Knox Pods

Andrea Carter Brown was born in Paterson, New Jersey. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Mississippi Review, and many others. She is the author of September 12, which recently won the 2022 IPPY Silver Medal in Poetry from the Independent Publishers Group. Her other titles include the The Disheveled Bed, Domestic Karma, and Brook & Rainbow. Her poems have won the Five Points James Dickey Prize, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, and the PSA Gustav Davidson Memorial Prize. She was a founding editor of the poetry journal Barrow Street, and, since 2017, she has been Series Editor of The Word Works Washington Prize.

John Keats, one of the greatest of the Romantic Poets, was born October 31, 1795 in London. He published just three volumes before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. Some of his poems are among the most anthologized in the 20th Century, including “To Autumn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Links:

Read “After the Disaster: Fragments,” “Ars Poetica,” “To the Dust,” and other poems at andrea carterbrown.com

Read "When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be" by John Keats

Andrea Carter Brown

“An Interview with Andrea Carter Brown"

September 12 book launch

Brown’s poem "The Rock in the Glen” featured in an episode of Poems on Air

“Poet Mary Mackey Interviews Poet Andrea Carter Brown”

John Keats

Bio and poems at Poets.org

Bio and articles on John Keats at the British Library

“The Cockney Romantics: John Keats and His Friends,” a lecture by Johnathan Bate

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

Rate & review on Podchaser

Linda Parsons holds a BA and an MA in English from the University of Tennessee. She's the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Parsons has published poems in The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, Baltimore Review, and Shenandoah, among others. Her fifth poetry collection is Candescent, which was published by Iris Press in 2019. She has received grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Knoxville Arts Council, was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2011, and she’s won the Tennessee Writers Alliance award in poetry, among other awards and honors.

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was born in Dublin, Ireland. In addition to writing poetry, Yeats was also a playwright; he wrote 26 plays that were performed by the Irish Literary Theatre. He was politically outspoken, and, beginning in 1922, he served six years as a senator in the Irish Free State. He’s considered by many to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Links:

Read "Midsummer"

Read "Everywhere and Nowhere at Once"

Read "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

Linda Parsons

Candescent at Iris Press

Bio and poems at the Poetry Foundation

Two poems at Terrain.org

"Therapy Dog" at Verse Daily

Two poems at Vox Populi

William Butler Yeats

Bio and poems at the Poetry Foundation

Bio and poems at Poets.org

Hear more W.B. Yeats poems at The Poetry Archive

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

Rate & review on Podchaser

Matthew Wimberley grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He’s the author of Daniel Boone's Window and All the Great Territories. Wimberley has won the Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award, the Weatherford Award, the William Matthews Prize, and his work was chosen for the 2016 Best New Poets Anthology. He's an Assistant Professor of English at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, North Carolina.  

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was born in New York City. He's best known as the author of novels like Moby Dick and White-Jacket, along with short fiction including “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno.” However, Melville spent decades writing poetry exclusively, and critics have ranked him, alongside Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, as one of the best poets of the 19th century.   

Links: 

Read "And So It Ends with the Cry of a Nuthatch on the First Day of Spring"

Read "Shiloh: A Requiem"

Matthew Wimberley

"The Celebrated Colors of the Local Sunsets" at Poets.org

“Tabula Rasa” in Rattle

“Elegy at Night” in The Paris-American 

Three poems in Blackbird

Four poems in Narrative

“’If There Is Anything to Show You:’ An Interview with Matthew Wimberley”

Herman Melville

Bio and poems at Poetryfoundation.org

Bio and poems at Poets.org

“Herman Melville: American Author" at Britannica.com”

"Herman Melville at Home" in The New Yorker

Music is by Chad Crouch

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

Rate & review on Podchaser

Amelia Martens is the author of four chapbooks and the full-length collection The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat. Her work has appeared in The Indianapolis Review, Cream City Review, Diode, Southern Humanities Review, Plume, Southern Indiana Review, and many others. She serves as the Associate Literary Editor for Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art and she co-curates the Rivertown Reading Series in Paducah, Kentucky.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was born near St. Louis, Missouri, raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and she graduated from Bryn Mawr College. Early on, she worked as a schoolteacher and as an assistant at The New York Public Library. From 1925 to 1929, she was the editor of The Dial, an influential literary magazine. Her Collected Poems, published in 1951, won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Links:

Read "The Apology" and "The Secret Lives of Cows"

Read "A Jelly-Fish"

Amelia Martens

Amelia Martens’ website

“Amelia Martens, a Natural Born Poet,” Something from Nothing podcast at WKMS  

Four poems at The American Journal of Poetry

Two poems at Plume

Two poems at Diode

Three poems at Tenderbox

Marianne Moore

Poems and bio at the Poetry Foundation's website 

Poems and bio at Poets.org

“In Praise of the Difficult: On Marianne Moore, Defiant Poet of Complexity” at LitHub

"NYPL's Marianne Moore: Writing Her Way Onto the Shelves" at NYPL.org

Marianne Moore documentary from the Voices and Visions series (on YouTube)

Music is by Chad Crouch

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

Rate & review on Podchaser

Ashley M. Jones is Alabama's first African American Poet Laureate, and she's also the youngest. Her books are Magic City Gospel, dark // thing, and REPARATIONS NOW! She teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and also at the Low Residency MFA program at Converse University.

