with a Monster” and “Lady Birds’ Evening Meetings” from the December issue of Poetry. Atsitty’s new poems come out of her desire to create a bestiary of Diné monsters. The poems explore how and why we create and abandon monsters, what we learn from them, how monsters humble us, and more.

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Diamond Forde, who joins us from Asheville, North Carolina, which she describes as a sort of homecoming. One of five recent recipients of the 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is described as “an intersectional exploration of the trauma and agency held within a body defined by its potential to mother.” Today we’ll hear from a new series of poems by Forde, which appear in the December 2022 issue of Poetry. The poems continue an exploration of maternal lineage, this time centering Forde's grandmother and addressing the complex processes of self-definition, self-reclamation, and biomythography. Belin and Forde also discuss the practice of joy and how poetry is an “assertion of love.”

This week, Ashley M. Jones speaks with Marcus Wicker about a project he began early in the pandemic while looking for sources of calm in books and music. Many of these were space-influenced—OutKast’s album ATLiens, Robert Hayden’s poem “American Journal”—and Wicker began exploring what an extraterrestrial who lands in Atlanta in 2020 would think of America and the way humans treat one another. We’ll hear two poems from this project, “Dear Mothership,” and “How did you learn to speak English?” which appear in Poetry’s December 2022 issue. Like much of Wicker’s poetry, these pieces incorporate popular culture and music references alongside unflinching observations and exciting wordplay.

On this week’s episode, Su Cho speaks with Tariq Luthun, a Palestinian writer and community organizer based in metro Detroit. Luthun is the author of How the Water Holds Me, out from Bull City Press in 2020, and we hear his poem, “I Want to Die,” from the November 2022 issue of Poetry. Cho and Luthun delight us with a brief Pokémon sing-along and discuss hiding bad grades as children in the Midwest, as well as the difficulty of finding joy in an apocalyptic world. Luthun also talks about writing poems as a way to hold and internalize experiences for personal growth.

This week, Su Cho sits down with Taneum Bambrick to talk about two of her favorite things: poetry and intimacy. Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received, recently out from Copper Canyon Press, and Vantage. Their chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the Yemassee Chapbook Prize. Vuong wrote, “This is poetry that encompasses, that let's no one turn away.” That’s exactly how Cho felt reading Bambrick’s poems in the November 2022 issue of Poetry. Cho says, “Bambrick’s poems make me feel incredibly shy and brave at the same time. I say make me because I can’t look away from them. The poems are telling me to sit down and listen.” Join us for a conversation about break ups, vulnerability, rodeos, and so much more.

This week, Poetry’s new editor, Adrian Matejka, sits down with Nikky Finney and Ross Gay for a joy-filled conversation about time and how we catalog it with artifacts, heartbeats, and, of course, poems.   Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements, and we’ll hear from her most recent collection, Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry. Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1974, and we’ll hear from his new collection of essays, Inciting Joy. Both Finney and Gay are featured in the October 2022 issue of Poetry, which marks the magazine’s 110th anniversary.   Excerpts from Nikky Finney’s Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts are copyright © 2020 by Nikky Finney. Published 2020 by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.

Delve into the life and poetry of one of the chief architects of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, Carolyn Marie Rodgers (1940-2010), with a very special guest: Carolyn’s sister, Nina Rodgers Gordon. Born in Bronzeville, Carolyn Marie Rodgers cofounded Third World Press, which remains the largest independent Black-owned press in the United States. Rodgers’s poetry is widely anthologized, and in 1976, her book, How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Today, we have the great honor of hearing her poetry read by her sister, Nina Rodgers Gordon, who talks about what it was like growing up with Carolyn and the many phases of her writing and life. She’s joined in the studio by Andrew Peart, a Chicago-based writer and editor who has worked with Nina for several years to organize the papers of Carolyn Marie Rodgers, and Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, former guest editor of Poetry and editor of the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. You’ll also hear a clip of Rodgers reading her poems in the late sixties and speaking at Northwestern University in 2007 for a symposium called “The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.” You can read more on Rodgers, and more of Rodgers’s work, in the October 2022 issue of Poetry.

This week, Esther Belin and Beth Piatote map out some unique qualities of the Navajo and Nez Perce languages. Piatote is a writer, scholar, and member of the Nez Perce nation, and she offers insight into the embodied experience of language revitalization. We hear her poem “1855,” which borrows language from—and interrupts—Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The year 1855 marks both the publication of Leaves of Grass and the signing of the treaty between the Nez Perce and the US, and Piatote’s poem highlights the relationship between Whitman’s vision of America and the confinement and genocide of Native people. Piatote says, “I’m a big fan of nineteenth-century literature. I love Whitman. I love Emily Dickinson. But I also recognize their specific project of making American literature and creating a type of settler colonial identity through art.” You can read “1855,” along with two other poems by Piatote, in the July/August 2022 issue of Poetry.

