Poetry Unbound

Wonder and strangeness commingle with the commonplace and universal in Danielle Chapman’s “Trespassing with Tweens.” In a not-quite mirroring, a human mother and her children stand and watch together in awe as a great blue heron flaps in and feeds its two offspring. The pleasures found here are profound and multiple – the joys in seeing, in sharing an experience of seeing, in seeing with fresh eyes, and in being seen.Danielle Chapman is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her most recent collection of poetry, Boxed Juice, was published in 2024 by Unbounded Edition Press. Her previous collection of poems, Delinquent Palaces, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2015, and her memoir, Holler: A Poet Among Patriots, was released by Unbound Edition Press in 2023. For several years, Chapman served as the Director of Literary Arts and Events for the City of Chicago, and she was also an editor at Poetry Magazine. She currently teaches Shakespeare and creative writing and lives in Hamden, Connecticut, with her family.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Danielle Chapman’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

In Richard Langston’s poem “Hill walk,” he proffers a handful of things that move us over the course of a day — words said or read, notes played, the sight of halting steps taken by a sibling. We marvel at the sound of an unfamiliar bird call, but there’s a startling mystery to the human heart and what it responds to (or doesn’t) and one that we don’t always mark.Richard Langston is a veteran broadcast journalist and director. He comes from Dunedin, New Zealand, and was a driving force in the city’s music scene in the 1980s. He now lives in Wellington and is a proud member of the three-person South Wellington Poetry Society. His poetry collection, Five O’Clock Shadows, was published in 2020 by The Cuba Press.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Richard Langston’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

What sacrifices were made by your parents when you were a child? How did you think about them as they were happening? And how do you think about them now? In his poem “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden holds space for a weighted childhood memory and the regret, love, and pain it evokes.Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was the first Black American poet to be appointed the Consultant of Poetry to the Library of Congress (now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate); he held this role from 1976 to 1978. Hayden was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Hopwood Award, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, and Russell Loines Award for distinguished poetic achievement from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Robert Hayden’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books. 

When you look at people who are younger than you — particularly teenagers — does your mind ever take you back to yourself at their age? Taylor Johnson’s poem “Pennsylvania Ave. SE” performs this feat of time travel, going from a glimpse of two boys on bicycles to a haunting sense memory of what was once so yearned for: to be seen, to be wanted, to be free.Taylor Johnson is proud of being from Washington, D.C. He has received fellowships and scholarships from CALLALOO, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, VONA, Tin House, Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, Conversation Literary Festival, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference, among others. In 2017, Johnson received the Larry Neal Writers' Award from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. His poems appear in The Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and The Paris Review, among other journals and literary magazines. His first book, Inheritance, was published in November 2020 by Alice James Books.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Taylor Johnson’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

In Kinsale Drake’s poem “Put on that KTNN,” she writes about driving to a hometown as a familiar station crackles to life on the car radio. From this corner of America, she creates her own country music — of Navajo voices alongside Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, of drumbeats and guitar licks, of things wrought by nature and things made by humans, all of them rooted in the desert sand.Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a poet, playwright, and performer based out of the Southwest U.S. She is a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series Competition. Her poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, was published by The University of Georgia Press in 2024. Drake’s work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poets.org, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, Nylon, MTV, Teen Vogue, Time, and elsewhere. She recently graduated from Yale University, where she received the J. Edgar Meeker Prize, Academy of American Poets College Prize, Young Native Playwrights Award, and the 2022 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. She is the founder of NDN Girls Book Club.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Kinsale Drake’s poem and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama is back on Monday, December 2. Featured poets in this season include Robert Hayden, Kinsale Drake, Danielle Chapman, Diannely Antigua, and many more. New episodes every week through March 3.Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast, or wherever you listen.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

In this concluding episode of "Poems as Teachers," our special miniseries on conflict and the human condition, host Pádraig Ó Tuama says the poems discussed in this offering are a different kind of teacher: “not as teachers that give us rules to follow — more so teachers that share something of their own intuition.” And for a final reflection, he offers Kai Cheng Thom’s “trauma is not sacred,” which speaks directly, fiercely, and lovingly to the pain, scars, and violence that we humans carry and inflict upon one another.Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist, and community healer. Kai Cheng is the author of the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir; the essay collection I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes at the End of the World (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book); the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book); and the children's books From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li) and For Laika, the Dog Who Learned the Names of the Stars (illustrated by Kai Yun Ching). She won the Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2017.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the final episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Kai’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Being right may feel good, but what human price do we pay for this feeling of rightness? Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The Place Where We Are Right,” translated by Stephen Mitchell, asks us to answer this question, consider how doubt and love might expand and enrich our perspective, and reflect upon the buried and not-so-buried ruins of past conflicts, arguments, and wounds that still call for our attention.Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet and novelist born in Würzburg, Germany, and he lived from 1924 to 2000. His poetry is collected in numerous works, including Open Closed Open, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, and The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.Stephen Mitchell is an author, poet, and translator. His works of translation include The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Gilgamesh, and Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda. Mitchell translated The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai with Chana Bloch.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the sixth episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Yehuda’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

