A Mother’s Day Ramble
Posted on 9 May 2010 | 3 responses
This MOTHER’S DAY, I’m far away from my two children, Ethan and Maggie (seen here harvesting bananas on the farm in Costa Rica where they’re living). When we’re together, we love to read, and sometimes read poetry–so I wanted to give myself the Mother’s day gift of reading some of the poems I know they enjoy, and talking about how they work and sound so they might become more familiar. I hope they, and other kids, moms, dads, and poetry folk out there, might enjoy it.
Listen to the show here:
The poems I read are
William Wordsworth “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
Robert Frost “The Pasture” and “The Road Not Taken”
e.e. cummings “maggie and milly and molly and may”
Elizabeth Bishop “The Fish”
Wallace Stevens “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” Read more
If I Have a Wish, It is to Find You
Posted on 13 February 2010 | 3 responses
Joanna Klink is the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University, and is the author of They Are Sleeping (2000), and Circadian (2007). Her latest collection is called Raptus (Penguin 2010). Read Joanna’s description of writing the poem “Aerial” from Raptus, at the Poetry Society of America, here:
http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/own_words/page_6/
More about Joanna, including the texts of the poems we talked about, coming up: in the meantime, please listen to the podcast here:
Anna Deeny: rambling on translation
Posted on 12 May 2010 | No responses
ANNA DEENY is a poet and translator whose most recent work is a beautiful and lauded translation of the book Purgatory by the Chilean poet Raul Zurita (see Unreal Cities podcast) . In our conversation in April 2009, Deeny and I talked about translating, and what it means to move from one language to another, doing justice to the many layers of language and meaning.
Listen to the podcast here:
Rambling on Disaster
Posted on 12 May 2010 | 1 response
PATRICK PRITCHETT is a poet and critic, and a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University. In a recent article in Jacket magazine, Pritchett examines the negotiations of “disaster” in the poetry of George Oppen and Michael Palmer. Listen to the podcast here:
The Rambles of Hajji Baba
Posted on 12 May 2010 | 1 response
SALLY MORRELL, Harvard senior and translator, discusses her translation project: The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isphahan. She also reads poetry in Persian (Farsi) and her original translations. Sally works in the Bow and Arrow Press in Adams House, and is from Memphis, Tennessee. 
Listen to the podcast here:
Bodies for Voices: Mike Doughty
Posted on 23 April 2010 | 1 response
MIKE DOUGHTY is a singer and songwriter whose latest album is called Sad Man, Happy Man. In the 1990s he headed the band Soul Coughing, known for their creative sampling and Mike’s poetic lyric delivery; since 2000 he has been solo–his albums include Skittish, Rockity-Roll, and Golden Delicious. Mike is also a poet; his book, Slanky, was published in 1996 by Soft Skull Press. His songs are poetic, and his poems are musical; the processes of writing for him are inseparable. He is currently working on a memoir.
We spoke in November 2009, when he came to Cambridge on tour. In this episode, Mike reads several poems from Slanky, and talks about his musical and poetic influences, beginning with his work with Seiku Sundiata, Ani diFranco and Suzan-Lori Parks while a student at NYU, through his engagement with hip-hop in New York in the 1990’s, to his newest work, which he describes as resonating with older, more elemental musical forms. 
Listen to the podcast here:
Unreal Cities: Raul Zurita with Anna Deeny
Posted on 15 April 2010 | 3 responses
Purgatory by Raul Zurita. UC Press 2009
The renowned Chilean poet Raul Zurita’s book, Purgatory, responds in broken and multiple forms to the brokenness of experience in Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970’s. With the help of Anna Deeny, the poet and translator of Zurita into English, I spoke with Zurita in spring 2009. The bilingual editon of Purgatory, translated beautifully and with an afterword by Deeny (and a forward by the poet C.D. Wright), was published by the University of California Press in 2009. Zurita and Deeny will be reading together at Poet’s House, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY on May 6, 2010, at 7pm.
Listen to the podcast here:
Works on Paper
Posted on 15 April 2010 | No responses
WILLIAM POWERS is an award-winning journalist (Washington Post, National Journal) and media critic who has been thinking about the importance of staying connected to the peculiar human qualities of paper in the age of digital disembodiment. Poetry–by poets such as Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Mary Oliver–has helped him think about how this question might be inseparable from the problems of disconnection people have always encountered.
Since we spoke in May 2009, Powers has completed the book project inspired by this line of thought: due in June 2010, it’s called Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. Listen to the podcast here:
Poetry and Politics: Rose Styron
Posted on 15 April 2010 | No responses
The amazing Rose Styron spoke with me in May 2009, after having taught a course at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government called “Art and Politics.” Styron is a poet and political activist, and was the wife of the late novelist William Styron.
Listen to the podcast here:
Lonely Animals: Music and Poetry
Posted on 15 April 2010 | 1 response
ONI BUCHANAN is a young American pianist who has performed solo recitals throughout the U.S. and abroad. She is also an award-winning poet. Her second book of poetry, Spring, was published by the University of Illinois Press in September 2008, selected by Mark Doty as a winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series. Her first poetry book, What Animal, was published in 2003 by the University of Georgia Press. She received her Master’s degree in piano performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, her Bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Virginia, and conducted three years of her music studies at the University of Iowa School of Music while pursuing an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I spoke with Oni in June of 2009. Listen to the podcast here:
Splendid Failures: Law and Poetry
Posted on 15 April 2010 | No responses
In a two-part episode, Mark Wolf, Chief Judge of the United States District Court in Massachusetts, talks about the ways in which poetry belongs to his life and his work as a judge.
Listen to Part 1 here:
Listen to Part 2 here: