Close Readings

What can a poem do in the face of calamity? This was an extraordinary conversation. Huda Fakhreddine [https://nelc.sas.upenn.edu/people/huda-fakhreddine] joins the podcast to discuss "Pull Yourself Together [https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-01/pull-yourself-together-and-seven-skies-of-homeland-hiba-abu-nada-huda-fakhreddine/]," a poem that Huda has translated into English and that was written by the Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator Hiba Abu Nada. Hiba was killed by an Israeli airstrike in her home in the Gaza Strip on October 20, 2023. She was 32 years old.  In the episode, Huda describes watching a clip of Hiba reading the poem. You can find that clip here [https://youtu.be/G21gSWYWh4Y?si=I_bjrAZahNud5lhX]. Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on modernist movements and trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is the author of Metapoeisis in the Arabic Tradition [https://brill.com/display/title/31773] (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice [https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-arabic-prose-poem.html] (Edinburgh UP, 2021) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry [https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Arabic-Poetry/Stetkevych-Fakhreddine/p/book/9780367562359] (Routledge, 2023). She is also a prolific translator of Arabic poetry: you can find another of her translations of HIba Abu Nada in Protean [https://proteanmag.com/2023/11/03/i-grant-you-refuge/]. Follow Huda on Twitter [https://twitter.com/FakhreddineHuda]. Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. You can also subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.

This is the kind of conversation I dreamed about having when I began this podcast. Emily Wilson [https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/] joins Close Readings to talk about Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite [https://public.websites.umich.edu/~celueb/sappho-poems/single-page/]," a poet and poem at the root of the lyric tradition in European poetry. You'll hear Emily read the poem in the Ancient Greek and then again in Anne Carson's English translation. We talk about the nature of erotic desire, what it's like to have a crush, and how a poem can be like a spell.  Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor of the Humanities. She is a celebrated translator of Homer, having translated both The Odyssey [https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-odyssey] and, more recently, The Iliad [https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-iliad-sept-2023] (both from Norton). Wilson has also published translations of Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca—and is the author of three monographs: The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford, 2014), The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard, 2007), and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins, 2004). You can follow Emily on Twitter [https://twitter.com/emilyrcwilson]. If you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get very occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.

"Poetry," according to this episode's poem, "makes nothing happen." But as our guest, Robert Volpicelli [https://www.rmc.edu/profile/robert-a-volpicelli/], makes clear, that poem, W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats [https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats]," offers that statement not as diminishment of poetry but instead as a way of valuing it for the right reasons. Robert Volpicelli is an associate professor of English at Randolph-Macon College and the author of Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/transatlantic-modernism-and-the-us-lecture-tour-9780192893383?cc=us&lang=en&] (Oxford UP, 2021). That book, which won the Modernist Studies Association's first book prize, will be out in paperback in April 2024. Bob's articles have appeared in journals like PMLA, NOVEL, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He and I co-edited and wrote a brief introduction for "Poetry Networks [https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/41709]," a special issue of the journal College Literature (a journal for which Bob has since become an associate editor).  As ever, if you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get very occasional updates on the pod and my writing.

How does life grow from death? When we taste a fruit, are we, in some sense, ingesting everything the soil contains? Margaret Ronda [https://english.ucdavis.edu/people/mronda] joins the podcast to discuss a poem that poses these questions in harrowing ways, Walt Whitman's  "This Compost [https://poets.org/poem/compost]." [A note on the recording: from 01:10:11 - 01:12:59, Margaret briefly loses her internet connection and I awkwardly vamp. Apologies! Rest assured the remainder of the episode goes off without a hitch!] Margaret Ronda is an associate professor of English at UC-Davis, where she specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End [https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28109] (Post*45 Series, Stanford UP, 2018), and her articles have appeared in such journals as American Literary History [https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/34/4/1389/6833096?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false], Post45 Contemporaries [https://post45.org/2023/06/abortions-poetic-figures/], and PMLA [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/work-and-wait-unwearying-dunbars-georgics/58F494BAF1F14008449165A565E34966] (for which she won the William Riley Parker Prize). She is also the author of two books of poetry, both published by Saturnalia Books: For Hunger [https://www.ipgbook.com/for-hunger-products-9781947817999.php?page_id=32&pid=SIA] (2018) and Personification [https://www.ipgbook.com/personification-products-9780981859156.php?page_id=32&pid=SIA] (2010). You can follow Margaret on Twitter [https://twitter.com/mronda77]. As ever, if you enjoy the episode, please follow the pod and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And sign up for my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

