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The Poetry Magazine Podcast — Arts
The Poetry Magazine Podcast

The Poetry Magazine Podcast takes listeners on an audio journey into and beyond the pages of Poetry. Hear poets share the surprises, confusions, and desires that keep them writing. Produced by Rachel James.

Copyright: ℗ & © 2020 Poetry Foundation

Latest Episodes:

The Life and Poetry of Carolyn Marie Rodgers, with Nina Rodgers Gordon, Andrew Peart, and Srikanth Reddy Oct 04, 2022

Show notes

Delve into the life and poetry of one of the chief architects of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, Carolyn Marie Rodgers (1940-2010), with a very special guest: Carolyn’s sister, Nina Rodgers Gordon.

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

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Esther Belin in Conversation with Beth Piatote Sep 22, 2022

Show notes

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.

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Esther Belin in Conversation with A. Van Jordan Sep 20, 2022

Show notes

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

Thanks to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast for allowing us to share some clips from their episode, “Duke Ellington, Shakespeare, and ‘Such Sweet Thunder.’”

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Esther Belin in Conversation with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach Sep 06, 2022

Show notes

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

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Esther Berlin in Conversation with Toni Giselle Stuart Aug 09, 2022

Show notes

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

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Esther Belin in Conversation with Allison Akootchook Warden Jul 27, 2022

Show notes

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.

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Esther Belin in Conversation with Manny Loley Jul 15, 2022

Show notes

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.

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Esther Belin in Conversation with Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Jun 28, 2022

Show notes

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.

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Mini Episode: Esther Belin Shares Two Writing Prompts Jun 24, 2022

Show notes

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.

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Esther Belin in Conversation with Orlando White Jun 21, 2022

Show notes

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.

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