Phillis Wheatley Peters was abducted in West Africa and brought to Boston where she was sold as a slave when she was around seven year old. Her first and only book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. She was in poor health for most of her life, and she died in her early thirties. According to the Smithsonian Institute, she was the “first American slave, the first person of African descent, and only the third colonial American woman to have her work published.”

Music by Chad Crouch

Links:

Read the poems

Think of a Marvelous Thing / It’s the Same as Having Wings at Inspicio Arts

"Harriet Tubman Crosses the Mason-Dixon for the First Time" at Oxford American

"On Being Brought from Africa to America" at poets.org

Ashley M. Jones

Ashley M. Jones’ website

Jones’ Bio and Poems at the Poetry Foundation

“Alabama's First Black Poet Laureate Takes A Personal Approach To 'Reparations” on NPR

Interview with Ashley M. Jones at The Reckon

“How to Become a Poet: A Conversation with Ashley M. Jones” at The Rumpus

Phillis Wheatley Peters

Bio and Poems at the Poetry Foundation

“The Multiple Truths in the Works of Enslaved Poet Phillis Wheatley” by Drea Brown

Phillis Wheatley Historical Society

Wheatley’s Bio and Poems at Massachusetts Historical Society Collections Online

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

Rate & review on Podchaser

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, stories, novels, essays, translations, and plays. She has won The Pushcart Prize, The Fence Modern Poets Series Award, and The Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists. With Carmen Maria Machado, she was the guest editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2020. With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

Links:

Read today’s poem at BOMB: “Two Poems by Joyelle McSweeney”

Joyelle McSweeney’s Website

Bio and Poems at the Poetry Foundation

Poems at Poets.org

“Kingdom” in The New York Times Magazine

“Joyelle McSweeney’s Poetry of Catastrophe” in The New Yorker

“A Poetry Reading by Joyelle McSweeney in conversation with David Baker and Kendra Sullivan”

Action Books, Edited by McSweeney And Johannes Göransson

Janet McAdams is the author of the novel Red Weather and the poetry collections Feral and The Island of Lost Luggage, which won an American Book Award. Her chapbook of prose poems Seven Boxes for the Country After won the Wick Chapbook competition and was published in 2016. She teaches at Kenyon College, where she is the Robert P. Hubbard Chair in Poetry.

Links:

Read "Thanatoptic"

Bio and poems at the Poetry Foundation

"Lie" at Poem-a-Day

Interview at Shenandoah’s website

"______and the Elders” at Southern Humanities Review

Jesse Graves is a Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at East Tennessee State University. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, and other literary magazines and anthologies. He has published four books of poetry and his book Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place is forthcoming from Mercer University Press in 2022. Graves received his PhD in English from the University of Tennessee and his MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. He has won the Book of the Year in Poetry Award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association and the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing.

Links:

Read "In a Familiar City" and "Sage Grass Brushing Against My Shins"

Jesse Graves’ website

Interview with Linda Parsons at Chapter 16

YouTube reading through West Virginia Wesleyan MFA Program Summer Reading Series

A collection of Jesse Grave’s poems available online

Poet-to-Poet Interview: A Conversation with Jesse Graves and Rita Sims Quillen, hosted by Johnson City Public Library

Bruce Alford’s work has appeared in the African American Review, Imagination & Place Press, The Comstock Review, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at Louisiana State University. Before working in academia, he was an inner-city missionary and journalist.

Links:

Read "from Alford's Devotional"

Bruce Alford’s website

Poems at SickLit 

“Perfect” at Storm Cellar

Review of Terminal Switching at Alabama Writers Forum

Robert Penn Warren is primarily known as the author of the great American novel All the King’s Men, but he’s also a well-respected poet, and was the USA’s first Poet Laureate. Though he grew up in Guthrie, KY, he crossed the state line to go to high school in Clarksville, TN. In 1921, he began his studies at Vanderbilt University and joined a group of poets who called themselves the Fugitives. He went on to publish over 40 books, and he is the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry.

Links:

Read "Vision" and other poems by Robert Penn Warren at Poets.org

Biography and poems at the Poetry Foundation

Online Resources (Library of Congress Web Guide)