Poetry Unbound

Martín Espada, Puerto Rican American poet, essayist, translator, and National Book Award winner, joins a wide-ranging conversation on poetry, politics, and human dignity. He reads poems about migration, massacre, love, and loss, reflecting on his parents, tenant-law work, and Brooklyn upbringing. He also discusses editing, revision, musicality, and how poetry can transform rage into tenderness and solidarity.

Amanda Quaid, a New York actor, dialect coach, Yale teacher, and poet, discusses turning medical-chart language into poetry after serious illness. She reads from No Obvious Distress and explores parenting through uncertainty, friendship, Shakespeare, voice, accents, and the power of naming. A vivid conversation about performance, family, mortality, and finding beauty in the unknown.

Haleh Liza Gafori, a poet, musician, and acclaimed translator of Rumi, brings the Persian mystic vividly to life. She explores Rumi’s Islamic roots, ecstatic love, and transformative bond with Shams. Persian recitations, Sufi music, whirling, sensuality, migration, and translation reveal a poet whose radical generosity speaks powerfully to troubled times.

Adrian Matejka, poet and editor known for Be Easy, talks about how music and swing shape his lines. He describes an “imaginary discotheque” in his head and how metaphor creates a third space for ideas. He also explores masculinities, different faces of violence, and the research behind poems. Short readings punctuate the conversation.

Karen Leeder, writer, scholar, and translator at Oxford, talks about translating living poets and her award-winning work on Durs Grünbein. She reads poems and explores motifs like memory, form, and musical language. She discusses translation as a political and humane practice that broadens audiences and challenges insularity.

Richard Scott, poet, former opera singer, and creative-writing lecturer, discusses his collection That Broke into Shining Crystals. He explores still-life paintings as frozen lyric attention. He reads poems about apples, roses, emeralds, and plums. Crystals become a metaphor for trauma, pressure, and possible healing. The conversation also examines voice, procedure, and the discipline of song.

Kimberly Campanello, poet, translator, and performance artist who created the MOTHERBABYHOME visual-poetry project, talks about making 796 vellum sheets from archival materials. She reads a lamenting piece and reflects on performance as ritual and archival gesture. They discuss poetry as a public rite, the emotional cost of difficult work, persona and vocal craft, and poetry’s DIY accessibility.

Kimberly Campanello, poet, translator and performance artist who teaches at the University of Leeds, discusses reworking Dante’s Inferno into contemporary lyric forms. She talks about family migration, restaurant lessons in care and time, locating cantos in her ancestral village, narrating illness through a poet-narrator, and how translation can be both consolation and creative practice.

Rachel Mann, a priest, poet, and broadcaster, and Yomi Ṣode, a Nigerian-British poet and playwright, meet for a vivid conversation on poetry’s unruly edges. They read work exploring trans identity, Black masculinity, grief, hospitals, Caravaggio, and urban violence. Together, they question who receives grace, how archives can disrupt history, and whose lives are worthy of remembrance.

From a young age, says Palestinian American poet and physician Fady Joudah, “I had such a fascination with the way the alphabet makes music in the mind.” We are thrilled to offer this thoughtful conversation between Pádraig and Fady, recorded when Fady received the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize. Fady reads several poems — including two with the same name! — and speaks of how memory, time, history, faith, love, violence, and difference figure in his work. He says, “Ultimately for my existence as a Palestinian in the 20th or 21st century … I am also always, particularly in English, bridging a gap.” We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes. Fady Joudah is the author of six collections of poems and has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic. He is the editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and his most recent collection, [ … ], was published in 2024 by Milkweed Editions. This interview was recorded on the occasion of him receiving the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize.  Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.