This week, Esther Belin speaks with A. Van Jordan about his forthcoming book, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again. The title comes from The Tempest, and the book celebrates Black youth while complicating contemporary understandings of Shakespearian characters and influence. Jordan shares two poems from that forthcoming book: “Airsoft” and “Such Sweet Thunder.” “Airsoft” begins with the epigraph, “For Tamir Rice,” and this November marks the eight-year anniversary since Rice, who was twelve years old, was killed by a white police officer in Cleveland, Ohio, less than an hour away from where Jordan grew up. The second poem Jordan reads, “Such Sweet Thunder,” references A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn album that borrows from the line, “I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder.” Belin and Jordan discuss the impact and legacy of artistic representations of race and explore how Ellington and Strayhorn musically engaged with Shakespeare’s writing.   Thanks to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast for allowing us to share some clips from their episode, “Duke Ellington, Shakespeare, and ‘Such Sweet Thunder.’”

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach. Dasbach emigrated to the United States from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. Her scholarly research focuses on contemporary American poetry related to the Holocaust, and pays particular attention to atrocities in the former Soviet territories. Her first book, The Many Names for Mother, hovers around intergenerational motherhood and trauma, while chronicling her travels, while pregnant, to death camp sites in Poland. She is also the author of Don't Touch the Bones and 40 WEEKS, which will be out next year. Dasbach reads, “I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows,” from the September 2022 issue of Poetry, and shares how the poem originated from an interaction on the playground. You’ll also hear Ukrainian poet Iya Kiva and her translator, Amelia Glaser, reading at the Voices for Ukraine fundraiser and virtual reading series.

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Toni Giselle Stuart, a South African poet, performer, and facilitator. Belin says, “When I first heard Stuart’s poetry, I was moved by her use of sound and breath to create tension and emphasis. She works against fractionating the whole person in ways that offer healing.” We hear two poems by Stuart, “maghrib” and “midnight,” from the July/August 2022 issue of Poetry. The poems are from a new trilogy of speculative fiction. Stuart says of the genre, “Speculative fiction gave me space to explore questions around identity in a way that was less suffocating.” Belin and Stuart also get into rhythm as an integral aspect of acknowledging self and land, and of healing. In the world Stuart is building, she says, “Rhythm has a capital ‘R’.”

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Allison Akootchook Warden, an interdisciplinary artist from the Alaskan Native village of Kaktovik. They discuss the practice of acknowledging land before events and Warden’s poem “we acknowledge ourselves,” which opens the Land Acknowledgments special issue of Poetry magazine. Warden’s writing process for this poem was incredibly collaborative, involving many members of her community, and the poem acknowledges original inhabitants, the historical and current situations connecting them to the land, as well as settlers and foreign governments. “we acknowledge ourselves,” which you’ll hear Warden read from, presents an opportunity to restore, celebrate, heal, and grieve.

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Manny Loley, a Diné poet and storyteller who writes in both the Navajo and English languages. Belin and Loley talk about stories as medicine, the unique poetics of the Navajo language and the meanings and musicality that don’t translate into English, and the importance and industriousness of queer people in Diné creation stories and in the Navajo Nation today. Loley also shares why his most important readers and listeners are his grandma, his mom, and the land. Loley is ‘Áshįįhi born for Tó Baazhní’ázhí; his maternal grandparents are the Tódích’íi’nii, and his paternal grandparents are the Kinyaa’áanii. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, and he serves as the director of the Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute. You can read two of Loley’s poems in Navajo and English in the July/August 2022 issue of Poetry, in print and online.

This week, guest editor Esther Belin speaks with poet and scholar Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Although Belin’s and Wesley’s homelands are far from each other—Wesley’s in Liberia and Belin’s in Diné bikéyah of the Navajo people—they share a deep commitment to their roles as storytellers, and their writing bears witness to the effects of war and invasion in their homelands. Wesley, who now lives in Altoona, Pennsylvania, is a survivor of the civil war in Liberia. She explains how poetry allows her to tell the truth of that experience while leaving some details unwritten. We’ll hear Wesley’s poem, “Black Woman Selling Her Home in America,” from the June 2022 issue of Poetry, and we’ll also hear her wonderful recipe for self-care (which includes teaching everyone to do their own laundry and sleeping in).  Content note: Wesley explicitly describes the effects of war including graphic violence against pregnant people.

In our very first mini episode, Esther Belin shares two writing prompts to help propel you to a place that comforts and aligns you back to center.

