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© 2024 Poetry Centered
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Poetry Centered features curated selections from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work during visits to the Center between 1963 and today. In each episode, a guest poet introduces three poems from Voca, sharing their insights about the remarkable performances recorded in our archive. Each episode concludes with the guest poet reading a poem of their own.
46 Episodes
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Eduardo C. Corral introduces recordings by poets who create and encourage possibilities for others through their inquisitive teaching, their artistic commitment to mystery, or by being fully themselves. He celebrates Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s dedication to delight and surprise (“The Possibilities”), Bei Dao’s inscrutability for the way it affirms the human condition (“Landscape Over Zero”), and Francisco X. Alarcón’s generous spirit and embodiment of what a poet can look like (“Ode to Tomatoes...
Sumita Chakraborty curates poems that draw our attention to the overlooked: to the body’s cycles, to cruelty, to deep attention, to trauma and what comes after. She introduces Lucille Clifton on accepting change and growth (“to my last period”), Ai on the link between violence and loss (“Cruelty”), and Nora Naranjo Morse on vulnerability as potential blessing (“Sometimes I Am a Sponge”). Chakraborty closes by reading her own exploration of the complexities of PTSD, written to an extraterrestr...
Silvina López Medin introduces poems that reflect on the writing process and the openings we encounter therein when boundaries blur between speaker and listener, creator and creation. She shares Robert Hass on going to the movies and Greek rhetorical devices (“Heroic Simile”), Adélia Prado on the earthy charms of poetry (“Seduction,” read by Prado’s translator Ellen Doré Watson), and Anne Carson on making marks (“Short Talk On Homo Sapiens”). López Medin concludes with her poem “I Am Writing ...
Adam O. Davis selects and shares poems that engage with journeys—across time, through mystery, into the past, or to shape a future. He introduces Nathaniel Mackey meditating on eternal questions (“Glenn on Monk’s Mountain”), Maurya Simon reminding us that the dead surround and sustain us (“El Día de los Muertos”), and Robert Creeley poignantly speaking across time (“I Know a Man”). Davis closes by reading his poem “Interstate Highway System,” his own plea for living sparked by a 2015 road tri...
Adrian Matejka reflects on cruelty as manifested in American institutions, history, private lives, and the public realm of the past year. He opens with Ai’s invocation of the human hunger for violence (“Cruelty”), Lucille Clifton’s deft blending of imagery and wisdom (“cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty”), and Al Young’s meditation on American cruelty as it begins with slavery (“The Slave Ship Desire”). To close, Matejka reads his poem “Somebody Else Sold the World,” which considers the ...
Joanna Klink curates poems that blend dream and waking, sparking ordinary life with visionary fire. She shares Jon Anderson wrestling with the desire to walk away (“In Autumn”), Sherwin Bitsui’s haunting epic of water (“Flood Song”), and Linda Gregg’s dreamscape of life without loneliness (“Alma to Her Sister”). Klink closes by reading her poem “On Diminishment,” an intimate, interior landscape of silences and withheld speech.You can find the full recordings of Anderson, Bitsui, and Gregg rea...
Rosa Alcalá curates poems in which the body plays a central role as a performing presence. She selects and shares Roberto Tejada’s exploration of control and surrender (“Sun bursting as in water beads”), Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s stereophonic collaborative poem (“Light Travels”), and Black Took Collective’s daring, experimental performance piece on race and racism (“Betraying Blackness”). Alcalá concludes by reading her poem “You in Cutoffs,” which looks back at the self in the past, a b...
Bojan Louis shares poems that embody deep listening and engagement with particular realities. He introduces Alan Dugan’s grasp of each moment’s truth (“Love Song: I and Thou”); Layli Long Soldier’s poetry of image, witness, and ways of being (“WHEREAS her birth signaled…”); and Angel Nafis’s critical song that speaks to community (“Ghazal to Open Cages”). Louis closes with a recently published ghazal (“Ghazal VI”) of his own.Listen to the full recordings of Dugan, Long Soldier, and Nafis read...
Peggy Robles-Alvarado introduces poems that embody complex identities with honesty, exuberance, and strength. She shares Toi Derricotte’s frank look at the experience of shifting from woman to mother (“Delivery”), Judith Ortiz Cofer’s reckoning with leaving childhood behind (“Quinceañera”), and Ada Limón’s celebration of self-worth and self-pride (“How to Triumph Like a Girl”). Robles-Alvarado concludes with her own poem “Stunting,” a piece sparked by exploring the archive and reflecting on...
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke curates poems by writers who have influenced her own writing through their creative leadership, mentoring, or poetics of belonging. She introduces Juan Felipe Herrera’s invitation to a spirit of generosity and care (“Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way”), Quincy Troupe’s musically attuned tribute to his father (“Poem for My Father”), and Arthur Sze’s transformative vision that unites intelligence with grace (“Adamant”). To close, Hedge Coke reads her poem “Ghost,” ack...
