Close Readings

Stephen Guy-Bray joins Close Readings to talk about one of the most beautiful sonnets in the English language, George Herbert's "Prayer (I)." Stephen's most recent book is Line Endings in Renaissance Poetry (Anthem, 2022). In the episode we also refer in passing to a recent academic article of his called "Notes on the Couplet in the Sonnet" and to a recent talk he gave on "Aboutness in Shakespeare's Poetry." Follow Stephen on Twitter here.

Stephen Guy-Bray is a professor at the University of British Columbia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of four earlier monographs: Shakespeare and Queer Representation (Routledge, 2020), Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From (Toronto, 2009), Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (Toronto, 2006), and Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto, 2002). 

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Our own Very Special Christmas Episode: Langdon Hammer joins the podcast to talk about James Merrill's "Christmas Tree."

Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015). With Stephen Yenser, he edited A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021). He is also the author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton, 1993) and the editor of Library of America editions of Crane and May Swenson. He is poetry editor at The American Scholar and a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. You can find a free, online version of "Modern Poetry," one of his Yale University undergraduate lecture courses, here.

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Anahid Nersessian joins Close Readings to talk about her favorite poem, John Keats's "Ode to Psyche." Anahid's most recent book, the extraordinary Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, is now available in a new edition.

Anahid is a professor of English at UCLA and the author of two earlier books: Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard: 2015), and The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: 2020). She has published in a wide variety of academic journals and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. 

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Brian Glavey joins Close Readings to talk about one of the great love poems of the twentieth century, Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke with You." Check out Brian's recent article on the poem in PMLA and his first book, The Wallflower Avant-Garde (Oxford UP, 2016). Follow Brian on Twitter here. 

You can watch and listen to O'Hara read the poem here and find the full episode of the television series from which that clip was excerpted, Richard O. Moore's USA: Poetry, on the PennSound website.

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Not the first proper episode of the podcast but just me, talking for a few minutes about what I hope the podcast will become. The room a poem makes.