For the past year and a half, Amanda Holmes has been delighting readers around the world with The American Scholar ’s podcast Read Me A Poem. She has recited poems ranging from English classics by W. B. Yeats and Maya Angelou to works in translation by Kamala Das and Wislawa Szymborska to mournful sonnets by Rupert Brooke and lighthearted romps by Kenneth Patchen and Laura Riding. Holmes’s gift lies in treating each poem with equal attention, whether it’s by a new poet she’s just encountered or a canonical master. These days, with listener requests flooding in during the pandemic, the show’s tagline seems truer than ever: we all need more poetry in our lives. So this week, we peer behind the curtain of our sister show, speaking with that voice that has been brightening all our lives with weekly poems.

Go beyond the episode:

• View the Read Me A Poem archives on our website
• Subscribe to Read Me A Poem: iTunes • Feedburner • Google Play • Acast
• Read Amanda Holmes’s book reviews and feature column at the Washington Independent Review of Books

Poems mentioned:

• Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
• Jane Hirshfield, “For What Binds Us”
• W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”
• Rabindranath Tagore, “Dungeon” and an excerpt from Gitanjali
• Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!”
• Emily Dickinson,“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
• Kamala Das, “Summer in Calcutta”
• Toru Dutt, “Our Casuarina Tree”
• Leonardo Sinisgalli, “Elderly Tears”
• Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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