Close Readings

What can a poem do in the face of calamity? This was an extraordinary conversation. Huda Fakhreddine joins the podcast to discuss "Pull Yourself Together," a poem that Huda has translated into English and that was written by the Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator Hiba Abu Nada. Hiba was killed by an Israeli airstrike in her home in the Gaza Strip on October 20, 2023. She was 32 years old. In the episode, Huda describes watching a clip of Hiba reading the poem. You can find that clip here.Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on modernist movements and trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is the author of Metapoeisis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2021) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). She is also a prolific translator of Arabic poetry: you can find another of her translations of HIba Abu Nada in Protean. Follow Huda on Twitter.Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. You can also subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.

This is the kind of conversation I dreamed about having when I began this podcast. Emily Wilson joins Close Readings to talk about Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite," a poet and poem at the root of the lyric tradition in European poetry. You'll hear Emily read the poem in the Ancient Greek and then again in Anne Carson's English translation. We talk about the nature of erotic desire, what it's like to have a crush, and how a poem can be like a spell. Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor of the Humanities. She is a celebrated translator of Homer, having translated both The Odyssey and, more recently, The Iliad (both from Norton). Wilson has also published translations of Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca—and is the author of three monographs: The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford, 2014), The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard, 2007), and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins, 2004). You can follow Emily on Twitter.If you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get very occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.

"Poetry," according to this episode's poem, "makes nothing happen." But as our guest, Robert Volpicelli, makes clear, that poem, W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," offers that statement not as diminishment of poetry but instead as a way of valuing it for the right reasons.Robert Volpicelli is an associate professor of English at Randolph-Macon College and the author of Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour (Oxford UP, 2021). That book, which won the Modernist Studies Association's first book prize, will be out in paperback in April 2024. Bob's articles have appeared in journals like PMLA, NOVEL, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He and I co-edited and wrote a brief introduction for "Poetry Networks," a special issue of the journal College Literature (a journal for which Bob has since become an associate editor). As ever, if you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get very occasional updates on the pod and my writing.

How does life grow from death? When we taste a fruit, are we, in some sense, ingesting everything the soil contains? Margaret Ronda joins the podcast to discuss a poem that poses these questions in harrowing ways, Walt Whitman's "This Compost."[A note on the recording: from 01:10:11 - 01:12:59, Margaret briefly loses her internet connection and I awkwardly vamp. Apologies! Rest assured the remainder of the episode goes off without a hitch!]Margaret Ronda is an associate professor of English at UC-Davis, where she specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (Post*45 Series, Stanford UP, 2018), and her articles have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, Post45 Contemporaries, and PMLA (for which she won the William Riley Parker Prize). She is also the author of two books of poetry, both published by Saturnalia Books: For Hunger (2018) and Personification (2010). You can follow Margaret on Twitter.As ever, if you enjoy the episode, please follow the pod and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And sign up for my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

What is a poem worth? What does beauty do to the person who wants it, or to the person who makes it? Michelle A. Taylor joins the pod to talk about Patricia Lockwood's poem "The Ode on a Grecian Urn," a wild and funny and ultimately quite moving poem (which is also, obviously, a riff on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn").Michelle A. Taylor is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University's Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Michelle is a scholar of 20th century literature, and more specifically, literary modernism. She is currently finishing her first book, tentatively titled Clique Lit: Coterie Culture and the Making of Modernism. Her academic essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Modernist Cultures, College Literature, Modernism/ modernity Print+, Literary Imagination, and Modernist Archives: A Handbook, and she has also written essays and reviews for The Point, Post45 Contemporaries, The Fence, Poetry Foundation, the Financial Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. She received her PhD in English from Harvard in 2021, and from 2021 to 2023, she was the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.If you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get the occasional update on the pod and on my other work.

How might a poem map the passage from life to death? Sylvie Thode joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem by Tim Dlugos, "The Far West." Sylvie is a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley, where she works on poetry and poetics, with particular interest in the poetry of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Though that focus roots her in the 20th century, she has written on poetry from a range of time periods. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Chicago Review, Cambridge Literary Review, and Jacket2. You can follow her on Twitter.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get an occasional update on the pod and my other work.