This week, Esther Belin and Orlando White talk about Diné thought and poetics, sound and breath in Diné bizaad, the Navajo language, and what it means, as Indigenous writers, to use the English language as a vessel to integrate tribal concepts. They also discuss one of White’s one-word poems, “Water.” Although the poem is only six letters long, there was barely enough time to unpack its complexity.  Orlando White is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and faculty member of Diné College, a tribal college on the Navajo reservation in Tsaile, Arizona. He is the author of LETTERRS (Nightboat Books, 2015) and Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009). You can read two poems by White in the June 2022 issue of Poetry.

This week, we return to the little-known world of Margaret Danner with guest editor Srikanth Reddy, historian Liesl Olson, and poet Ed Roberson. Olson and Roberson were the people who first introduced Reddy to Margaret Danner’s poetry. Olson is the Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library, the building where Margaret Danner worked as an editor of Poetry magazine from 1951 to 1956. Roberson is a celebrated poet living in the South Side of Chicago—probably not far from where Danner grew up and wrote much of her poetry.  Born in 1915, Danner was a contemporary of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes—and knew them personally—but she never achieved the recognition she deserved in her lifetime. It’s hard to find her poetry in print; in fact, Reddy might have borrowed one of the last copies of her collected poems left in Chicago in preparation for this podcast.  Danner wrote about many things—the civil rights movement, African art, gender, class, and faith (there’s a previous episode of the Poetry Magazine Podcast that focuses on Danner’s Baha’i faith). Today, we do a deep dive into one of Danner’s poems that explores race, class, and social mobility in 1950s America. It’s called, “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form,” and it may (or may not) be about an elevator operator who worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Today we explore the Popol Vuh, the foundational sacred narrative of the K’iche people. This Mayan epic tells the story of creation, the role of the gods in human affairs, and the history of migration and settlement in Central America up to the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. The story of the Popol Vuh is pretty amazing itself. It was passed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years, first orally and then written in Mayan glyphs in the mid sixteenth century. The original Mayan text was hidden from Spanish invaders—until the K’iche people allowed a Dominican friar, Francisco Ximenez, to make a Spanish translation in the early 1700s. Today there are many translations of the Popol Vuh—but it’s not nearly as well known as other texts, like the Bible or the Epic of Gilgamesh, even though it’s considered by many to be the oldest book in the Americas.  One incredible thing about the translation we’ll be talking about today is that it’s a family affair. Juan Coy Tení was born into an Indigenous community in Coban, Guatemala; he studied law and is now a social worker living in Kansas. When he married the poet Jesse Nathan’s sister, Juan and Jesse began translating poetry together over email and at gatherings—and now Juan’s son, Josué, an undergraduate student who was raised in the US, has joined in their work as a family of translators. To guest editor Srikanth Reddy, Jesse, Juan, and Josue’s translation—made across borders, languages, and generations—marks an important new chapter in this epic poem’s story.

This week, Srikanth Reddy talks shit, quite literally, with the poet and translator James Shea. Shea recently co-translated, with Ikuho Amano, a little-known essay by the Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki titled “Haiku on Shit.” It’s a surprisingly serious, if not a little deadpan, essay about art and reality, beauty and ugliness, and poop and poetry. One favorite that’s shared in the episode is this one by Issa: “When you show it some sympathy, the baby sparrow takes a crap on you.” Here’s another favorite, this time by Buson: “Fallen red plum blossoms appear to be ablaze on clumps of horse shit.” To begin, Shea and Reddy take us through the history of haiku, starting with the four great poets of the form: Issa, Buson, Basho, and—200 years later—Shiki, who published the essay “Haiku on Shit” over a century ago.

Srikanth Reddy first encountered the complex poetic world of Don Mee Choi as a translator of avant-garde Korean poetry before reading Choi’s own poetry. As a poet, Choi invites readers into her personal history—which is also the history of her father and of war. Even if you haven’t read Choi’s poetry, you’ve probably seen the work of her father—a photojournalist who filmed much of the news footage that Americans saw of the Vietnam War and the Cold War era. Choi is at work on a new book, Wings of Utopia, which is the final book in what unintentionally became a trilogy. In Hardly War, Choi set out to explore the dictatorship era of South Korea, but to understand Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship, she felt she also needed to delve into the 1945 national division of Korea, so she wrote a second book, DMZ Colony. Today you’ll hear three poems from the final book, where Choi orbits around her father’s memories as a way to explore the Gwangju Massacre, and what Walter Benjamin called “temporal magic.”

When Srikanth Reddy was reading about Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis’s work as a curator at the Smithsonian, he was surprised to learn about Davis’s interest in ghosts. This week on the podcast, Reddy speaks with Davis about ghosts and “ghost practice,” and about the unusual way Davis’s novel is being haunted by other writers. They also talk about the Center for Refugee Poetics, founded by Davis with the poet Ocean Vuong, which Davis describes as “a mobile literary arts and education project, a Center without a physical home, a roving sanctuary.” To learn more about the Center for Refugee Poetics, check out Davis’s essay in the April 2022 issue of Poetry, “On Refugee Poetics and Exophony.”