What is a poem worth? What does beauty do to the person who wants it, or to the person who makes it? Michelle A. Taylor [https://twitter.com/scriblerian] joins the pod to talk about Patricia Lockwood's poem "The Ode on a Grecian Urn [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143936/the-ode-on-a-grecian-urn]," a wild and funny and ultimately quite moving poem (which is also, obviously, a riff on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn [https://poets.org/poem/ode-grecian-urn]"). Michelle A. Taylor is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University's Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry [https://fchi.emory.edu/home/fellows/index.html]. Michelle is  a scholar of 20th century literature, and more specifically, literary modernism. She is currently finishing her first book, tentatively titled Clique Lit: Coterie Culture and the Making of Modernism. Her academic essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Modernist Cultures [https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/mod.2023.0403], College Literature [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/746213/summary], Modernism/ modernity Print+ [https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/discomfort], Literary Imagination [https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article-abstract/21/3/324/5583714], and Modernist Archives: A Handbook [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury-handbook-of-modernist-archives-9781350450592/], and she has also written essays and reviews for The Point [https://thepointmag.com/author/mtaylor/], Post45 Contemporaries [https://post45.org/2021/05/come-slowly-eden/], The Fence [https://www.the-fence.com/author/dr-michelle-alexis-taylor/], Poetry Foundation [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158199/because-i-have-not-existed], the Financial Times Magazine [https://www.ft.com/content/1e1342ea-97ae-4816-aa6f-3b7158f72df2], and The New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-secret-history-of-t-s-eliots-muse]. She received her PhD in English from Harvard in 2021, and from 2021 to 2023, she was the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford. If you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get the occasional update on the pod and on my other work.

How might a poem map the passage from life to death? Sylvie Thode [https://english.berkeley.edu/people/sylvie-thode] joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem by Tim Dlugos, "The Far West [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RvLedWDwYwdtdVOJQ3wh4yessLsitBlz/view?usp=drive_link]."  Sylvie is a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley, where she works on poetry and poetics, with particular interest in the poetry of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Though that focus roots her in the 20th century, she has written on poetry from a range of time periods. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Poetry [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/856456], Chicago Review [https://www.chicagoreview.org/drew-daniel-joy-of-the-worm/], Cambridge Literary Review [https://cambridgeliteraryreview.wordpress.com/issue-13/], and Jacket2 [https://jacket2.org/reviews/writing-trauma-silence-and-stillness]. You can follow her on Twitter [https://twitter.com/sylviethode]. Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get an occasional update on the pod and my other work.

For the first time in the run of this podcast (though certainly not the last!) today we have a poem in translation. Marisa Galvez [https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/marisa-galvez] joins Close Readings to discuss "The Song of Nothing [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j8TlS0yViDK4Ab-ZIz9R1dFizkAuR4Ul/view?usp=sharing]," a poem by the first attested troubadour, William IX.   The poem is something like 900 years old, and Marisa helps us see both its strangeness and the sense in which it feels like it might have been written yesterday. You'll hear Marisa read the poem both in an English translation and in its original language, Old Occitan, where its musicality and verve really come through. This was a fascinating conversation about how poems are made—and why, and who and what for—with lessons to offer both about the medieval period and about the poems and songs we encounter today. Marisa Galvez is Professor of French and Italian (and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature) at Stanford University, where she specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. She is the author of two books, both published by University of Chicago Press: Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13249857.html] (2012) and The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo49911567.html] (2020). Her current book project concerns contemporary and modern translations of medieval lyric and how they propose new ways of "lyric knowing" the Global South. Remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates about the pod and about my writing.

