The Poetry Magazine Podcast

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok talks with Richie Hofmann, whose latest book is A Hundred Lovers (Knopf, 2022), about the ancient tale of Hermias of Iasos which informs Hofmann’s poem “Dolphin.” The poem appears in the July/August issue of Poetry alongside “Breed Me,” and we’ll hear both on today’s episode. Hofmann and Ok reveal they are both “Cavafy heads,” and Hofmann discusses the influence of Robert Mapplethorpe on his poems, as well as why lineation is one of the “erotic touchstones” of poetry.

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok talks with torrin a. greathouse, a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist who is the author of the forthcoming DEED (Wesleyan University Press), as well as Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020). Ok and greathouse get into poetic forms—which they liken to open-source software—particularly the beloved “burning haibun” form that greathouse created and that she wrote about for Poetry’s “Not Too Hard to Master” series. The essay appears in the July/August issue of Poetry alongside their Springsteen-inspired burning haibun, “Dancing in the Dark,” which greathouse reads on the podcast. They also interrogate the anti-trans rhetoric and language of radical white feminist poets, and greathouse reads “There’s No Trace of the Word ‘Transgender’ in Adrienne Rich’s Biography,” which previously appeared in Poetry. 

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Douglas Kearney, who joins from Saint Paul, Minnesota. Kearney is the author of eight books of poetry, prose, and libretti, and his poems are often highly distinctive both on and off the page. Today’s conversation begins with spite and Scrabble, which Kearney writes about in his new essay in the July/August issue of Poetry, a continuation of the “Hard Feelings” series. They also talk about the changing topographies in Kearney’s work, the “dintelligibility” of his new poems, and the vital importance of discomfort. Thanks to Douglas Kearney and Wave Books for permission to include Kearney’s reading of “Sand Fire (or The Pool, 2016)” from his book Sho, and to Fonograf Editions for permission to include clips from Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty’s Fodder.

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Elisa Gabbert, who joins us from Providence, Rhode Island. Gabbert is the author of six, soon to be seven, collections of essays and poems, including Normal Distance (Soft Skull Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Any Person Is the Only Self (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Ok writes, “For Elisa, seemingly no field, no form, no fondness, is exempt from her thought or, lucky for us, her writing. She is a lover of surprising etymology and misunderstood quotes. She works toward clarity in play and in study.” Today, the two discuss Gabbert’s essay “On Self-Pity: Go Eat Worms,” which is part of a new series called “Hard Feelings” that makes its debut in the July/August 2023 issue of Poetry. Gabbert explains why she was excited to write a “spirited defense” of self-pity, and more.

This week, new host Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Omar Sakr, who joins us from Sydney, Australia. Sakr tends to the in between, writing prose and poetry, and moving between poetic and political urges, and through queerness and diasporic experience. On this episode, we spend time with a series from Sakr’s newest collection, Non-Essential Work (UQP, 2023). The series, “On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno,’” reflects on and challenges Canto XXVIII, in which Dante comes upon the Prophet in the eighth level of hell. You can read three poems from the series in the June 2023 issue of Poetry. We also continue our new segment, in which guests answer a question from the void, and the episode ends with a surprise visitor. 

This week, new host Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Donika Kelly. The author of two poetry collections, The Renunciations and Bestiary, Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. Rita Dove called The Renunciations, “poetry of the highest order,” and Nikki Finney, who selected Kelly’s first book for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, wrote, “Bestiary’s lesson is complicated and also simple. Love can be hunted down.” Using erasures or Greek myths, writing from terror and travel, Kelly never approaches an event, state, or image in only one way. Today, we hear from a new sequence of poems featured in the June issue of Poetry, and Kelly also answers a question from the void. 

This week, Charif Shanahan speaks with Cynthia Cruz, who joins us from Berlin, Germany. Born on a US military base in Wiesbaden and raised in Northern California, she is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School where her research focuses on Hegel and madness. Cruz is the author of seven poetry collections, as well as two collections of critical work, including The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class. In the book, Cruz writes, “To be working-class in a middle-class world is to be a ghost,” and the book analyzes how the choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers. Her newest collection of poems, Back to the Woods (forthcoming from Four Way Books) was written alongside A Manifesto for the Working Class and shares references with it while also circulating around Freud’s concept of the death drive. According to Cruz, “In its simplest iteration the death drive is an attempt to begin again through the act of self annihilation.” Today, we’ll hear two poems from the new collection, including “Dark Register” from the May issue of Poetry.