This week, guest editor Srikanth Reddy and poet CM Burroughs dive into the world of Margaret Danner. Danner was a contemporary of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, whom she knew personally, but she never achieved the recognition she deserved in her lifetime. If you look for Danner’s poetry in your local bookstore, you won’t find anything in print. Recently, Burroughs connected with Danner, a poet from her lineage as a Black woman writing in America, but not through Danner’s poems—through her archival “hair-down letters.” Reddy and Burroughs talk about Danner, race in America, and also faith. Danner converted to Baha’i, a relatively new world religion devoted to the unity of all faiths, in the early sixties. Burroughs reads one of her poems titled “God Letter,” from her newest book Master Suffering, and we’ll hear two poems by Danner. We’re grateful to also share a bit from the choir at the Bahá'í House of Worship and their director of music, Van Gilmer. You can read more work by and on Margaret Danner, including CM Burroughs’s “Dear Margaret: An Epistolary Collaboration,” in the March 2022 issue.

When Jay Hopler received a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2017, he was told he had two years to live. He thought, “I have to write a book in twenty-four months.” We’ll hear two poems from that book today. Still Life, out in June from McSweeney’s, is a “violently funny but playfully serious fulfillment of what Arseny Tarkovsky called the fundamental purpose of art: a way to prepare for death, be it far in the future or very near at hand.” Poetry guest editor Srikanth Reddy takes over the helm of the podcast this week, and interviews both Hopler and renaissance scholar and poet Kimberly Johnson. As a literary couple, Hopler and Johnson have shared a life in art for many years, and Johnson’s new book, Fatal, traces her experiences since Hopler’s 2017 diagnosis. Out in May from Persea Books, Paisley Rekdal writes, “Fatal examines how we live poised between terror and delight, stasis and transformation, ever bewildered by how even the simplest objects and events can change everything in instant.” Despite the heavy subject matter, the conversation between Hopler, Johnson, and Reddy contains plenty of laughter.

This week, Suzi F. Garcia sits down with Jennifer Shyue, a translator focusing on contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers. We hear two poems by Julia Wong Kcomt, whose work Shyue has been translating for the past three years. Kcomt was born into a Chinese Peruvian family in 1965, and although Shyue was born in the US decades later, they share many obsessions. Kcomt traveled from an early age, traversing borders, languages, and cultures, and these multiplicities motivated her to write poetry. Shyue’s interest in hybrid identities and linguistic border crossings also motivated her to translate. Garcia and Shyue talk about what it means to write and translate from hyphenated or adjectival identities, as well the connections between language and identity.

This week, Suzi F. Garcia speaks with one of her literary sheroes, Ada Limón. They talk about the importance of seeing but also being seen, the complexity of avoiding a trauma-porn poetics, and naps as part of the creative process.  We hear two poems from Limón’s newest book, The Hurting Kind, including “Foaling Season” from the February 2022 issue of Poetry. 

This week, Suzi F. Garcia had the honor of speaking with Kay Ulanday Barrett, a self-described queer brown Filipinx disabled transgender boi. Barrett is one of the most generous people we have ever encountered, no doubt due to their commitment to care work—which is another way of saying his commitment to collective survival. Their essay “To Hold the Grief & the Growth: On Crip Ecologies” in the January 2022 issue of Poetry is an absolute must read.

Today on the podcast: Joy Harjo. Harjo is the nation's first Native American poet laureate and a playwright, musician, author, and editor. Not everyone knows that Harjo also started playing saxophone at the age of forty. Today, we have the pleasure of hearing from her new album, I Pray for My Enemies, which features musicians from some of the biggest bands of the nineties grunge scene—including R.E.M., Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. We also spoke with Harjo about her early activism, how she came to befriend Audre Lorde, her obsession with maps, and her new memoir, Poet Warrior. The memoir celebrates the influences that shaped Harjo’s poetry and reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland. She writes about her sixth-generation grandfather, who survived the Trail of Tears, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member.  Harjo has been creating her own maps for decades—with her poetry, the way she lives in the world, and recently, with the project Living Nations, Living Words, a collaboration with the Library of Congress and her signature project as United States Poet Laureate. It’s an online map where poems by Native Nations poets can be heard. The conversation starts with how Harjo found poetry.

In today’s episode, Suzi F. Garcia sits down with poet Paul Hlava Ceballos to discuss writing against monoculture. They also dig into the history of banana workers in Ecuador, propaganda, and the art of citation. Ceballos reads from his forthcoming book, banana [ ], which includes images and a mix of handwritten and typed text. If you’d like to read along while you listen, excerpts of the book-length poem appear in the December issue of Poetry.