Very few scholars have as much enthusiasm for poetry as Stephanie Burt [https://english.fas.harvard.edu/people/stephanie-burt], and so it was a  delight to have her back for this episode. Steph has been in the news of late for offering a (very popular) course at Harvard on Taylor Swift, and we begin this episode by talking in fascinating ways about the long history of the relation between popular music and poetry.  And then we move on to this episode's poem, Allan Peterson's marvelous "I thought all life came from the alphabet [https://www.poetrynw.org/allan-peterson-i-thought-all-life-came-from-the-alphabet/]." Peterson was a new poet to me, and I was totally won over by Steph's framing of him as a poet of science, of intellect, and of fun. This is a poet thinking in surprising ways about the match and mismatches between the world as we find it and the consciousness with which we receive it. He is, in that sense, an epistemological poet, but also at his core a naturalist, a poet whose mind grows in relation to the world he describes. Stephanie Burt is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her most recent book of poems is We Are Mermaids [https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/we-are-mermaids] (Graywolf, 2022) and her most recent book of criticism is Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/stephanie-burt/dont-read-poetry/9780465094516/?lens=basic-books] (Basic Books, 2019). You can follow her on Twitter [https://twitter.com/accommodatingly]. Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you're enjoying it. Share it with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

Some of the most profound insights I have ever had as a student of poetry occurred in the classroom of Paul Fry, and so this episode really is a dream for me. Paul Fry [https://english.yale.edu/people/professors-emeritus/paul-fry] joins the podcast to talk about William Wordsworth's poem "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal [https://poets.org/poem/slumber-did-my-spirit-seal]."  Just an eight-line poem, but it opens for us into some big questions: Where does Wordsworth fit into the history of autobiography and poetry? How should we think of his phrase "spots of time"? Who was "Lucy," the girl who seems to be memorialized in this and a handful of Wordsworth's other poems? What does poetry have to tell us about death? Can it console? Why do we read literature at all, and what does that have to do with the relation between "doing" and "being"?  Paul Fry is William Lampson Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, where he has taught for many decades. He is the author of several books, most recently Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300126488/] (Yale Studies in English, 2008) and Theory of Literature [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300180831/theory-of-literature/] (Yale UP, 2012), a book based on his brilliant Yale lecture course, which you can find online (and entirely for free!) here [https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300]. As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, please follow it and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and on my other work.

What kind of love do we find in comparison? Keegan Cook FInberg [https://keegancfinberg.net/] joins the podcast to discuss Harryette Mullen's poem "Dim Lady [https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mullen-Harryette/Mullen-Harryette_Dim-Lady.jpg]," which is simultaneously a love poem and a (perhaps?) loving tribute to Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 (itself a love poem and parody).  Keegan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is finishing a book called Poetry in General: Interdisciplinarity and U.S. Public Forms. You can find a sample of the work she's doing in that book in her article [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1064015] in Textual Practice on Frank O'Hara and the Seagram Building. And you can find samples of her new project, on poetry and surveillance, in essays she has written on Claudia Rankine [https://academic.oup.com/cww/article-abstract/15/3/326/6444343?redirectedFrom=fulltext] and Solmaz Sharif [https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/article/view/12446]. Follow Keegan on Twitter [https://twitter.com/kfinberg]. As ever, please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you're enjoying it. And share an episode with a friend! You can also subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

"New Year is nearly here / and who, knowing himself, would / endanger his desires / resolving them / in a formula?" So asks James Schuyler in this episode's poem, "Empathy and New Year [https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/schuyler/schuyler_empathy.html]." No resolutions for me this year, but instead an indulgence, a gift to myself, and I hope to you: my friend Eric Lindstrom [https://www.uvm.edu/cas/english/profiles/eric_lindstrom] rejoins the podcast to talk once again about Schuyler, poetry, and friendship. Eric Lindstrom is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the author of two books: Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230299412] (Palgrave, 2011) and Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/jane-austen-and-other-minds/C1E29C95B481498C7030894BA1CE6427](Cambridge, 2022). He is now completing a third book, James Schuyler and the Poetics of Attention: Romanticism Inside Out, which would be the first scholarly monograph dedicated to Schuyler's work. Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get the occasional update on the podcast and on my other work.