This week, Charif Shanahan continues asking the Big Questions, this time with Brian Tierney, who joins us from Oakland, California. They get into poetry as a way to pursue truth, living in a time of ruin, and more. We hear poems from Tierney’s debut collection, Rise and Float (Milkweed Editions, 2022), as well as poems from the May issue of Poetry. In keeping true to Tierney’s complex poetics, this new work emerges from a world of dystopian exhaustion while also insisting on love.

This week, Charif Shanahan asks Marie Howe the Big Questions about writing into the unknown, losing oneself in poems, spirituality, the ineffable, teaching and mentorship, and more. Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Magdalene (W.W. Norton, 2017), which imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape—hailing a cab, raising a child, listening to news on the radio. Howe also co-edited (with Michael Klein) the book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1994). In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship, and from 2012-2014, served as the poet laureate of New York State. Today, we’ll hear two new poems by Howe from the May issue of Poetry, as well as two older poems, including “Prayer,” which lives above Shanahan’s desk. With thanks to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. for permission to include  “Prayer” from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, copyright © 2008 by Marie Howe, and “The Gate” from What the Living Do: Poems, copyright © 1998 by Marie Howe. All rights reserved.

This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from a Ruth Lilly Prize winner who’s worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975: CAConrad. The poet Hoa Nguyen writes of them: “A queer activist, a diviner, and a visionary from beyond the veil, Conrad brings shape to the whispers of the cosmos.... You could say that CAConrad’s practice is a form of magical studies, a practice in dialogue with the ineffable.” We asked Nguyen if she would interview CAConrad for the podcast, and they get into crow justice, poem orgies, and the fact that we are all collaborating whether we think we are or not. We also hear several poems from CAConrad’s forthcoming book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books, 2024).

This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from one of these winners, someone who’s been illuminating a way forward for poetry for over fifty years: Arthur Sze. Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He’s authored eleven books of poetry, most recently The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems out from Copper Canyon Press. We asked his friend, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Forrest Gander, to speak with Sze for this episode of the podcast. Sze shares the story of how he became a poet, which included encouragement from poets and teachers Denise Levertov and Josephine Miles, and the two recall how their friendship started through publication. Not surprisingly, they also lead us into the cosmos. Sze introduces the ancient Sanskrit idea of Indra's net: Everything that happens in the cosmos is like a crystal. If you imagine the cosmos as an immense chandelier and shine light into it, each hanging jewel reflects and absorbs the light of every other. “That’s one of the things poetry does,” Sze says. “We’re not writing in competition—we’re all trying to create poems, and they’re all shining light on each other.

On this episode, Lindsay Garbutt speaks with Nam Le, whose debut book, the short story collection The Boat, was translated into fourteen languages and received over a dozen major awards. We hear poems from his much anticipated first poetry collection, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, out from Knopf this year. The book is incredibly polyvocal, unpredictable, and intimate, yet also politically scathing. Garbutt and Le get into the inherent violence of language and how slippage and ambiguity might be the only way toward truth.

This week, Holly Amos speaks with KB Brookins, a writer, cultural worker, and artist living in Austin, TX, and the author of the chapbook How to Identify Yourself with a Wound, as well as the forthcoming full-length collection Freedom House. Brookins talks about the power of insisting on their transness, getting to know the plants in their neighborhood, being a “career Texan,” and more. We also have the pleasure of hearing poems from Freedom House that appear in the March 2023 issue of Poetry.

This week, Holly Amos speaks with Joanna Klink, who joins us from Austin, Texas. Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields, and she shares some new poems that appear in the February 2023 issue of Poetry. If described directly, the poems feature the mundane, yet they carry a deep sense of unease. Amos states, “The unease is gorgeous, and the gorgeous is uneasy.” Speaking toward that uneasiness, Amos and Klink get into psychic longing, time and aging, attention and attunement, death, and their very different childhood dinner tables. We also hear Muriel Rukeyser, an important influence for Klink’s poem “Called,” speaking in 1959 about the role of the poet in society.

This week, Adrian Matejka sits down with poet and guest editor of the magazine, Charif Shanahan, to talk about oneness, the shifting of identity, and centering love. Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Shanahan’s poems meditate on mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. Shanahan shares how a class he almost dropped with the poet Linda Gregg changed poetry for him forever, and he reads two poems from his new book, Trace Evidence, which is out next month from Tin House Books.