For guest editor Suzi F. Garcia, getting to know Taylor Johnson’s poetry was a highlight of 2021. Garcia says Johnson’s debut book, Inheritance, absolutely blew her away. The book is described as a “black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence.” Fred Moten said about the book: “I’m singing. I’m singing with them, about them, because of them.” That’s also how Garcia felt reading Johnson’s new poem, “Hymn,” which you’ll hear Johnson read from today.

This week, Gabrielle Bates and Jennifer Cheng read from their epistolary exchange, “So We Must Meet Apart,” published in the November 2021 issue of Poetry. Hosted by Su Cho, this conversation unabashedly feels through infertility, what no one tells you about giving birth, our fraught relationships to perfection, the experience of being in a body, and how distance can create even more possibilities for love.

This week, a celebration of collaboration. Su Cho had the honor of speaking with poets and scholars Kimberly Blaeser, Molly McGlennen, and Margaret Noodin. They talk about how language is a kind of time travel; it helps us preserve our memories, but also puts us in conversation with our ancestors and larger histories. You’ll hear from their collaborative poem in the November issue of Poetry, written in both English and Anishinaabemowin, and how, for each poet, language acquisition is an ongoing, creative, and radical act of resistance.

This week, Holly Amos speaks with poet Su Cho. Cho guest edited the magazine and hosted the podcast for the last few months. They talk about loneliness, anger as a secret weapon, and food! It’s all about food really. Cho reveals her love of Cool Whip on white bread, and she makes Amos cry—though those two things are totally unrelated. We hear several poems from The Symmetry of Fish, Cho’s first book, forthcoming from Penguin in 2022.

This week, poet, memoirist, and translator E.J. Koh on the untranslatability of Han. “Han is very difficult for me to define,” Su Cho agrees. “The dictionary definition is ‘an internalized feeling of deep grief, regret, anger, and sorrow, which is felt by all Koreans,’ but this is complicated because what does it mean to define an entire country by its trauma? And how can those of us who feel the lingering effects, but didn’t live through its history, write about it?” Koh’s work runs into the fog of what we don’t know—yet. This conversation features excerpts from her memoir, The Magical Language of Others, which includes translated letters written by Koh’s mother, and her poem “American Han” from the October issue of Poetry.

This week, Gabrielle Calvocoressi talks about their series of “Miss you” poems. The poems exist as a kind of spell or enchantment, a way to create an actual space for the dead to inhabit. We also hear the incredible poem, “My Perimenopausal Body Cistern Disappointing How Surprising.” Gabrielle was nervous to share the poem but read it anyway, and how lucky we are. This conversation holds a lot of pain and a lot of joy, including their shared love of feasting with friends. It was an historic event as Su never expected to meet a poet who loves food as much as she does.

This week, Su Cho had the honor of speaking with Eugenia Leigh. Cho says reading Leigh’s work changed her: “I was a shy poet, and reading her work emboldened me to say what I needed to say.” They talk about Leigh’s research into attachment theory, the authentic self, healing, hindsight, and how we can accept our past selves. Note: This episode mentions child abuse. Eugenia Leigh reads “My Whole Life I Was Trained to Deny Myself” from the September issue of Poetry. 

This week, a conversation on worldbuilding. Su Cho hosts a roundtable of sorts on what it’s like growing up Asian American in white suburbia with poets Marianne Chan and Lisa Low. They also get into armpit hair, sad mom poems, and how motherhood means having a constant audience–whether we want one or not.  Marianne Chan and Lisa Low read poems from the September 2021 issue of Poetry.

This week, Fred Sasaki had the very special honor of interviewing his friend and colleague, Ashley M. Jones. Jones guest edited the late spring and summer issues of Poetry magazine during a remarkable time in the publication’s history. In this conversation, we hear Jones read from her new book, Reparations Now! Sasaki asks, what are reparations and what do they mean? When did that idea materialize in each of their minds? They also talk about being Gods, being too cool for school, and playing with Barbies.

When Ashley M. Jones first heard the poetry of Jacqueline Allen Trimble, Jones says she heard something “Southern, unapologetically Black, fierce, sweet, and strong.” This week, Jones and Trimble talk about Alabama, activism, and the under-recognized power of historically Black colleges and universities in America. You’ll hear Trimble’s poems “This Is Why People Burning Down Fast Food Joints and Whatnot” and “The Language of Joy” from the July/August issue of Poetry.

This week, Ashley M. Jones and JoAnn Balingit talk about where poetry lives in the face of loss and grief, and how that intimate place can be shared. Balingit’s intimate approach to poetry has had to consider a wider audience during her tenure as poet laureate of Delaware. For example, when Balingit received a request from the Philippine embassy to write a poem, she said yes—but not without pause. The poem was to mark the 75th anniversary of Philippine-American relations. As Balingit put it, “This was a fraught request about a troubled relationship.” Her response was to write a Tanaga—a Filipino poetic form—alongside three other poets who also wrote Tanagas for the embassy marking the occasion. All four poems are in the July/August 2021 issue of Poetry. Today you’ll hear “Tanaga: Song Where Every Filipinx Person Is Standing by the Ocean.”