For the first time in the run of this podcast (though certainly not the last!) today we have a poem in translation. Marisa Galvez joins Close Readings to discuss "The Song of Nothing," a poem by the first attested troubadour, William IX. The poem is something like 900 years old, and Marisa helps us see both its strangeness and the sense in which it feels like it might have been written yesterday. You'll hear Marisa read the poem both in an English translation and in its original language, Old Occitan, where its musicality and verve really come through. This was a fascinating conversation about how poems are made—and why, and who and what for—with lessons to offer both about the medieval period and about the poems and songs we encounter today.Marisa Galvez is Professor of French and Italian (and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature) at Stanford University, where she specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. She is the author of two books, both published by University of Chicago Press: Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (2012) and The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 (2020). Her current book project concerns contemporary and modern translations of medieval lyric and how they propose new ways of "lyric knowing" the Global South.Remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates about the pod and about my writing.

Very few scholars have as much enthusiasm for poetry as Stephanie Burt, and so it was a delight to have her back for this episode. Steph has been in the news of late for offering a (very popular) course at Harvard on Taylor Swift, and we begin this episode by talking in fascinating ways about the long history of the relation between popular music and poetry. And then we move on to this episode's poem, Allan Peterson's marvelous "I thought all life came from the alphabet." Peterson was a new poet to me, and I was totally won over by Steph's framing of him as a poet of science, of intellect, and of fun. This is a poet thinking in surprising ways about the match and mismatches between the world as we find it and the consciousness with which we receive it. He is, in that sense, an epistemological poet, but also at his core a naturalist, a poet whose mind grows in relation to the world he describes.Stephanie Burt is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her most recent book of poems is We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022) and her most recent book of criticism is Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic Books, 2019). You can follow her on Twitter.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you're enjoying it. Share it with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

Some of the most profound insights I have ever had as a student of poetry occurred in the classroom of Paul Fry, and so this episode really is a dream for me. Paul Fry joins the podcast to talk about William Wordsworth's poem "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal." Just an eight-line poem, but it opens for us into some big questions: Where does Wordsworth fit into the history of autobiography and poetry? How should we think of his phrase "spots of time"? Who was "Lucy," the girl who seems to be memorialized in this and a handful of Wordsworth's other poems? What does poetry have to tell us about death? Can it console? Why do we read literature at all, and what does that have to do with the relation between "doing" and "being"? Paul Fry is William Lampson Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, where he has taught for many decades. He is the author of several books, most recently Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (Yale Studies in English, 2008) and Theory of Literature (Yale UP, 2012), a book based on his brilliant Yale lecture course, which you can find online (and entirely for free!) here.As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, please follow it and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and on my other work.

What kind of love do we find in comparison? Keegan Cook FInberg joins the podcast to discuss Harryette Mullen's poem "Dim Lady," which is simultaneously a love poem and a (perhaps?) loving tribute to Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 (itself a love poem and parody). Keegan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is finishing a book called Poetry in General: Interdisciplinarity and U.S. Public Forms. You can find a sample of the work she's doing in that book in her article in Textual Practice on Frank O'Hara and the Seagram Building. And you can find samples of her new project, on poetry and surveillance, in essays she has written on Claudia Rankine and Solmaz Sharif. Follow Keegan on Twitter.As ever, please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you're enjoying it. And share an episode with a friend! You can also subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

"New Year is nearly here / and who, knowing himself, would / endanger his desires / resolving them / in a formula?" So asks James Schuyler in this episode's poem, "Empathy and New Year." No resolutions for me this year, but instead an indulgence, a gift to myself, and I hope to you: my friend Eric Lindstrom rejoins the podcast to talk once again about Schuyler, poetry, and friendship.Eric Lindstrom is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the author of two books: Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Palgrave, 2011) and Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction (Cambridge, 2022). He is now completing a third book, James Schuyler and the Poetics of Attention: Romanticism Inside Out, which would be the first scholarly monograph dedicated to Schuyler's work.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get the occasional update on the podcast and on my other work.

