Poetry For All

Latest Episodes:

Episode 10: Mary Jo Bang, The Head of a Dancer Nov 10, 2020

Show notes

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, A Doll for Throwing uses ekphrastic prose poetry throughout to delve into the riches of the Bauhaus movement which flourished in Germany between the world wars and had longlasting consequences for modern art. With Mary Jo Bang's poem this week, we explore both ekphrasis (poetry about an image) and prose poetry (poetry with no line breaks).

For the full text of the "Head of the Dancer," please see here.

For the image by Lotte Jacobi about which this poem is written, please see here.

For more on Lucia Moholy, please see the MoMA here..

For more on Mary Jo Bang, please see the Poetry Foundation here.

Links:

Episode 9: Anne Bradstreet, In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet Oct 27, 2020

Show notes

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 work of this talented Puritan poet--the first woman from British North America to publish a book of poems.

"In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665 Being a Year and a Half Old"

Farewell dear babe, my heart's too much content,
Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye,
Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,
Then ta'en away unto eternity.
Blest babe why should I once bewail thy fate,
Or sigh the days so soon were terminate;
Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state.

By nature trees do rot when they are grown.
And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown, to have so short a date,
Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.

For more on Anne Bradstreet, please see the Poetry Foundation.

For an essay on Anne Bradstreet's art, please see this short piece by Kevin Prufer.

For an essay on Anne Bradstreet's publication of The Tenth Muse (the first published book by a woman from British North America) and her ambitions as a poet, see this piece by Charlotte Gordon.

For an understanding of Puritan spirituality, please see this short review essay by Abram Van Engen.

Links:

Episode 8: Toi Derricotte, "The Minks" Oct 20, 2020

Show notes

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 breaks.

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

Episode 7: John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14 Oct 14, 2020

Show notes

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 seeking God and questioning whether union with God will ever be achieved.

John Donne was an influential metaphysical poet who enjoyed wide fame in his own day, then went largely unread for two centuries, and then, saw his reputation radically revived in the early twentieth century. He was born into a Catholic family, converted to Anglicanism, and became a minister. Along the way, he wrote both "secular" erotic love poems and "religious" poems of many forms. This poem is one of the nineteen "Holy Sonnets" he wrote.

For a sequence on sonnets, this episode caps a mini-sequence in Poetry For All, which included a sonnet of Shakespeare's (episode 4), a reconception of the sonnet tradition by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay (episode 5), a set of erasure poems drawn from Shakespeare's sonnets by Jen Bervin (episode 6), and a return to the seventeenth-century sonnet tradition with John Donne (episode 7).

For more on John Donne, please see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne

Links:

Episode 6: Jen Bervin, Nets Oct 06, 2020

Show notes

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 are extraordinary--short and moving--and you'll never see Shakespeare the same way again. We also discuss poetic traditions, and the idea of writing into and over top of what has come before.

For an important essay on the political implications of erasure poetry, please see "The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure" by Solmaz Sharif.

For more on Jen Bervin, please visit her website: http://jenbervin.com/

Special thanks this week to Ugly Duckling Presse for giving us permission to read Bervin's poetry aloud. "18" "63" and "64" by Jen Bervin were first published in Nets (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009).

To purchase Nets please visit Ugly Duckling Presse.

Links:

Episode 5: Claude McKay, "America" Sep 29, 2020

Show notes

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 want to thank Professors Bill Maxwell and Vince Sherry at Washington University in St. Louis, both of whom have often taught Claude McKay and this poem in particular. Bill Maxwell in addition has written extensively on McKay, and we encourage you to look up his work.

For the complete collection of McKay's poetry, see Bill Maxwell's edited volume:
Claude McKay, Complete Poems

And for more information on McKay, please visit the Poetry Foundation:

Links:

Episode 4: Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 Sep 22, 2020

Show notes

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 in full, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day

For helpful works on Shakespeare's sonnets, see:

Stephen Booth's edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets

and

Helen Vendler's edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Episode 3: Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America Sep 15, 2020

Show notes

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.youtube.com/watch?v=6QezAVP_HiY

For a foundational essay about Phillis Wheatley and her work, please see June Jordan's essay, "The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America."

For two examples of the way Wheatley has inspired other artists and writers, please see the work of Cornelius Eady and Honoree Fanonne Jeffers.

Eady, "Diabolic"
Eady, "To Phillis Wheatley's Mother"
Eady, Interview

Jeffers, The Age of Phillis

Links:

Episode 2: Emily Dickinson, Tell all the truth Sep 10, 2020

Show notes

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 surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

For more on Emily Dickinson, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson

Links:

Episode 1: Seamus Heaney, Digging Aug 31, 2020

Show notes

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

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

Links:

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