This week, Ashley M. Jones speaks with one of the most important mentors in her life: poet and scholar Dr. Donna Aza Weir-Soley. They speak about protest and power, Weir-Soley’s mentor Audre Lorde, and the legacies they inhabit and continue as Black poets writing toward liberation. Weir-Soley met Audre Lorde as a student at Hunter College, and came to run the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center. Today, they invite Lorde into the room with the poem, “Power.” You’ll also hear “8 Minutes and 46 seconds,” by Weir-Soley, which appears in the July/August issue of Poetry magazine.

Ashley M. Jones is interested in the way that poetry can bring loved ones back to life. In this week’s episode, Jones sits down with Cathy Linh Che to talk about resurrections on the page. After fleeing Vietnam as refugees, Che’s parents worked as extras on the film Apocalypse Now. Jones and Che talk about the revisionist cinematic history of the film, and the uncanny family story which serves as the backdrop for a series of poems and a memoir.  You’ll hear “Zombie Apocalypse Now: The Making Of” and “Zombie Apocalypse Now: Documentary,” two poems from the June 2021 issue of Poetry.

One thing Ashley M. Jones knows to be absolutely true is that her work is made possible by the poetry and spirit of Lucille Clifton. This week, Jones speaks with Sidney Clifton, one of Lucille Clifton’s daughters. Sidney Clifton is the President of the Clifton House, a new endeavour to transform her childhood home in Baltimore into a gathering place for writers and artists. They speak about mothers, their impenetrable connection to family, and how important it is to honor our journeys, no matter how winding they might be. Jones says, “It was unreal for me to get to spend time with Sidney, and what a joy to also get to invite Ms. Clifton’s poems into the room to join the conversation. What a celebration, indeed.”

Ashley M. Jones says she has never met an Ashley she hasn’t liked. This week, the feeling was mutual. Jones caught up with Ashlee Haze, a force of a poet in every sense of the word. Haze’s poem, “temple,” is featured in this month’s issue of Poetry, along with a video of the poem, which you can check out on our website. Jones and Haze talk about the South, its memory, and the ways in which the world of poetry has opened to new ways of writing, working, and experiencing the form. In this episode, they rebuke the Ivory Tower.

This week we visit the opera. Writer and musician Kevin Simmonds and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis discuss Black sound, Black church, and the future of opera. Davis has been making operas rooted in Black history for over thirty years. X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, premiered in 1986. Today you’ll hear from X, and his opera Amistad, which revisits the story of the Middle Passage.  Simmonds’s new book, The Monster I Am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse, skillfully travels through the life of one of classical music’s greatest virtuosos. Leontyne Price remains one of the twentieth century’s most revered opera singers, and the first Black opera singer to achieve such international acclaim. The book is structured operatically into overture, acts, and postlude, uncovering complex layers of music history, biography, and the body itself. How do our bodies sound? Why do they sound that way?  Simmonds reads from The Monster I Am Today, featured in the April 2021 issue of Poetry.

This week, we hear from one of the co-editors of the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology – yes the very first. It’s called When The Light of The World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. It was edited by Poet Laureate Joy Harjo with Jennifer Elise Foerster and LeAnne Howe.  Organized by geographical region, each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with an emerging poet. Contributors range from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a Diné poet born in 1991.  The poet, translator, and critic André Naffis-Sahely reviewed the anthology in the April 2021 issue of Poetry. Today he speaks with co-editor LeAnne Howe about how the anthology came to be, and why it took so long to get here. Howe, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, opens the conversation with a Choctaw chant. You’ll hear two poems from the anthology. Ishki, Mother, Upon Leaving the Choctaw Homelands, 1831 by LeAnne Howe and The Old Man’s Lazy by Peter Blue Cloud.

Poetry can be a great connector. It can connect us to our bodies and our histories. For Ashley M. Jones, poetry is also a way to connect with faith. In today’s episode, Jones sits down with the poet Faisal Mohyuddin, whose poem “Allah Castles” appears in the May issue of Poetry, the first under Jones’s guest editorship. Mohyuddin and Jones explore faith, the things that move them into action, and their shared pride as high school writing teachers. Jones says she doesn’t believe in coincidences, only an otherworldly alignment. Today’s conversation is a testament to that.   Ashley M. Jones reads from her book dark//thing and Faisal Mohyuddin reads from the May issue of Poetry and from his book The Displaced Children of Displaced Children.