In “Hebrews 13” by Jericho Brown, a narrator says: “my lover and my brother both knocked at my door.” The heat is turned on, scalding coffee is offered and hastily swallowed, and silence is the soundtrack. What an exquisitely awkward triangle it is, and what a human, beautiful, and loving shape that can be.Jericho Brown is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where he also directs the university’s creative writing program. His books of poetry are The New Testament, Please, and The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the fifth episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Jericho Brown’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

In Mosab Abu Toha’s “Ibrahim Abu Lughod and brother in Yaffa,” two barefoot siblings on a beach sketch out a map of their former home in the sand and argue about what went where. Their longing for return to a place of hospitality, family, memory, friends, and even strangers is alive and tender to the touch.Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is his debut book of poems: it won an American Book Award and a 2022 Palestine Book Award, and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry as well as the 2022 Walcott Poetry Prize. His writings from Gaza have appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub, and his poems have been published in Poetry, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, and the New York Review of Books, among others.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the fourth episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Mosab Abu Toha’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

We ask questions to find out the facts, but what if you can’t trust the answers, the questions, or the person who's asking the questions? In Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” translated by Evan Jones, leaders exercise a sinister kind of violence — they’ve taken over people’s imaginations with showy displays of wealth and privilege, time-wasting ceremony, and fear coursing beneath it all.Constantine P. Cavafy was a Greek-language poet born in Alexandria, Egypt, and he lived from 1863 to 1933. His poetry has been published in numerous collections, including The Complete Poems of Cavafy, The Collected Poems, and The Barbarians Arrive Today.Evan Jones is a Greek-Canadian poet based in Manchester, England. His first collection, Nothing Fell Today But Rain, was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, and his British debut, Paralogues, was published in 2012. He is the translator of Constantine Cavafy’s The Barbarians Arrive Today: Poems & Prose, and his most recent poetry collection is Later Emperors.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This is the third episode of "Poems as Teachers," a special seven-part miniseries on conflict and the human condition.We’re pleased to offer Constantine P. Cavafy’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

As appealing as it may sound, is it really possible to live in a world completely free of conflict? No. And since differences and disagreements are inevitable and natural, Joy Harjo gives ground rules in “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.” Her call to us echoes across time and space — a call to listen, to humility, to justice, and to recognizing the land, the living, the dead, the not-yet-living.Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation and the 23rd Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States. She is the author of 10 books of poet­ry, including An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, and She Had Some Horses, and the memoirs Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior. Her most recent poetry collection is Weav­ing Sun­down in a Scar­let Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years. She’s also produced several award-winning albums of music, including her most recent, I Pray for My Ene­mies.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer two sections of Joy Harjo’s longer poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Host Pádraig Ó Tuama gives an overview of this Poetry Unbound mini season that's devoted to poems with wisdom to offer about conflict and humanity. He also brings us Wisława Szymborska’s “A Word on Statistics,” translated by Joanna Trzeciak, which covers statistics of the most human kind — like the number of people in a group of 100 who think they know better, who can admire without envy, or who could do terrible things. Listen, and ask yourself: Which categories do I belong to? Which do I believe?Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, and she lived from 1923 to 2012. Her poetry is collected in numerous volumes including View with a Grain of Sand, Poems New and Collected, Miracle Fair, and Map.Joanna Trzeciak is professor of Russian and Polish Translation and Translation Studies at Kent State University. She has translated two poetry collections: Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska, which was the winner of the Heldt Prize for translation, and Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and winner of the Found in Translation Award and the AATSEEL Award for Best Scholarly Translation.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Wisława Szymborska’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

