Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:

– Pantoums vs. pantuns

– The medical fecklessness of poets

– My imperfect book reviews

– Art is bad at teaching lessons

– Hollywood studio movies are all about why you should be an unpaid intern for a Hollywood studio

– Christmas is about presents

– Pedantic English majors

– Horace’s Ars Poetica

– Horace’s Ode i.11

– To delight vs. to instruct

– Lay off Polonius already

– Magic quotation marks

– A. M. Juster’s poem “No”

– John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X, “Death be not proud”

– Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool”

– Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”

– The Giving Tree

– “Baby It’s Cold Outside”

– The epilogue to Crime and Punishment

– The lovely, talented, and extremely online Quincy Lehr

– Some actual formalist Nazis

– A New Yorker article about the time W. E. B du Bois walloped Lothrop Stoddard in front of a live audience

– Dave Eggers’ short short “Woman Waits, Seething, Blooming”

– Reginald McKnight’s story “Into Night”

– Reginald McKnight’s story “Float”

– Alan Shapiro’s poem “Happy Hour”

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Music by ETRNL

Art by Daniel Alexander Smith