Why might a poet set poetry aside for more than two decades and then return to it? What would the return sound like? When, as a young man, George Oppen stopped writing poetry, it was because, in his words, "I couldn't make the art I wanted to make while also pursuing the politics I wanted to pursue." David Hobbs joins the podcast to discuss "Ballad," one of the poems Oppen wrote upon his return to poetry. David B. Hobbs is an assistant professor of English at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, where he is working on his first monograph, What Can You Do Alone?: Lyric Sociality & the Global Depression. He is also the editor of George Oppen's 21 Poems (New Direcitions, 2017). You can read David's introduction to that volume in The New York Review of Books and his scholarly article on Oppen in Modernism/modernity. Please remember to follow the podcast, and, if you like what you hear, leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And follow my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.

How can a poet choose between his language and his idea of home? A postcolonial turn this week, as Jahan Ramazani joins the podcast to talk about Derek Walcott's "A Far Cry from Africa."Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Professor and the Director of Modern and Global Studies in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books, most recently Poetry in a Global Age (Chicago, 2020). Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates about the podcast and my other work.

What a searching, stimulating conversation this was. Elisa Gabbert joins the podcast to talk about a poem she and I have both long loved, Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus."Elisa is a poet, critic, and essayist—and the author of several books. Her recent titles include Normal Distance (Soft Skull, 2022), The Unreality of Memory (FSG Originals, 2020), and The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018). She has a new book of essays coming out next year: Any Person Is the Only Self (FSG, 2024). Elisa writes the "On Poetry" column for The New York Times, and she regularly reviews new books of poetry there and elsewhere. You can follow Elisa on Twitter.Please follow, rate, review, and share the podcast if you like what you hear. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates about the podcast and other news about my work.

A conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time: Hanif Abdurraqib joins the podcast to talk about Umang Kalra's poem "Job Security."Hanif is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, A Fortune for Your Disaster, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and The Crown Ain't Worth Much. He has a new book coming out in March, 2024: There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. You can find links to all of these titles on Hanif's website. Follow Hanif on Twitter.If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend, and follow, rate, and review the podcast. Subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get an occasional newsletter to update you on the pod and my other work.

The last of three episodes in our cluster on Louise Glück: one of her oldest and dearest friends, the marvelous poet Ellen Bryant Voigt joins the podcast to talk about Louise's poem "Brooding Likeness." Ellen's books of poetry have recently been assembled into a staggering single volume, Collected Poems (Norton, 2023). She is also the author of two books of prose: The Flexible Lyric (Georgia, 1999) and The Art of Syntax (Graywolf, 2009).A couple notes on things that come up in the episode:Ellen discusses Louise's autobiographical note for the Nobel Prize. You can find that autobiographical piece here.We listen, during the episode, to a recording of Louise reading "Brooding Likeness." The recording contains an alternate phrase in its penultimate line, and during the episode Ellen and I surmise that it was an earlier version of the poem than the one that appeared in The Triumph of Achilles. I've since been able to confirm that. The poem first appeared (with the penultimate line as she reads it here) in The New Yorker on April 12, 1981. The reading we listen to happened on October 22, 1981. The book version, with the version of the line we both prefer, wouldn't be published until 1985.I hope these three episodes on Glück will add something to the beautiful array of memories that have appeared in writing since her passing. I think the guests speak to each other, even as I talk to them one on one, and they do so through their mutual devotion to the poetry of their friend.Please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. And subscribe to my Substack to get occasional updates on my work.

The second episode in our cluster on the great Louise Glück, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, and who passed away on October 13.Lanny Hammer rejoins the podcast to talk about his friend and colleague Louise and her poem "A Foreshortened Journey." Langdon Hammer is Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University, where he studies poetry and its place in the culture. Among his recent publications are James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015) and A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021), which he edited with Stephen Yenser. Lanny has also remembered Louise in print: you can find pieces by him about her in The Yale Review and The Paris Review.I hope you'll hear the beautiful resonances that begin to emerge between the episodes in this cluster—and that, via the poems, they'll give you some sense of the person, the life, and the world she made and left behind.Make sure you're following the podcast to get new episodes as they roll out, and please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Follow my Substack to get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

After a little hiatus, the podcast returns with a cluster of new episodes on the great, late poet Louise Glück, recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Louise passed away on October 13. First up we have the brilliant poet and writer Elisa Gonzalez, who knew Louise as both teacher and friend. Elisa has chosen the poem "A Village Life" for our conversation.Elisa's first collection of poems, Grand Tour, was just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. About the book, Louise Glück wrote, "These poems make me feel as if poems have never before been written." You can find Elisa's poems, essays, and stories in places like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The Point, The Drift, and The New York Times Magazine. Follow Elisa on Twitter. You can find Elisa's memorial piece for Louise here, in The Paris Review.The other conversations in this cluster will roll out over the course of this week—make sure you're following the podcast to get them as soon as they come out. Please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional newsletters to update you on the podcast and my other work.