Francisco Aragón shares poems alive with the vibrancy of a particular voice addressed to a particular audience. He introduces Francisco X. Alarcón’s bittersweet homage to a poetic ancestor (“Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón”), Thom Gunn’s farewell address to a beloved fellow writer (“To Isherwood Dying”), and Denise Levertov’s mythic, ecstatic monologue on transformation (“A Tree Telling of Orpheus”). Aragón concludes the episode with a direct address of his own that challenges Arizona’s SB 1070 (“Po...
Jane Hirshfield curates poems that look into the abyss with brave clarity and complex humility. Hirshfield shares Eavan Boland’s probing into the place of shadows that history passes by (“Quarantine”), Miroslav Holub’s reminder that there is life and meaning beyond human precision (“Brief Thoughts on Exactness”), and Tomas Tranströmer’s marrying of the visionary and the vernacular (“Vermeer”). Hirshfield closes by reading her poem “Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and...
Douglas Kearney discusses recordings that give rise to reflections on human interaction and the potential for both connection and violence held there. Kearney introduces Rosa Alcalá as she uses found text to chart the shape of violence (“Are You Okay?"), Martín Espada as he encounters “reeling hyper-reality” in the courtroom (“City of Coughing and Dead Radiators”), and Ai as she pushes the limits between understanding and sympathizing with cruel narrators (“Abortion”). Kearney ends by readi...
Cynthia Cruz introduces poems that mingle “the everyday with the mystical, the unreasonable,” the poems' meaning and beauty transcending the words themselves. Cruz considers the urgency of the quotidian in Denis Johnson’s “The Monk’s Insomnia,” the magical life a poem can carry within itself in Jon Anderson’s “Fox,” and negation as a place of beginning in Orlando White’s “Ats'íísts'in.” To close, Cruz reads “Hotel Letters,” a poem from a forthcoming collection. Listen to the full recordi...
Jack Jung shares poems in which he hears echoes of the themes, musicality, and imagery of Korean modernist poet Yi Sang. Shadow selves recur in each selection: Jung introduces early recordings of James Tate in 1968 on sparring with his shadow (“Shadowboxing”) and W.S. Merwin in 1969 reading a mythical poem about anti-creation (“The Last One”). He also discusses Sawako Nakayasu’s playful, desperate poem in which ants become a double of humans (“Battery”). Jung closes with his translation of Yi...
Michelle Whittaker presents recordings of poems that display their writers’ skill with both narrative and sound as they each consider the body as a site of conflict and grace. Whittaker considers the way Robert Hass employs sound to communicate strong emotion (“A Story About the Body”), connects with Ellen Bryant Voigt’s memories of seeing a family member’s scars (“Lesson”), and celebrates Michael S. Harper’s reflective pairing of narrative tension and cycling sounds (“The Borning Room”). To ...
Oliver Baez Bendorf shares recordings of poets that encourage him to “show up in [his] own life” through both their poetry and the way they themselves move through the world as thinkers, activists, and people. He celebrates Trish Salah’s intelligence and generosity of mind (“Tiresias as Cuir (on the run)”), CAConrad’s expressiveness of voice and connection to the body (“I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead”), and Ching-In Chen’s call to reconsider histories (“dear story of a risk, 1878.”). Baez Bend...
Randall Horton introduces poems that ask us to consider intensely difficult situations, seeing anew their complexity and the humanity of the people involved. He discusses Reginald Dwayne Betts’ exploration of the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic and mass incarceration (“The Invention of Crack”), Brian Turner’s masterful use of point of view (“2000 lbs.”), and Patricia Smith as an example of the way that poets can be instruments for change (“Sitting in my dimly lit cell…”). Horton closes by sharin...
Teaching artists from the Poetry Center’s Writing the Community program offer ideas for using recordings from Voca to inspire K-12 students. Kristen E. Nelson discusses the benefits of using a simple, concrete parameter—such as writing about the moon—for younger students. She shares moon poems by Al Young (“Excerpt from ‘About the 22 Moon Poems’” and “Moon of No Return”) and a student at Miles Exploratory Learning Center. Lisa M. O’Neill discusses the power of using lists and other forms of e...
TC Tolbert shares recordings that express a willingness to be deeply present, including a poem by Akilah Oliver that records intimacy with grief (“Selections from the Putterer’s Notebook and ‘An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet’”), a poem by Rigoberto González that brings exquisite specificity to a migrant’s narrative (“The Bordercrosser’s Pillowbook”), and a Marie Howe poem that demonstrates the power of staying with a constraint for as long as you can (“Magdalene—The Seven D...
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