Close Readings

What a gift this conversation was. I talked to Evie Shockley about a poem from Ed Roberson's book City Eclogue, "Open / Back Up (breadth of field)."

Evie is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of five books of poetry, including the just-released suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). She is also the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U of Iowa P, 2011). Her essays and articles have appeared in such journals as New Literary History, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket2, The Black Scholar, and Callaloo, where she published "On the Nature of Ed Roberson's Poetics."

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"The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully." So begins this episode's poem, "Man Carrying Thing," by the modernist American poet Wallace Stevens. I got to talk about it with the scholar and poet Kimberly Quiogue Andrews.

Kim is an assistant professor of English at the University of Ottawa and the author of The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). She's also a poet who has published two collections: A Brief History of Fruit (University of Akron Press, 2020) and BETWEEN (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She's the winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry, the New Women's Voices Award, the Ralph Cohen Prize for Criticism, and a development grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her essays and scholarship have appeared in such publications as The Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporaries at Post45, Modernist Cultures, and New Literary History. Her creative work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Asian American Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, and Crab Orchard Review. Follow Kim on Twitter.

And please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share the episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter to go with each episode.

"I can't get over / how it all works in together." That's the poet James Schuyler, towards the end of today's poem, "February," a favorite of mine, which I had the great fortune to talk about with an old and beloved friend, Eric Lindstrom.

Eric is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the author of two books: Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Palgrave, 2011) and Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2022). He's also the guest editor of two collections of essays: Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism (Romantic Circles, 2014) and Ostensive Moments and the Romantic Arts: Essays in Honor of Paul Fry (Essays in Romanticism, forthcoming in March 2023). His essays have appeared in such journals as ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Criticism, Modern Philology, and Modernism/modernity. His most recent article, "Promethean Ethics and Nineteenth-Century Ecologies," published and available open access at Literature Compass online, was co-written with Kira Braham. Eric is completing a third book, James Schuyler and the Poetics of Attention: Romanticism Inside Out, and, from the gleanings of that project, assembling an uncreative, marginally scholarly commonplace called "'Now and Then': A Poetics and Commonplace of Intermittence."

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A haunting, haunted poem for us today: Beci Carver joins the podcast to discuss Thomas Hardy's poem for his late wife, "The Voice."

Beci is a lecturer in 20th-century literature at University of Exeter and the author of Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014). Her articles have appeared in journals like Textual Practice, Critical Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, and Essays in Criticism. She is also very close to completing her second monograph, Modernism's Whims, which I await eagerly. You can follow Beci on Twitter.

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What a thrill it was to talk with Christopher Spaide about one of the great poems of this century, Terrance Hayes's "The Golden Shovel."

This is a two-for-one Close Readings experience, since you can't talk about the Hayes poem without also discussing the Gwendolyn Brooks poem that his is "after," "We Real Cool."

Christopher Spaide is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he focuses on poetry, ecopoetics, American literature, and Asian American literature. His academic writing on poetry (as well as music and comics) appears in American Literary History, The Cambridge Quarterly, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, ELH, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and several edited collections. His essays and reviews and his poems appear in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, Colorado Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and honors from Harvard University, the James Merrill House, and the Keasbey Foundation.

As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a rating and review, and make sure you're following us. Share Close Readings with a friend! And subscribe to the newsletter, where you'll get more thoughts from me and links to things that come up during the episodes.

Contemporary poetry finally makes its debut on Close Readings! Sarah Dowling joins the podcast to discuss a thrilling and powerful new poem by Liz Howard, "True Value."

Sarah is the author of three poetry collections: Security Posture, Down, and Entering Sappho, which was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Her first scholarly book, Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, received an honorable mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association. She's also working on another scholarly book, Figure & Ground. Sarah teaches in Victoria College and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. You can follow Sarah on Twitter here.

Liz Howard is currently the Shaftesbury Writer in Residence at Victoria College. She is the author of two poetry collections: Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, which won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, which contains "True Value," and which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize in 2022. The recording of Howard reading "True Value" (apologies for its low volume in the episode!) can be found here. Follow Liz on Twitter here.

As always, if you like what you hear, please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast. And subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Stephanie Burt joins the podcast to talk about Randall Jarrell's breathtaking poem "The Player Piano."

Steph is Professor of English at Harvard University, where she works on poetry (particularly of the 20th and 21st centuries), science fiction, literature and geography, contemporary writing, comics and graphic novels, and literature alongside other arts. She is also a poet—her books of poetry include We Are Mermaids, After Callimachus, Advice from the Lights, Belmont, and Parallel Play. Her critical books include Don't Read Poetry, The Poem Is You, Close Calls with Nonsense, and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Steph regularly reviews new books of poetry and publishes essays in places like The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and The Yale Review. She is also a cohost of Team-Up Moves, a podcast about superhero role-player games. You can follow Steph on Twitter.

If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review the podcast. Subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

What a delight it was to talk to the brilliant Katie Kadue about Andrew Marvell's beautiful and perverse poem "The Garden."

Katie is the author of Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (Chicago, 2021). She is currently a Fellow at the International Network for Comparative Humanities at Notre Dame and Princeton. She has published academic essays on Andrew Marvell, Michel de Montaigne, and misogyny and cliché in Renaissance lyric poetry, and her writing has also appeared in venues such as n+1, Gawker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Her piece on Marvell for the University of Chicago Press blog provides an excellent brief introduction to the poet we discuss in this episode—you can find it here. Finally, make sure to follow Katie on Twitter.

Please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Anthony Reed joins the podcast to discuss June Jordan's marvelous poem "In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr."

Anthony is Professor of English and the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) and Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2021). With Vera Kutzinski, Anthony edited Langston Hughes in Context (Cambridge UP, 2022). 

During the episode, I make reference to Anthony's article, "The Erotics of Mourning in Recent Experimental Black Poetry." We also listen to a recording of Jordan herself reading today's poem. Finally, you can find the transcript of Jordan's visit to Allen Ginsberg's class, during which she discusses "vertical rhythm," here.

Please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and subscribe to the newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

Lindsay Turner joins the podcast to talk about what is perhaps my favorite love poem ever, Elizabeth Bishop's "The Shampoo." 

[FYI: For some reason there's a minor technical issue w/my audio quality for the first 3-4 minutes of the episode—sorry!—but, happily, it resolved quickly and doesn't affect the rest of this lovely conversation.]

The Shampoo

The still explosions on the rocks,

the lichens, grow

by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.

They have arranged

to meet the rings around the moon, although

within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend

as long on us,

you've been, dear friend,

precipitate and pragmatical;

and look what happens. For Time is

nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair

in bright formation

are flocking where,

so straight, so soon?

—Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,

battered and shiny like the moon.