"Dear heart, how like you this?" There's really nothing better than that, is there? I talked to Jeff Dolven about Sir Thomas Wyatt's gorgeous poem "They Flee from Me." It's one of the hottest poems I know, and after talking to Jeff I know it much better. Jeff Dolven is Professor of English at Princeton University, where he teaches courses in poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. He is the author of three books of criticism, including, most recently, Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation (Chicago, 2018), and two books of poetry: Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013) and *A New English Grammar (dispersed holdings, 2022). Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share the episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get updates on the podcast.

How is poetry like skipping stones across the surface of a lake? How might a poem be like an undelivered letter or package? Matthew Zapruder joins the podcast to talk about James Tate's "Quabbin Reservoir," a poem that raises those and other questions—and does so with Tate's gorgeous ear for weird idiom, full of both humor and feeling. (For the backstory on the place this poem is—at least on its surface—about, see this story.)Matthew Zapruder is the author of five books of poems, including, most recently, Father's Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), and two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem: A Memoir (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California. You can follow Matthew on Twitter.As ever, if you enjoy the episode, please follow, rate, and review the podcast. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and on my own writing.

How does suffering separate the person going through it from their friends and loved ones? Priscilla Gilman joins the podcast to talk about a poem that takes on that question in literal terms—it tells the tragic story of a sailor who drowns as his shipmates are forced to sail away—and that sees it, at the same time, as a question we all have to face, William Cowper's "The Castaway."Priscilla Gilman is the author of two books: The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy (Harper, 2011) and The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir (Norton, 2023). She's a former English professor, first at Yale University and then at Vassar College, during which time she published an important article on Cowper's letters in ELH. You can follow Priscilla on Twitter.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast.

What kind of work is the work of poetry, and how does it compare with other kinds of labor? We have the perfect pairing of poem and critic to think through that question on this episode: Kristin Grogan joins the podcast to talk about Lorine Niedecker's "Poet's Work."Kristin is assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, where she works on poetry, poetics, modernism, American literature, modernism, gender, and sexuality. She is nearing completion of her first book, Stitch, Unstitch: Poetry, Modernism, and the World of Work. You can find Kristin's essays and articles in such journals as American Literature, Critical Quarterly, Post45, Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and in several essay collections. With David B. Hobbs, Kristin edited a Post45 cluster on the poet Bernadette Mayer. You can find her contribution to that cluster, on Mayer and keeping a garden, here.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend, with students—with a coworker! And subscribe to my Substack to stay up to date on our plans.

What if life were like a book that you could open at will and know in real time? Gillian White joins the podcast to talk about Elizabeth Bishop's fascinating poem "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance." Gillian is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also runs the Poetry and Poetics Workshop. She is the author of Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry (Harvard UP, 2014). Her essays have also appeared in The New York Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation website, and London Review of Books. You can follow Gillian on Twitter.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And follow my Substack for news about the podcast.

What a delight this was, to talk to my friend Walt Hunter about the marvelous Gwendolyn Brooks poem "kitchenette building." Walt is an associate professor and the Chair of the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of two books of criticism: Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham UP, 2019) and The American House Poem, 1945 - 2021 (Oxford UP, forthcoming in 2023). He is also the author of a book of poems, Some Flowers (Mad Hat Press, 2022), and the translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Frédéric Neyrat's Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham UP, 2017). He edits poetry for The Atlantic, where he is also a frequent contributor, and has published in such journals as New Literary History, American Literary History, Essays in Criticism, Modern Philology, and ASAP/Journal. Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and share an episode with a friend! Follow my Substack to get news of the podcast.

