Close Readings

How should we deal with the fact that we have to read the lines of a poem in order, one after another—or, for that matter, that we have to live our days one after the other? That's some of what comes up in my conversation with Evan Kindley about Kenneth Koch and his funny, didactic, and haunting poem "One Train May Hide Another."

Evan is an associate editor at the Chronicle Review. He is the author of two books: Questionnaire (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (Harvard UP, 2017).  With Kara Wittman, he is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Essay (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is currently writing a "group biography" of the New York School Poets (of which Koch, along with previous podcast subjects Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery, is a crucial member), which is under contract with Knopf, and his essays can be found in such publications as The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and n+1. You can follow Evan on Twitter.

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I've been waiting for a chance to talk about an Emily Dickinson poem on the podcast, and no one better to do it with than my friend Johanna Winant. She chose "My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —" for our conversation. (If you're curious, you can find an image of Dickinson's manuscript here.)

Johanna is an assistant professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, where she works on transatlantic modernism, twentieth-century American literature, philosophy and literature, and transhistorical poetry and poetics. She is completing a book manuscript with the working title "Lyric Logic: American Modernism and the Problem of Induction," and her articles and reviews have appeared in James Joyce Quarterly, Paideuma, Journal of Modern LIterature, Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere. You can follow Johanna on Twitter.

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"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" You may know the line, even if you don't know the poem it ends. I had the great pleasure of talking with one of the most accomplished poetry critics of our time, Dan Chiasson, about that poem, William Butler Yeats's fascinating "Among School Children."

Dan Chiasson was born and raised in the city of Burlington, Vermont, and received a BA in 1993 from Amherst College and a PhD from Harvard University in 2002. He has written regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Chiasson is the author of six books, including five books of poetry, most recently The Math Campers (Knopf, 2020), and one book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (Chicago, 2007). He is at work on a study of politics and change in American life, Bernie for Burlington: His Rise in a Changing Vermont, 1964-1991, based partly on his own close observation of Sanders since Chiasson was nine years old. Dan Chiasson is Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College.

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I talked with my friend Sarah Osment about "Governors on Sominex," a poem by David Berman. In addition to being a poet, Berman was the frontman and lyricist of the band Silver Jews.

Sarah works in the Writing Program at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses in Media Aesthetics. She has devoted her intellectual energy to more public-facing projects since earning her PhD in English  from Brown University in 2016: she is the co-founder of Hyped on Melancholy, an online magazine devoted to smart words about sad songs and the reasons we cleave to them. Sarah's own essay for Hyped—on Wilson Phillips's "Hold On" and much else besides—is here. She is also co-editor, along with David Hering, of a recent cluster of essays on the poetry and music of David Berman published at Post45.

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An episode I've been waiting for from the beginning: Andrew Epstein joins the podcast to talk about John Ashbery, one of the most important poets of the last hundred years, and his beautiful and haunting poem of mid-career, "Street Musicians."

Andrew is Professor of English at Florida State University and the author of three books: Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford UP, 2009), Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford UP, 2016), and The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry since 1945 (Cambridge UP, 2022). He blogs about the poets and artists of the New York School at Locus Solus and his essays and articles have appeared in such publications as the New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, LARB, American Literary  History, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Comparative Literature Studies, Jacket2, and Raritan. You can follow Andrew on Twitter.

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Harris Feinsod joins the podcast to talk about William Carlos Williams, his great book of 1923, Spring and All, and one of its strange and unforgettable poems, "To Elsie."

Harris is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford UP, 2017) and the co-translator (with Rachel Galvin) of Oliverio Girondo's Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018). Harris's articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Comparative Literature, American Literary History, English Language Notes, Modernism/modernity, The Baffler, In These Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and Post45. You can follow Harris on Twitter.

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Hard to think of a scholar who's had a more significant influence on poetry studies in the last two decades than Virginia Jackson, and so what a thrill it was for me to welcome her onto the podcast to discuss the legendary Phillis Wheatley and her poem "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth."

Virginia Jackson is the UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of two monographs, Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) and Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005), and the co-editor, with Yopie Prins, of The Lyric Theory Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014). Her articles have appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, MLQ, New Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, and PMLA. 

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How does poetry emerge out of an ordinary life? Willard Spiegelman joins the podcast to talk about "Losing Track of Language," a poem by Amy Clampitt, a poet who was, in the words of our guest, one of the great "late bloomers" in American poetry.

Willard Spiegelman is the author of Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt (Knopf, 2023).  He was for many years the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and the editor of the Southwest Review. He is the author of eight books of literary criticism and writes regularly about art and literature for The Wall Street Journal. 

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What do poems require of the persons who make them, in order for those persons to be known in them? Oren Izenberg joins the podcast to talk about that question and a strange and wonderful poem by Allen Grossman that takes it on, "The Life and Death Kisses."

Oren Izenberg is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of a monograph, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton UP, 2012). He is currently completing another book, How to Know Everything, about the philosophical significance of poetry’s engagement with “ordinary” mental actions like believing, desiring, perceiving, remembering, and intending.

Oren's teaching spans the long history of the art (from the Iliad to the poem someone is working on right now). He is the author of many essays on poetry and poetics, which have appeared in a variety of journals and collections (Critical Inquiry, Modernism/modernity, PMLA, Modern Philology, Lana Turner, nonsite, and others). He is a poetry editor at nonsite.org, an online journal of art and ideas. You can follow Oren on Twitter.

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One of those poems that makes you feel like its ending is perfect, inevitable. I talked with Maya C. Popa about Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring and Fall." 

Maya is a poet, critic, scholar, and teacher. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: American Faith (Sarabande, 2019) and Wound is the Origin of Wonder (Norton, 2022). She is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches creative writing at the Nightingale-Bamford School and NYU. She has a Ph.D. from Goldsmiths, University of London, on the role of wonder in poetry, a topic she writes about in her Substack. You can also follow Maya on Twitter.

As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you're following it. Leave a rating or review, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack for thoughts and links to go with each episode.