If your home were a museum — and they all are, in a way — what would the contents of your refrigerator say about you and those you live with? In his poem “Refrigerator, 1957,” Thomas Lux opens the door to his childhood appliance and oh, does a three-quarters full jar of maraschino cherries speak volumes. Thomas Lux was an American poet and professor. He was the author of several collections of poetry, including To the Left of Time (Ecco, 2016), Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin, 2012), God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), and New and Selected Poems of Thomas Lux: 1975-1995 (Ecco Press, 1999). Lux taught for many years at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he held the Bourne Chair in Poetry and directed the McEver Visiting Writers Program.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Thomas Lux’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

The word “flush” is a verb, as in an activity that we do umpteen times a day. It’s also an adjective that conveys abundance. Fittingly, Rita Wong’s poem “flush” offers a praise song to water’s expansive and unceasing presence in our lives — from our toilets to our teacups, from inside our bodies to outside our buildings, and from our soil to our skies. Rita Wong is the author of several poetry collections, including monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998), forage (Nightwood Editions, 2007), and undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015). Wong is an associate professor at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Rita Wong’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Bro — this is definitely not the “Beowulf” that you read back in school. Maria Dahvana Headley’s gutsy, swaggering translation brings the Old English epic poem roaring into this century, showing you why this tale of fraught family ties, power plays and posturing, and mighty, imperfect people is as relevant as ever.  Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (MCD X FSG Originals, 2020). Her novel The Mere Wife (MCD X FSG, 2018), an adaptation of the Beowulf poem set in suburban America, was named by The Washington Post as one of its Notable Works of Fiction in 2018. Her essays on gender, chronic illness, politics, propaganda, and mythology have been published and covered in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Nieman Storyboard, and elsewhere. She grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Maria Dahvana Headley’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

A horse race from the 1980s may not seem like the obvious inspiration for a poem that celebrates so many of the things that make our lives worth living — good company (human and animal), good books, good food, and honest work — and that is just part of the surprise, delight, and surging joy of Michael Klein’s “Swale.” Michael Klein is a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for poetry and is the author of five books of poetry and two memoirs. His work has appeared in many places, including Poetry, Tin House, The Paris Review, and Bennington Review. His newest book is The Early Minutes of Without: New & Selected Poems (Word Works, 2023). Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Michael Klein’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

What holds our bodies together? Yes, there are the biological components, such as the cells, fluids, fibers, but what about the bone-deep stuff, the histories, myths, aches, resolves? In “Our Bird Aegis,” poet Ray Young Bear evokes an adolescent eagle to show how this blend of the visceral, the inherited, and the self-made abides in each of us, no matter our form, wherever we go. Ray Young Bear is a Meskwaki poet and fiction writer. He is the author of several books of poetry including, The Invisible Musician (Holy Cow Press, 1990), The Rock Island Hiking Club (University of Iowa Press, 2001), and Manifestation Wolverine (Open Road Media, 2015). Young Bear is also the author of two novels, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives (University of Iowa Press, 1995) and Remnants of the First Earth (Grove Atlantic, 1996).Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Ray Young Bear’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

While disputes over contested lands result in damage that can be seen and documented, they also create countless unseen ruptures in the hearts, minds and souls of the humans caught in the chaos. By giving voice to yearning, Suji Kwock Kim’s poem “Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border” shows how bearing witness and asking the impossible are acts of profound courage, creativity, and defiance. Suji Kwock Kim is a poet and playwright. Her debut poetry collection, Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003), was the recipient of the 2002 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and was also shortlisted for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection is Notes from the North (The Poetry Business, 2022). Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Suji Kwock Kim’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

In “ROLL CALL: NEW TAROT NAMES FOR BLACK GIRLS,” Amber McBride treats us to a playful litany of language that twists and leaps and never stumbles. Flavored with old-time Christianity, old-time hoodoo, and a modern alchemy all her own, it talks back to prejudice, reclaims the words meant to take people down, and forges new identities that shimmer with strength and strangeness. Amber McBride is an English professor at the University of Virginia. She is the author of several books, including the forthcoming poetry collection, Thick with Trouble (Penguin Books/Penguin Random House, 2024). Her debut young adult novel, Me (Moth) (Square Fish/Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, 2023) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and it also won the 2022 Coretta Scott King - John Steptoe Award for New Talent. McBride low-key practices hoodoo and high-key devours books (100 or so a year keep her well fed). She is a bit of a book dragon; she collects more than she reads. In her spare time, she enjoys pretending it is Halloween every day, organizing her crystals, watching K-dramas, and accidentally scrolling through TikTok for 3 hours at a time. She believes in ghosts, and she believes in you.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Amber McBride’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.