How should we deal with the fact that we have to read the lines of a poem in order, one after another—or, for that matter, that we have to live our days one after the other? That's some of what comes up in my conversation with Evan Kindley about Kenneth Koch and his funny, didactic, and haunting poem "One Train May Hide Another."Evan is an associate editor at the Chronicle Review. He is the author of two books: Questionnaire (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (Harvard UP, 2017). With Kara Wittman, he is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Essay (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is currently writing a "group biography" of the New York School Poets (of which Koch, along with previous podcast subjects Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery, is a crucial member), which is under contract with Knopf, and his essays can be found in such publications as The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and n+1. You can follow Evan on Twitter.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and share an episode with a friend. Finally, subscribe to my Substack to stay up to date on our plans.

I've been waiting for a chance to talk about an Emily Dickinson poem on the podcast, and no one better to do it with than my friend Johanna Winant. She chose "My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —" for our conversation. (If you're curious, you can find an image of Dickinson's manuscript here.)Johanna is an assistant professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, where she works on transatlantic modernism, twentieth-century American literature, philosophy and literature, and transhistorical poetry and poetics. She is completing a book manuscript with the working title "Lyric Logic: American Modernism and the Problem of Induction," and her articles and reviews have appeared in James Joyce Quarterly, Paideuma, Journal of Modern LIterature, Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere. You can follow Johanna on Twitter.As ever, please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack, and you'll get (eventually!) a newsletter to go with each episode.

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" You may know the line, even if you don't know the poem it ends. I had the great pleasure of talking with one of the most accomplished poetry critics of our time, Dan Chiasson, about that poem, William Butler Yeats's fascinating "Among School Children."Dan Chiasson was born and raised in the city of Burlington, Vermont, and received a BA in 1993 from Amherst College and a PhD from Harvard University in 2002. He has written regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Chiasson is the author of six books, including five books of poetry, most recently The Math Campers (Knopf, 2020), and one book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (Chicago, 2007). He is at work on a study of politics and change in American life, Bernie for Burlington: His Rise in a Changing Vermont, 1964-1991, based partly on his own close observation of Sanders since Chiasson was nine years old. Dan Chiasson is Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Spread the word, and share an episode with a friend. Finally, follow my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter to go with each episode.

I talked with my friend Sarah Osment about "Governors on Sominex," a poem by David Berman. In addition to being a poet, Berman was the frontman and lyricist of the band Silver Jews.Sarah works in the Writing Program at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses in Media Aesthetics. She has devoted her intellectual energy to more public-facing projects since earning her PhD in English from Brown University in 2016: she is the co-founder of Hyped on Melancholy, an online magazine devoted to smart words about sad songs and the reasons we cleave to them. Sarah's own essay for Hyped—on Wilson Phillips's "Hold On" and much else besides—is here. She is also co-editor, along with David Hering, of a recent cluster of essays on the poetry and music of David Berman published at Post45.Please follow, rate. and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter to go with each episode.

An episode I've been waiting for from the beginning: Andrew Epstein joins the podcast to talk about John Ashbery, one of the most important poets of the last hundred years, and his beautiful and haunting poem of mid-career, "Street Musicians."Andrew is Professor of English at Florida State University and the author of three books: Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford UP, 2009), Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford UP, 2016), and The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry since 1945 (Cambridge UP, 2022). He blogs about the poets and artists of the New York School at Locus Solus and his essays and articles have appeared in such publications as the New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, LARB, American Literary History, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Comparative Literature Studies, Jacket2, and Raritan. You can follow Andrew on Twitter.As always, please rate and review the podcast if you like what you hear, make sure you're following it to get new episodes automatically uploaded to your feed, and share an episode with a friend. You can also subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get (eventually!) a newsletter to go with each episode.

Harris Feinsod joins the podcast to talk about William Carlos Williams, his great book of 1923, Spring and All, and one of its strange and unforgettable poems, "To Elsie."Harris is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford UP, 2017) and the co-translator (with Rachel Galvin) of Oliverio Girondo's Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018). Harris's articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Comparative Literature, American Literary History, English Language Notes, Modernism/modernity, The Baffler, In These Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and Post45. You can follow Harris on Twitter.If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a rating and review, and share it with a friend! Follow my Substack to get a newsletter with each episode.

Hard to think of a scholar who's had a more significant influence on poetry studies in the last two decades than Virginia Jackson, and so what a thrill it was for me to welcome her onto the podcast to discuss the legendary Phillis Wheatley and her poem "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth."Virginia Jackson is the UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of two monographs, Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) and Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005), and the co-editor, with Yopie Prins, of The Lyric Theory Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014). Her articles have appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, MLQ, New Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, and PMLA. Remember to follow the podcast and to leave a rating and review if you like what you hear. Share this episode with a friend! And sign up for my Substack, where you'll receive a newsletter to go with each episode.

