Poetry For All

Wendy Wall joins us to discuss an extraordinary poet whose works went unknown for over three hundred years. Hester Pulter brought together science, religion, poetic traditions and so much more. Her 120 remarkable poems are now available at the award-winning Pulter Project website. In this episode we discuss her work with emblems, her scientific chemistry experiment with flowers, and her wonderment (both worried and confident, doubtful and awestruck) about the resurrection of the body and its reunification with the soul after death. For a biography of Hester Pulter, see here: https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/about-hester-pulter-and-the-manuscript.html For her poems, see the Pulter Project here: https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/ Here is the text of today's poem: "View But This Tulip" (Emblem 40) View but this tulip, rose, or gillyflower, And by a finite, see an infinite power. These flowers into their chaos were retired Till human art them raised and reinspired With beating, macerating, fermentation, Calcining, chemically, with segregation; Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal, Shut up the ashes under Hermes’s seal; Then, with a candle or a gentle fire, You may reanimate at your desire These gallant plants; but if you cool the glass, To their first principles they’ll quickly pass: From sulfur, salt, and mercury they came; When they dissolve, they turn into the same. Then, seeing a wretched mortal hath the power To recreate a Virbius of a flower, Why should we fear, though sadly we retire Into our cause? Our God will reinspire Our dormant dust, and keep alive the same With an all-quick’ning, everlasting flame. Then, though I into atoms scattered be, In indivisibles I’ll trust in Thee. Then let this comfort me in my sad story: Dust is but four degrees removed from glory By Nature’s paths, but God from death and night Can raise this flesh to endless life and light. Then, my impatient soul, contented be, For thou a glorious spring ere long shalt see. After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow, Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow. As wheat in new-plowed furrows rotting lies, Incapable of quick’ning till it dies, So into dust this flesh of mine must turn And lie a while forgotten in my urn. Yet when the sea, and earth, and Hell shall give Their treasures up, my body too shall live: Not like the resurrection at Grand Caire, Where men revive, then straight of life despair; But, with my soul, my flesh shall reunite And ne’er involvéd be with death and night, But live in endless pleasure, love, and light. Then hallelujahs will I sing to thee, My gracious God, to all eternity. Then at thy dissolution patient be: If man can raise a flower, God can thee.

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 encounters and celebrates different cultures. She is the recipient of many awards and is currently the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate. In this poem, we explore what makes a poem "poetry" versus some other genre, and we consider what difference such designations make while walking through a longer, narrative poem. For the text of the poem, see here: https://poets.org/poem/gate-4 For more on Naomi Shihab Nye, see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/naomi-shihab-nye This poem comes from Honeybee: Poems and Short Prose. The image has a creative commons license and can be found here.

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 awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. After earning a BA/MT in English Education from the University of Virginia, she taught public school for several years in San Francisco, and she spent ten summers on the staff of the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. For more about Jenny, please visit her website: https://www.jennyjohnsonpoet.com/

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’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. In this extraordinary curtal sonnet (a shortened sonnet, curtailed), Hopkins packs immense power. He uses the shortened form to heighten the emotion, drawing himself up short in the end with nothing else that can be said other than "Praise him." This week, we walk through these short lines and unfold some of the ways that Hopkins works. Hopkins was an immensely influential poet of the Victorian era (late 1800s) whose work was not published or encountered until 1918 in the modernist era. He was a reclusive, Jesuit priest who struggled with depression, but who could also be given over to incredible acts of wonder and praise (as in this poem). He stands outside his time, and has been read and loved by poets of all different persuasions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For more informaiton on Hopkins, please see The Poetry Foundation.

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 his coming blindness, he hears the voice of Patience giving him the strength to wait. THE TEXT John Milton, "When I Consider How My Light is Spent" When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-milton

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 and the verbal, and the mix of ancient methods with emergent forms. See her poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ejbSCjg2qo See this great article by Virginia Jackson and Meredith Martin about Amanda Gorman's Inauguration Poem at Avidly: The Poetry of the Future For more on Amanda Gorman, see The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amanda-gorman

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: THE COLLAR I struck the board, and cried, "No more; I will abroad! What? shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free, free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store. Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit? Sure there was wine Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn Before my tears did drown it. Is the year only lost to me? Have I no bays to crown it, No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted? All wasted? Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, And thou hast hands. Recover all thy sigh-blown age On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage, Thy rope of sands, Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee Good cable, to enforce and draw, And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. Away! take heed; I will abroad. Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears; He that forbears To suit and serve his need Deserves his load." But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild At every word, Methought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied My Lord. For more on George Herbert, visit the poetry foundation.

In this episode, we discuss Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb," the poem that she recited at the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. We discuss how well suited the poem is to its occasion, Gorman's powerful use of sound, and the conversation that she engages in--with John Winthrop, the Constitution, the Bible, George Washington, Maya Angelou, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Like everyone else in America, we are in love with this poem and hope you enjoy the discussion.

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 the friendship between James Merrill and Spencer Reece, the rhetorical force of visual poems, and the emotional power of elegy during the AIDS pandemic as well as in our own moment. For the full text of "Christmas Tree," please see this page from the September 1995 issue of Poetry magazine. For more on James Merrill, please see this page from the Poetry Foundation website. For more on Spencer Reece, please see this page from the Poetry Foundation website.

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 poem for a broad audience and has shared it with many different groups. It is, on the one hand, a very simple and accessible poem, easy to understand. And it is also, on the other hand, filled with rich layers, structures, images, and contexts. We explore here how simplicity and complexity work together. For the full text of the poem, see here. For more on Alberto Ríos, see the Poetry Foundation here. Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem in this episode. You can find "When Giving Is All We Have" in A Small Story about the Sky: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/a-small-story-about-the-sky-by-alberto-rios/Links:When Giving Is All We Have by Alberto Ríos - Poems | poets.org — inaugural state poet laureate of ArizonaAlberto Ríos | Poetry Foundation