This week, The Cyborg Jillian Weise speaks with Ishmael Reed. Reed is a writer whose decades of work have been immensely influential to Weise. They’ve shared stages and pages as poets, performers, editors, and activists. They both wield humor and satire to seriously consider the violence of our governments, our literature, and the many other forms of erasure that are enacted on the lives and works of disabled people. Born 43 years apart, Reed in Tennessee in 1938, and Weise in Texas in 1981, they share a sort of poetic kinship. Today, they talk about smashing tokenism and the joy of making up new words and new paths.  The Cyborg Jillian Weise reads from the April 2021 issue of Poetry, and Ishmael Reed reads from his newest poetry collection, Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues, Poems 2007-2020.

This week: thoughts on form. Both Marilyn Nelson and Nikki Grimes agree, playing with poetic constraints can create an expansive world to write within. Listen as two of the most celebrated authors writing for young readers today share their thoughts on poetic forms. You’ll hear about two of their favorite forms to experiment with, as well as excerpts from both of their memoirs in verse. The impact Nelson and Grimes have had on the field of writing for younger audiences is profound. Both are featured in this month’s special issue of Poetry dedicated to poems for young people.

Spring is almost officially here. This week, poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Danusha Laméris reflect on the year that has passed—a year that has been so different and difficult to comprehend. Nye and Laméris remind us that poetry makes sense when things stop making sense—that poetry can take us over, under, or through difficulty. Nye is the Poetry Foundation's Young People’s Poet Laureate, and one of the guest editors of the magazine's special issue dedicated to poems for young people. When we asked her who she wanted to speak with on the podcast, she said Danusha Laméris, the last person she really spent time with before the lockdown began. The two were essentially meeting for the first time, but they sound like “new-old friends.” They’ve spent a year getting to know each other from afar by exchanging letters, poems, and packages between San Antonio, Texas, and Santa Cruz, California. You’ll hear poems from Nye and Laméris, including Nye’s poem in the current issue of Poetry, “Every day as a wide field, every page.”

In this week’s episode, Bennett and Monson get into literary ancestors, Monson’s top 5 rappers of all time, and what the future of poetry in this country might look like (if we are brave enough to invest in our young people).  Monson spoke to us from the Michigan Department of Corrections in Freeland, Michigan. His poems are featured in “The Practice of Freedom” issue, which focuses on poetry and visual art produced by artists who have been directly affected by the criminal legal system. Joshua Bennett guest edited the issue alongside Tara Betts and Sarah Ross.  In Bennett's words, “Justin Monson is one of the most courageous, original, daring poets working today. I first encountered his work three years ago, as a judge for PEN America’s Writing for Justice Fellowship, and was absolutely taken aback from the very first lines. The work shimmered. Monson has a fantastic ear, and a citational breadth that is truly a wonder to behold; it’s clear that he reads, and listens, to everything. Postcolonial theory, 90s hip-hop, erasure poetry. It’s all there. All of these traditions are part of the world Monson paints on the page, and is generous enough to share with us.” Need a transcript of this episode? Request a transcript here.

In this week’s episode, Cathy Park Hong and Lynn Xu talk about the startling directness of Korean poet Choi Seungja and the humbling experience of translation. The conversation ranges from Nietzsche to South Korea in the 1980s, and from Paul Celan to capitalism. As Xu says, Choi’s poems contemplate “living with death as one’s companion,” but instead of indulging in nihilism, her poems are often surprisingly hopeful. Choi Seungja is one of the most influential feminist poets in South Korea, and her book Phone Bells Keep Ringing For Me (Action Books) has recently been published in English, thanks to Cathy Park Hong and her cotranslator Won-Chung Kim. Need a transcript of this episode? Request a transcript here.

When we learned that poet Jackson Holbert asked to speak with John Darnielle for this episode, it made so much sense to us. Holbert’s poems in the magazine are simple in construction, but the voice is incredibly distinct. The poems deal with heavy subjects in a way that feels normal, everyday. For those listeners who spent the 90s listening to cassettes of Darnielle’s musical moniker, The Mountain Goats, you know that Darnielle has one of the most deceptively simple and distinct vocal styles you’ll ever encounter.  Holbert and Darnielle discuss everything from Iowa, a shared love of Slipknot, metal, and the physicality of writing. You’ll hear Darnielle read an unreleased lyric for a future song, and read from his latest novel, Universal Harvester. Holbert reads “The Uncle Poem” from the January 2021 issue of Poetry.

On today’s show, Tongo Eisen-Martin talks with activist, icon, legend, Sonia Sanchez. Listen to these brilliant poets pass fire, life, and love between them. Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His poem “Pennies for the Opera” is featured in the December 2020 issue of Poetry as part of a portfolio of work from the book Carving Out Rights from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex. Both Eisen-Martin and Sanchez appear in the book, alongside artists incarcerated at Stateville Prison in Crest Hill, Illinois. Sonia Sanchez is a poet, playwright, professor, and activist. You can read “Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman”—which you’ll hear in this episode—in the April 2018 issue of Poetry.