How does poetry emerge out of an ordinary life? Willard Spiegelman joins the podcast to talk about "Losing Track of Language," a poem by Amy Clampitt, a poet who was, in the words of our guest, one of the great "late bloomers" in American poetry.Willard Spiegelman is the author of Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt (Knopf, 2023). He was for many years the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and the editor of the Southwest Review. He is the author of eight books of literary criticism and writes regularly about art and literature for The Wall Street Journal. Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share it with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack to receive a newsletter with each episode.

What do poems require of the persons who make them, in order for those persons to be known in them? Oren Izenberg joins the podcast to talk about that question and a strange and wonderful poem by Allen Grossman that takes it on, "The Life and Death Kisses."Oren Izenberg is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of a monograph, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton UP, 2012). He is currently completing another book, How to Know Everything, about the philosophical significance of poetry's engagement with “ordinary” mental actions like believing, desiring, perceiving, remembering, and intending.Oren's teaching spans the long history of the art (from the Iliad to the poem someone is working on right now). He is the author of many essays on poetry and poetics, which have appeared in a variety of journals and collections (Critical Inquiry, Modernism/modernity, PMLA, Modern Philology, Lana Turner, nonsite, and others). He is a poetry editor at nonsite.org, an online journal of art and ideas. You can follow Oren on Twitter.As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you're following it. Leave a rating or review, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack for thoughts and links to go with each episode.

One of those poems that makes you feel like its ending is perfect, inevitable. I talked with Maya C. Popa about Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring and Fall." Maya is a poet, critic, scholar, and teacher. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: American Faith (Sarabande, 2019) and Wound is the Origin of Wonder (Norton, 2022). She is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches creative writing at the Nightingale-Bamford School and NYU. She has a Ph.D. from Goldsmiths, University of London, on the role of wonder in poetry, a topic she writes about in her Substack. You can also follow Maya on Twitter.As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you're following it. Leave a rating or review, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack for thoughts and links to go with each episode.

What a gift this conversation was. I talked to Evie Shockley about a poem from Ed Roberson's book City Eclogue, "Open / Back Up (breadth of field)."Evie is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of five books of poetry, including the just-released suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). She is also the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U of Iowa P, 2011). Her essays and articles have appeared in such journals as New Literary History, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket2, The Black Scholar, and Callaloo, where she published "On the Nature of Ed Roberson's Poetics."As ever, if you like what you hear, follow the podcast, and leave us a rating and review. Share the episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter to go with each episode.

"The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully." So begins this episode's poem, "Man Carrying Thing," by the modernist American poet Wallace Stevens. I got to talk about it with the scholar and poet Kimberly Quiogue Andrews.Kim is an assistant professor of English at the University of Ottawa and the author of The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). She's also a poet who has published two collections: A Brief History of Fruit (University of Akron Press, 2020) and BETWEEN (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She's the winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry, the New Women's Voices Award, the Ralph Cohen Prize for Criticism, and a development grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her essays and scholarship have appeared in such publications as The Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporaries at Post45, Modernist Cultures, and New Literary History. Her creative work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Asian American Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, and Crab Orchard Review. Follow Kim on Twitter.And please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share the episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter to go with each episode.

"I can't get over / how it all works in together." That's the poet James Schuyler, towards the end of today's poem, "February," a favorite of mine, which I had the great fortune to talk about with an old and beloved friend, Eric Lindstrom.Eric is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the author of two books: Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Palgrave, 2011) and Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2022). He's also the guest editor of two collections of essays: Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism (Romantic Circles, 2014) and Ostensive Moments and the Romantic Arts: Essays in Honor of Paul Fry (Essays in Romanticism, forthcoming in March 2023). His essays have appeared in such journals as ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Criticism, Modern Philology, and Modernism/modernity. His most recent article, "Promethean Ethics and Nineteenth-Century Ecologies," published and available open access at Literature Compass online, was co-written with Kira Braham. Eric is completing a third book, James Schuyler and the Poetics of Attention: Romanticism Inside Out, and, from the gleanings of that project, assembling an uncreative, marginally scholarly commonplace called "'Now and Then': A Poetics and Commonplace of Intermittence."As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you're following it and consider leaving a rating and review. Share it with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter (with more links, thoughts, images) to go with each episode.

