Poetry For All

Robert Hayden was one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. His poems are known for their formal grace and his deep and broad explorations of the African American experience. "Those Winter Sundays" is one of our all-time favorite poems. We hope you enjoy this conversation. For the text of "Those Winter Sundays," click here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays For more about Robert Hayden, click here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-hayden We love Reginald Dwayne Betts's introduction to the Centenary Edition of Robert Hayden's Collected Poems, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Please do find a copy at your local library or at your favorite bookstore: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780871406798

In this episode, we discuss social poetics, the poetry of witness, and the way poets can speak of the failure of language and the need for silence in the face of trauma. "The worst is not, so long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'" For the text of Langston Hughes's poem "Johannesburg Mines," see here. For more on Langston Hughes, see the Poetry Foundation. For more on social poetics, see Mark Nowak's book by that name. For more on the poetry of witness, see Sandra Beasley's essay "Flint and Tinder." For Anna Akhmatova's "Instead of a Preface" in her great work Requiem as an alternative approach, see here. Thanks to Harold Ober Associates, Inc., for granting us permission to read this poem on our podcast.Links:Poem: Johannesburg Mines by Langston HughesLangston Hughes | Poetry FoundationSocial Poetics – Coffee House PressSandra Beasley: “Flint and Tinder – Understanding the Difference Between ‘Poetry of Witness’ and ‘Documentary Poetics’”Requiem Poem by Anna Akhmatova - Poem Hunter

In this episode, we talk with Vince Sherry about two poems of WWI: Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" and Ivor Gurney's "To His Love." The first poem, a stately beauty, imagines war almost peacefully; the second poem, scarred by combat, speaks back nervously and angrily. We talk through this remarkable set of poems and experiences and examine how a careful use of language conveys their effects. "The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. To His Love by Ivor Gurney He's gone, and all our plans Are useless indeed. We'll walk no more on Cotswold Where the sheep feed Quietly and take no heed. His body that was so quick Is not as you Knew it, on Severn river Under the blue Driving our small boat through. You would not know him now ... But still he died Nobly, so cover him over With violets of pride Purple from Severn side. Cover him, cover him soon! And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers— Hide that red wet Thing I must somehow forget. For more on Rupert Brooke, see The Poetry Foundation. For more on Ivor Gurney, see The Poetry Foundation. Gurney was also a prolific composer. For a sample of his music, see his Goucestershire Rhapsody.Links:The Soldier by Rupert Brooke | Poetry MagazineTo His Love by Ivor Gurney | Poetry FoundationIvor Gurney: A Gloucestershire Rhapsody - YouTubeVincent Sherry | Arts & SciencesRupert Brooke | Poetry FoundationIvor Gurney | Poetry Foundation

In this episode we talk with Christian Wiman about the arc of a book of poetry, the structure of an individual poem, the desire for openness and accessibility, and the surprising shifts from levity to seriousness that take even the writer by surprise. The episode considers how poets construct and organize their poems, and it also touches on differing approaches poets take across their career. Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School, the former editor of Poetry magazine, and the author, editor, and translator of multiple books. He has won countless awards for his poetry and also has extraordinary books of prose, including My Bright Abyss and He Held Radical Light. Today, we talk with him about his poem “I Don’t Want to be a Spice Store” from his latest book of poetry, Survival is a Style. For more on Christian Wiman, please see The Poetry Foundation. This poem comes from Survival is a Style.Links:Survival Is a Style | Christian Wiman | MacmillanChristian Wiman | Poetry Foundation

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