When we asked Leila Chatti who she wished to speak with most, she chose one of the poets who gave her permission to be a poet herself: Sharon Olds. And not just to be a poet, but to write from a voice she thought wasn’t possible. You’ll hear why. This episode features more poems than we’ve ever had on the Poetry Magazine Podcast. Chatti asked Sharon to read a selection of poems that span 40 years – ranging from her first book, Satan Says, to her most recent book, Arias. Leila also reads from the December issue of Poetry, and her latest collection, Deluge, a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.

Poet Alison C. Rollins recently finished her first outdoor survival training program. Part of her preparation was to read Latria Graham’s essays about the experience of being a Black woman in the outdoors. Graham is a journalist and fifth-generation farmer living in South Carolina. In “Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream,” published in Outside Magazine, Graham describes a moment when—right before leaving for the Great Smoky Mountains—her mother handed her the gun of her late father for protection. Rollins had a very similar experience. Her mother’s first question, when hearing of her daughter's desire to journey into the outdoors, was, “How are you going to protect yourself?” This moment of recognition led Rollins and Graham together, to talk about writing, survival, and, as Rollins calls it, “Black nature joy.”

young and Diggs both work with words, sound, image—and bodies—as Diggs puts it. On today’s show, they talk about funk, Dolly Parton, taking notes, polyglots, and how these different cadences resonate in young’s series peestain. In these collages and poems, featured in the November issue of Poetry, young weaves his own history with the lives of his students and characters like Willis Jackson from the sitcom Diff'rent Strokes. The familiarity and openness of the references are as heartening as they are devastating. Nothing is neat. Nothing is predictable in young’s work—or Digg’s—as you’ll hear today. In the course of the conversation, Diggs reads one of her own poems and a poem by Carl Hancock Rux. Need a transcript of this episode? Request a transcript here.

When we asked Ed Roberson who he’d like to speak with on the show he said: Lyn Hejinian. Longtime friends despite living vastly far apart—Lyn in Berkeley and Ed in Chicago—they’ve been in close dialogue for almost 20 years. Now, for the first time, we have the pleasure of listening in. Topics discussed include the survival of the human species, the safety in friendship, and a pesky octopus at a Pittsburgh aquarium. Ed also reads from a new series of poems in the October 2020 issue of Poetry.

Oli Rodriguez and Xandria Phillips on queer familia, ephemeral cruising spots, McDonald’s, Polaroid film, and much more. Rodriguez’s “Papi, Papi, Papi” appears in the October 2020 issue of Poetry. Need a transcript of this episode? Request a transcript here.

Kit Fan talks with Alice Oswald about her latest book, Nobody. Fan’s review of the book appears in the July/August 2020 issue of Poetry.

Justice Leah Wards Sears talks about how Margaret Walker’s poem “For My People” has been a resource for her throughout her life. Justice Sears’s essay, “Love for My People,” appears in the June 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Karen An-hwei Lee’s poem “On June Blossoming in June” from the June 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Bradley Trumpfheller’s poem “Speculative Realism” from the June 2020 issue of Poetry.

Don Share speaks with Vidyan Ravinthiran and Vahni Capildeo about Ravinthiran’s essay on Capildeo’s work in the May 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss A.E. Stallings’s poem “Daedal” from the May 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Janice N. Harrington’s poem “Wind Shear” from the May 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Mary Ruefle’s poem “Vapor Wake” from the May 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Ocean Vuong’s poem “Not Even This” from the April 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Michael Hofmann’s poem “Famous Poets” from the April 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Tishani Doshi’s poem “They Killed Cows. I Killed Them.” from the April 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Joy Ladin’s poem “Forgetting” from the April 2020 issue of Poetry.

In this special episode, Thurston Moore and John Kinsella read their collaborative poems from the March 2020 issue of Poetry and have an extended conversation about collaboration, music, poetry, and activism.

The editors discuss John Kinsella and Thurston Moore’s poem “Signal Jamming” from the March 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Fernando Valverde’s “The Balada of New England,” translated by Carolyn Forché, from the March 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Nicole Sealey’s poem “And” from the March 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Ashley August’s poem “Superstition” from the March 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors talk with Jeffrey Yang about the poet Mary Oppen and her autobiography, Meaning a Life. Jeffrey Yang’s essay “Mary Oppen, Meaning a Life” appears in the February 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Dujie Tahat’s poem “salat to be read from right to left” from the February 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Maggie Smith’s poem “Threshold” from the February 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Jack Underwood’s poem “Poem Beginning with Lines by Elizabeth Barrett Browning” from the February 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors talk with Declan Ryan about his review in the January 2020 issue, “Letters Are Not Life,” on The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle.

The editors discuss Gerald Stern’s poem “Torn Coat” from the January 2020 issue of Poetry.