Why might a poet set poetry aside for more than two decades and then return to it? What would the return sound like? When, as a young man, George Oppen stopped writing poetry, it was because, in his words, "I couldn't make the art I wanted to make while also pursuing the politics I wanted to pursue." David Hobbs [https://www.davidbeehobbs.com/] joins the podcast to discuss "Ballad [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=30791]," one of the poems Oppen wrote upon his return to poetry.  David B. Hobbs is an assistant professor of English at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, where he is working on his first monograph, What Can You Do Alone?: Lyric Sociality & the Global Depression. He is also the editor of George Oppen's 21 Poems [https://www.ndbooks.com/book/21-poems/] (New Direcitions, 2017). You can read David's introduction [https://www.nybooks.com/online/2017/09/01/the-lost-poems-of-george-oppen/] to that volume in The New York Review of Books and his scholarly article [https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/854595] on Oppen in Modernism/modernity.  Please remember to follow the podcast, and, if you like what you hear, leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And follow my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.

How can a poet choose between his language and his idea of home? A postcolonial turn this week, as Jahan Ramazani [https://english.as.virginia.edu/people/profile/rr5m] joins the podcast to talk about Derek Walcott's "A Far Cry from Africa [https://poets.org/poem/far-cry-africa]." Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Professor and the Director of Modern and Global Studies in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books, most recently Poetry in a Global Age [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo59347589.html] (Chicago, 2020).  Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates about the podcast and my other work.

What a searching, stimulating conversation this was. Elisa Gabbert [http://www.elisagabbert.com/] joins the podcast to talk about a poem she and I have both long loved, Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus]." Elisa is a poet, critic, and essayist—and the author of several books. Her recent titles include Normal Distance [https://softskull.com/books/normal-distance/] (Soft Skull, 2022), The Unreality of Memory [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538347] (FSG Originals, 2020), and The Word Pretty [https://www.blackocean.org/catalog1/the-word-pretty] (Black Ocean, 2018). She has a new book of essays coming out next year: Any Person Is the Only Self [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605896](FSG, 2024). Elisa writes the "On Poetry" column for The New York Times, and she regularly reviews new books of poetry there and elsewhere. You can follow Elisa on Twitter [https://twitter.com/egabbert]. Please follow, rate, review, and share the podcast if you like what you hear. And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates about the podcast and other news about my work.

A conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time: Hanif Abdurraqib [https://www.abdurraqib.com/]joins the podcast to talk about Umang Kalra [https://linktr.ee/umangkalra]'s poem "Job Security [https://proteanmag.com/2023/02/07/job-security/]." Hanif is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, A Fortune for Your Disaster, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and The Crown Ain't Worth Much. He has a new book coming out in March, 2024: There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. You can find links to all of these titles on Hanif's website [https://www.abdurraqib.com/book]. Follow Hanif on Twitter [https://twitter.com/NifMuhammad]. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend, and follow, rate, and review the podcast. Subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get an occasional newsletter to update you on the pod and my other work.

The last of three episodes in our cluster on Louise Glück: one of her oldest and dearest friends, the marvelous poet Ellen Bryant Voigt [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ellen-bryant-voigt] joins the podcast to talk about Louise's poem "Brooding Likeness [https://voetica.com/poem/7086]."  Ellen's books of poetry have recently been assembled into a staggering single volume, Collected Poems [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324035329] (Norton, 2023). She is also the author of two books of prose: The Flexible Lyric [https://ugapress.org/book/9780820321318/the-flexible-lyric/] (Georgia, 1999) and The Art of Syntax [https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/art-syntax](Graywolf, 2009). A couple notes on things that come up in the episode: Ellen discusses Louise's autobiographical note for the Nobel Prize. You can find that autobiographical piece here [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/biographical/]. We listen, during the episode, to a recording [https://poets.org/poem/brooding-likeness-audio-only] of Louise reading "Brooding Likeness." The recording contains an alternate phrase in its penultimate line, and during the episode Ellen and I surmise that it was an earlier version of the poem than the one that appeared in The Triumph of Achilles.  I've since been able to confirm that. The poem first appeared (with the penultimate line as she reads it here) in The New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/04/20/brooding-likeness] on April 12, 1981. The reading we listen to happened on October 22, 1981. The book version, with the version of the line we both prefer, wouldn't be published until 1985. I hope these three episodes on Glück will add something to the beautiful array of memories that have appeared in writing since her passing. I think the guests speak to each other, even as I talk to them one on one, and they do so through their mutual devotion to the poetry of their friend. Please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/] to get occasional updates on my work.