A haunting, haunted poem for us today: Beci Carver joins the podcast to discuss Thomas Hardy's poem for his late wife, "The Voice."Beci is a lecturer in 20th-century literature at University of Exeter and the author of Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014). Her articles have appeared in journals like Textual Practice, Critical Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, and Essays in Criticism. She is also very close to completing her second monograph, Modernism's Whims, which I await eagerly. You can follow Beci on Twitter.If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a rating or review—and share an episode with a friend! Finally, subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get a newletter to go with each new episode.

What a thrill it was to talk with Christopher Spaide about one of the great poems of this century, Terrance Hayes's "The Golden Shovel."This is a two-for-one Close Readings experience, since you can't talk about the Hayes poem without also discussing the Gwendolyn Brooks poem that his is "after," "We Real Cool."Christopher Spaide is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he focuses on poetry, ecopoetics, American literature, and Asian American literature. His academic writing on poetry (as well as music and comics) appears in American Literary History, The Cambridge Quarterly, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, ELH, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and several edited collections. His essays and reviews and his poems appear in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, Colorado Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and honors from Harvard University, the James Merrill House, and the Keasbey Foundation.As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a rating and review, and make sure you're following us. Share Close Readings with a friend! And subscribe to the newsletter, where you'll get more thoughts from me and links to things that come up during the episodes.

Contemporary poetry finally makes its debut on Close Readings! Sarah Dowling joins the podcast to discuss a thrilling and powerful new poem by Liz Howard, "True Value."Sarah is the author of three poetry collections: Security Posture, Down, and Entering Sappho, which was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Her first scholarly book, Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, received an honorable mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association. She's also working on another scholarly book, Figure & Ground. Sarah teaches in Victoria College and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. You can follow Sarah on Twitter here.Liz Howard is currently the Shaftesbury Writer in Residence at Victoria College. She is the author of two poetry collections: Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, which won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, which contains "True Value," and which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize in 2022. The recording of Howard reading "True Value" (apologies for its low volume in the episode!) can be found here. Follow Liz on Twitter here.As always, if you like what you hear, please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast. And subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Stephanie Burt joins the podcast to talk about Randall Jarrell's breathtaking poem "The Player Piano."Steph is Professor of English at Harvard University, where she works on poetry (particularly of the 20th and 21st centuries), science fiction, literature and geography, contemporary writing, comics and graphic novels, and literature alongside other arts. She is also a poet—her books of poetry include We Are Mermaids, After Callimachus, Advice from the Lights, Belmont, and Parallel Play. Her critical books include Don't Read Poetry, The Poem Is You, Close Calls with Nonsense, and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Steph regularly reviews new books of poetry and publishes essays in places like The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and The Yale Review. She is also a cohost of Team-Up Moves, a podcast about superhero role-player games. You can follow Steph on Twitter.If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review the podcast. Subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

