The Poetry Magazine Podcast

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.

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 talks with torrin a. greathouse, a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist who is the author of DEED, which is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press, and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020). Ok and greathouse discuss the ways in which poetic forms can function as open-source software, and they dive into the beloved burning haibun form greathouse created. She wrote about the form for Poetry's new series, “Not Too Hard to Master,” which you can find alongside her Springsteen-inspired burning haibun, “Dancing in the Dark,” in the July/August issue of Poetry. 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 catalogue 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.

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 60s 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.” “Airspoft” 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 most recent book, The Many Names for Mother, hovers around intergenerational motherhood and trauma, while chronicling her travels, while pregnant, to death camp sites in Poland. Her third poetry collection, 40 WEEKS, 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 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 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 Staurt 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.