The second episode in our cluster on the great Louise Glück, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/facts/], and who passed away on October 13. Lanny Hammer rejoins the podcast to talk about his friend and colleague Louise and her poem "A Foreshortened Journey [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/poetry/]."  Langdon Hammer [https://english.yale.edu/people/tenured-and-tenure-track-faculty-professors/langdon-hammer] is Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University, where he studies poetry and its place in the culture. Among his recent publications are James Merrill: Life and Art [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/74410/james-merrill-by-langdon-hammer/] (Knopf, 2015) and A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/251165/a-whole-world-by-james-merrill-edited-by-langdon-hammer-and-stephen-yenser/](Knopf, 2021), which he edited with Stephen Yenser. Lanny has also remembered Louise in print: you can find pieces by him about her in The Yale Review [https://yalereview.org/article/langdon-hammer-louise-gl%C3%BCck] and The Paris Review [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/10/20/remembering-louise-gluck/]. I hope you'll hear the beautiful resonances that begin to emerge between the episodes in this cluster—and that, via the poems, they'll give you some sense of the person, the life, and the world she made and left behind. Make sure you're following the podcast to get new episodes as they roll out, and please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Follow my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/] to get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

After a little hiatus, the podcast returns with a cluster of new episodes on the great, late poet Louise Glück, recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/facts/]. Louise passed away on October 13.  First up we have the brilliant poet and writer Elisa Gonzalez [https://www.elisamariegonzalez.com/], who knew Louise as both teacher and friend. Elisa has chosen the poem "A Village Life [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/13/a-village-life]" for our conversation. Elisa's first collection of poems, Grand Tour [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374611378/grandtour], was just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. About the book, Louise Glück wrote, "These poems make me feel as if poems have never before been written." You can find Elisa's poems, essays, and stories in places like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The Point, The Drift, and The New York Times Magazine. Follow Elisa on Twitter [https://twitter.com/athenek].  You can find Elisa's memorial piece for Louise here [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/10/18/against-remembrance-on-louise-gluck/], in The Paris Review. The other conversations in this cluster will roll out over the course of this week—make sure you're following the podcast to get them as soon as they come out.  Please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional newsletters to update you on the podcast and my other work.

"Dear heart, how like you this?" There's really nothing better than that, is there? I talked to Jeff Dolven [https://jdolven.princeton.edu/] about Sir Thomas Wyatt's gorgeous poem "They Flee from Me [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45589/they-flee-from-me]." It's one of the hottest poems I know, and after talking to Jeff I know it much better.   Jeff Dolven is Professor of English at Princeton University [https://english.princeton.edu/people/jeff-dolven], where he teaches courses in poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. He is the author of three books of criticism, including, most recently, Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo27315203.html] (Chicago, 2018), and two books of poetry: Speculative Music [https://www.sarabandebooks.org/all-titles/speculative-music-jeff-dolven] (Sarabande, 2013) and *A New English Grammar [https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9798986799001/a-new-english-grammar.aspx?bCategory=1SP] (dispersed holdings, 2022).  Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share the episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get updates on the podcast.

How is poetry like skipping stones across the surface of a lake? How might a poem be like an undelivered letter or package? Matthew Zapruder [https://matthewzapruder.com/] joins the podcast to talk about James Tate's "Quabbin Reservoir [https://aprweb.org/poems/quabbin-reservoir]," a poem that raises those and other questions—and does so with Tate's gorgeous ear for weird idiom, full of both humor and feeling. (For the backstory on the place this poem is—at least on its surface—about, see this story [https://newengland.com/yankee/history/lost-towns-quabbin-reservoir/].) Matthew Zapruder is the author of five books of poems, including, most recently, Father's Day [https://matthewzapruder.com/books/fathers-day/] (Copper Canyon, 2019), and two books of prose: Why Poetry [https://matthewzapruder.com/books/why-poetry/] (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem: A Memoir [https://matthewzapruder.com/books/story-of-a-poem/] (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books [https://www.wavepoetry.com/] and teaches [https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/faculty-directory/zapruder-matthew] in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California. You can follow Matthew on Twitter [https://twitter.com/matthewzapruder]. As ever, if you enjoy the episode, please follow, rate, and review the podcast. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and on my own writing.