Close Readings

A conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time: Hanif Abdurraqib joins the podcast to talk about Umang Kalra's poem "Job Security."

Hanif is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, A Fortune for Your Disaster, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and The Crown Ain't Worth Much. He has a new book coming out in March, 2024: There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. You can find links to all of these titles on Hanif's website. Follow Hanif on Twitter.

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The last of three episodes in our cluster on Louise Glück: one of her oldest and dearest friends, the marvelous poet Ellen Bryant Voigt joins the podcast to talk about Louise's poem "Brooding Likeness." 

Ellen's books of poetry have recently been assembled into a staggering single volume, Collected Poems (Norton, 2023). She is also the author of two books of prose: The Flexible Lyric (Georgia, 1999) and The Art of Syntax (Graywolf, 2009).

A couple notes on things that come up in the episode:

Ellen discusses Louise's autobiographical note for the Nobel Prize. You can find that autobiographical piece here.

We listen, during the episode, to a recording of Louise reading "Brooding Likeness." The recording contains an alternate phrase in its penultimate line, and during the episode Ellen and I surmise that it was an earlier version of the poem than the one that appeared in The Triumph of Achilles. 

I've since been able to confirm that. The poem first appeared (with the penultimate line as she reads it here) in The New Yorker on April 12, 1981. The reading we listen to happened on October 22, 1981. The book version, with the version of the line we both prefer, wouldn't be published until 1985.

I hope these three episodes on Glück will add something to the beautiful array of memories that have appeared in writing since her passing. I think the guests speak to each other, even as I talk to them one on one, and they do so through their mutual devotion to the poetry of their friend.

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The second episode in our cluster on the great Louise Glück, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, and who passed away on October 13.

Lanny Hammer rejoins the podcast to talk about his friend and colleague Louise and her poem "A Foreshortened Journey." 

Langdon Hammer is Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University, where he studies poetry and its place in the culture. Among his recent publications are James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015) and A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021), which he edited with Stephen Yenser. Lanny has also remembered Louise in print: you can find pieces by him about her in The Yale Review and The Paris Review.

I hope you'll hear the beautiful resonances that begin to emerge between the episodes in this cluster—and that, via the poems, they'll give you some sense of the person, the life, and the world she made and left behind.

Make sure you're following the podcast to get new episodes as they roll out, and please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Follow my Substack to get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

After a little hiatus, the podcast returns with a cluster of new episodes on the great, late poet Louise Glück, recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Louise passed away on October 13. 

First up we have the brilliant poet and writer Elisa Gonzalez, who knew Louise as both teacher and friend. Elisa has chosen the poem "A Village Life" for our conversation.

Elisa's first collection of poems, Grand Tour, was just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. About the book, Louise Glück wrote, "These poems make me feel as if poems have never before been written." You can find Elisa's poems, essays, and stories in places like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The Point, The Drift, and The New York Times Magazine. Follow Elisa on Twitter. 

You can find Elisa's memorial piece for Louise here, in The Paris Review.

The other conversations in this cluster will roll out over the course of this week—make sure you're following the podcast to get them as soon as they come out. 

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"Dear heart, how like you this?" There's really nothing better than that, is there? I talked to Jeff Dolven about Sir Thomas Wyatt's gorgeous poem "They Flee from Me." It's one of the hottest poems I know, and after talking to Jeff I know it much better.  

Jeff Dolven is Professor of English at Princeton University, where he teaches courses in poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. He is the author of three books of criticism, including, most recently, Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation (Chicago, 2018), and two books of poetry: Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013) and *A New English Grammar (dispersed holdings, 2022). 

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How is poetry like skipping stones across the surface of a lake? How might a poem be like an undelivered letter or package? Matthew Zapruder joins the podcast to talk about James Tate's "Quabbin Reservoir," a poem that raises those and other questions—and does so with Tate's gorgeous ear for weird idiom, full of both humor and feeling. (For the backstory on the place this poem is—at least on its surface—about, see this story.)

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five books of poems, including, most recently, Father's Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), and two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem: A Memoir (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California. You can follow Matthew on Twitter.

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How does suffering separate the person going through it from their friends and loved ones? Priscilla Gilman joins the podcast to talk about a poem that takes on that question in literal terms—it tells the tragic story of a sailor who drowns as his shipmates are forced to sail away—and that sees it, at the same time, as a question we all have to face, William Cowper's "The Castaway."

Priscilla Gilman is the author of two books: The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy (Harper, 2011) and The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir (Norton, 2023). She's a former English professor, first at Yale University and then at Vassar College, during which time she published an important article on Cowper's letters in ELH. You can follow Priscilla on Twitter.

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What kind of work is the work of poetry, and how does it compare with other kinds of labor? We have the perfect pairing of poem and critic to think through that question on this episode: Kristin Grogan joins the podcast to talk about Lorine Niedecker's "Poet's Work."

Kristin is assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, where she works on poetry, poetics, modernism, American literature, modernism, gender, and sexuality. She is nearing completion of her first book, Stitch, Unstitch: Poetry, Modernism, and the World of Work. You can find Kristin's essays and articles in such journals as American Literature, Critical Quarterly, Post45, Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and in several essay collections. With David B. Hobbs, Kristin edited a Post45 cluster on the poet Bernadette Mayer. You can find her contribution to that cluster, on Mayer and keeping a garden, here.

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What if life were like a book that you could open at will and know in real time? Gillian White joins the podcast to talk about Elizabeth Bishop's fascinating poem "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance." 

Gillian is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also runs the Poetry and Poetics Workshop. She is the author of Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry (Harvard UP, 2014). Her essays have also appeared in The New York Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation website, and London Review of Books. You can follow Gillian on Twitter.

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What a delight this was, to talk to my friend Walt Hunter about the marvelous Gwendolyn Brooks poem "kitchenette building." 

Walt is an associate professor and the Chair of the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of two books of criticism: Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham UP, 2019) and The American House Poem, 1945 - 2021 (Oxford UP, forthcoming in 2023). He is also the author of a book of poems, Some Flowers (Mad Hat Press, 2022), and the translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Frédéric Neyrat's Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham UP, 2017). He edits poetry for The Atlantic, where he is also a frequent contributor, and has published in such journals as New Literary History, American Literary History, Essays in Criticism, Modern Philology, and ASAP/Journal. 

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