Poetry For All

Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American poet born in St. Louis and raised in Jerusalem and San Antonio, focuses on the ordinary to observe the extraordinary. Her poetry often speaks of cultural enco…

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. She has also received aw…

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ win…

The episode explores Milton's great sonnet spun from the difficulties of middle age and new disappointments. We consider how he pulls consolation from his sense of defeat and near despair. Faced with…

Amanda Gorman became the first poet ever to perform at the Super Bowl on February 7, 2021. In this episode we talk about poetry for the masses, mass media, genres of poetry, spoken word, the visual a…

In this episode, we look at "The Collar"--a famous single-stanza poem, playing with meter, rhythm, and rhyme by the seventeenth-century priest and poet, George Herbert.

Here is the poem in full:

TH…

In this episode, Spencer Reece guides us through a reading of "Christmas Tree," one of the last poems that James Merrill wrote before his death. We learned so much through this conversation--about th…

In this episode, we think with the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona, Alberto Ríos, about the meaning of giving. Why do we give? What is giving? And what are its consequences? Ríos wrote this …

This week Mary Jo Bang joins us! We learn about the Bauhaus movement and an influential photographer named Lucia Moholy, whose works were largely stolen during her lifetime. Mary Jo Bang's collection…

This week we read Anne Bradstreet's elegy for her grandchild Elizabeth and draw out the multiple voices (both faith and doubt, both grief and consolation) and the tensions and deep emotions in the wo…

Carl Phillips joins us this week to take a close look at Toi Derricotte's "The Minks." Together we consider the art of narrative poetry, the movements of a single-stanza poem, and the meaning of line…

This week we look at one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets from the seventeenth century. This famous poem (#14, "Batter my heart") turns a poetic tradition of love and longing to religious ends, earnestly…

In this episode we learn about erasure poetry and poetic tradition by looking at Jen Bervin's incredible book NETS, composed of erasure poems created from the sonnets of Shakespeare. The erasures ar…

In this episode, we discuss Claude McKay, an influential poet of the Harlem Renaissance, taking a close look at his incredible sonnet "America."

For help in our preparations for this podcast, we wa…

In this episode we introduce listeners to one of the most resilient forms in English-language poetry: the sonnet. And we do it with one of the most famous sonnets Shakespeare wrote.

For the sonnet i…

To view the poem, please see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45465/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america

To hear Cornelius Eady reading the poem and discussing it, see here: https://www.yo…

Full poem:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)
by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surpr…

In this episode, we begin learning about poetry through Seamus Heaney's great poem "Digging."

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

To hear…