What a delight it was to talk to the brilliant Katie Kadue about Andrew Marvell's beautiful and perverse poem "The Garden."Katie is the author of Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (Chicago, 2021). She is currently a Fellow at the International Network for Comparative Humanities at Notre Dame and Princeton. She has published academic essays on Andrew Marvell, Michel de Montaigne, and misogyny and cliché in Renaissance lyric poetry, and her writing has also appeared in venues such as n+1, Gawker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Her piece on Marvell for the University of Chicago Press blog provides an excellent brief introduction to the poet we discuss in this episode—you can find it here. Finally, make sure to follow Katie on Twitter.Please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Anthony Reed joins the podcast to discuss June Jordan's marvelous poem "In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr."Anthony is Professor of English and the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) and Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2021). With Vera Kutzinski, Anthony edited Langston Hughes in Context (Cambridge UP, 2022). During the episode, I make reference to Anthony's article, "The Erotics of Mourning in Recent Experimental Black Poetry." We also listen to a recording of Jordan herself reading today's poem. Finally, you can find the transcript of Jordan's visit to Allen Ginsberg's class, during which she discusses "vertical rhythm," here.Please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and subscribe to the newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Lindsay Turner joins the podcast to talk about what is perhaps my favorite love poem ever, Elizabeth Bishop's "The Shampoo." [FYI: For some reason there's a minor technical issue w/my audio quality for the first 3-4 minutes of the episode—sorry!—but, happily, it resolved quickly and doesn't affect the rest of this lovely conversation.]The ShampooThe still explosions on the rocks,the lichens, growby spreading, gray, concentric shocks.They have arrangedto meet the rings around the moon, althoughwithin our memories they have not changed.And since the heavens will attendas long on us,you've been, dear friend,precipitate and pragmatical;and look what happens. For Time isnothing if not amenable.The shooting stars in your black hairin bright formationare flocking where,so straight, so soon?—Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,battered and shiny like the moon.Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs and Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and the chapbook A Fortnight (forthcoming, Doublecross Press). She's an assistant professor in the Department of English at Case Western University. Her second collection of poetry, The Upstate, is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Press's Phoenix Poets series in fall 2023. Her translations from the French include the poetry collections adagio ma non troppo, by Ryoko Sekiguchi (Les Figues Press, 2018), The Next Loves, by Stéphane Bouquet (Nightboat Books, 2019) and Common Life, by Stéphane Bouquet (Nightboat Books, 2023), as well as books of philosophy by Frederic Neyrat (Atopias, co-translated with Walt Hunter, Fordham UP, 2017), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Postcolonial Bergson, Fordham UP, 2019), Anne Dufourmantelle (In Defense of Secrets, Fordham UP, 2020), Richard Rechtman (Living in Death, Fordham UP, 2021) and Éric Baratay (Animal Biographies, UGA Press, 2022). She is the recipient of a WPR Creative Grant from Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room for 2016-17 as well as 2017 and 2019 French Voices Grants.During the episode, we listen to a recording of James Merrill reading Bishop's poem. The full recording can be found on the website of the Key West Literary Seminar. My thanks to Arlo Haskell from the Key West Literary Seminar and Stephen Yenser from the Literary Estate of James Merrill for permission to use the clip. (Copyright @ the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University.) Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and make sure you're signed up for my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Stephen Guy-Bray joins Close Readings to talk about one of the most beautiful sonnets in the English language, George Herbert's "Prayer (I)." Stephen's most recent book is Line Endings in Renaissance Poetry (Anthem, 2022). In the episode we also refer in passing to a recent academic article of his called "Notes on the Couplet in the Sonnet" and to a recent talk he gave on "Aboutness in Shakespeare's Poetry." Follow Stephen on Twitter here.Stephen Guy-Bray is a professor at the University of British Columbia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of four earlier monographs: Shakespeare and Queer Representation (Routledge, 2020), Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From (Toronto, 2009), Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (Toronto, 2006), and Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto, 2002). Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and make sure you're signed up for my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Our own Very Special Christmas Episode: Langdon Hammer joins the podcast to talk about James Merrill's "Christmas Tree."Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015). With Stephen Yenser, he edited A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021). He is also the author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton, 1993) and the editor of Library of America editions of Crane and May Swenson. He is poetry editor at The American Scholar and a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. You can find a free, online version of "Modern Poetry," one of his Yale University undergraduate lecture courses, here.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and sign up for my newsletter for more links and to stay up to date on our plans.

Anahid Nersessian joins Close Readings to talk about her favorite poem, John Keats's "Ode to Psyche." Anahid's most recent book, the extraordinary Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, is now available in a new edition.Anahid is a professor of English at UCLA and the author of two earlier books: Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard: 2015), and The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: 2020). She has published in a wide variety of academic journals and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Please rate and subscribe to the podcast if you like what you hear, and sign up for my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Brian Glavey joins Close Readings to talk about one of the great love poems of the twentieth century, Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke with You." Check out Brian's recent article on the poem in PMLA and his first book, The Wallflower Avant-Garde (Oxford UP, 2016). Follow Brian on Twitter here. You can watch and listen to O'Hara read the poem here and find the full episode of the television series from which that clip was excerpted, Richard O. Moore's USA: Poetry, on the PennSound website.Finally please rate and subscribe to the podcast if you like what you hear, and sign up for my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Not the first proper episode of the podcast but just me, talking for a few minutes about what I hope the podcast will become. The room a poem makes.