The third in our series of conversations about the late Alice Notley. Lindsay Turner returns to the podcast to discuss a selection from Waltzing Matilda, "Dec. 12, 1980." 

A poet, critic, and translator, Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include books by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Stéphane Bouquet, Frédéric Neyrat, Richard Rechtman, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. Her translation of Bouquet's The Next Loves was longlisted for the National Translation Awards, shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and named a New York Times top 10 poetry collection of 2019, and she has twice received French Voices Grants for her translation work. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University. Take a look at Lindsay's Substack, "stay you are so fair."

You can listen to Notley reading from Waltzing Matilda on the PennSound archive of her recordings.

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The second in a series of conversations about the poet Alice Notley, who passed away on May 19, 2025. The poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney joins the podcast to talk about selections from Notley's epic The Descent of Alette. 

(A brief note on audio quality: we listen to three recordings of Notley reading from her book during this episode. The volume on playback of those recordings seems somewhat low to me—sorry!—but hopefully listeners will be able to adjust the volume on their devices so as to hear Notley well enough.)

Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's latest book, Death Styles, appeared from Nightboat Books in Spring 2024; her previous title, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. Her debut poetry volume, The Red Bird, inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books, which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

You can see Alice Notley read the entirety of The Descent of Alette in a series of recordings made over two nights at The Poetry Center at SFSU. 

Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! (Post it to your social media feeds?)  You can also subscribe to my Substack, which I haven't used in a while, but may again. I'm also on Bluesky, now and then.

After a long break, the podcast returns with an episode on the late Alice Notley, who passed away on May 19, 2025. Nick Sturm joins us to discuss Notley's elegy for her husband Ted Berrigan, "At Night the States." 

Nick Sturm teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His book on small press print culture, publishing communities, and the New York School is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is also the editor of Early Works by Alice Notley (Fonograf Editions) and co-editor, with Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan, of Get the Money!: Collected Prose, 1961-1983 by Ted Berrigan (City Lights). His articles and editorial projects have been published at Poetry Foundation, Jacket2, Paideuma, College Literature, Chicago Review, ASAP/J, Women’s Studies, Post45, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. You can follow Nick on Bluesky.

In the episode, we listen (twice) to a recording of Notley reading the poem in Buffalo, in 1987. That recording, along with many others, can be found on Notley's page in the marvelous PennSound digital archive.

Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! (Post it to your social media feeds?)  You can also subscribe to my Substack, which I haven't used in an even longer while, but who knows what the future holds. I'm also on Bluesky, now and then.

What can a poem do in the face of calamity? This was an extraordinary conversation. Huda Fakhreddine joins the podcast to discuss "Pull Yourself Together," 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.

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 (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2021) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). She is also a prolific translator of Arabic poetry: you can find another of her translations of HIba Abu Nada in Protean. Follow Huda on Twitter.

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, 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 joins Close Readings to talk about Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite," 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 and, more recently, The Iliad (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.

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, 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, makes clear, that poem, W. H. Auden's "In Memory of 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 (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," 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, 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 joins the podcast to discuss a poem that poses these questions in harrowing ways, Walt Whitman's  "This 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 (Post*45 Series, Stanford UP, 2018), and her articles have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, Post45 Contemporaries, and PMLA (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 (2018) and Personification (2010). You can follow Margaret on Twitter.

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, 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 joins the pod to talk about Patricia Lockwood's poem "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").

Michelle A. Taylor is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. 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, College Literature, Modernism/ modernity Print+, Literary Imagination, and Modernist Archives: A Handbook, and she has also written essays and reviews for The Point, Post45 Contemporaries, The Fence, Poetry Foundation, the Financial Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. 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, 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 joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem by Tim Dlugos, "The Far West." 

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, Chicago Review, Cambridge Literary Review, and Jacket2. You can follow her on Twitter.

Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, 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 joins Close Readings to discuss "The Song of Nothing," 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 (2012) and The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 (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, where you'll get occasional updates about the pod and about my writing.