No Good Poetry

Poet Nathan Hoks joins us to talk about 6 poets that are lesser known, and we read some of their poetry: Jim Lang, Zena Smith, Antonio Porta, John Wheelwright, Chika Sagawa, and Joyce Mansour.

This episode is a tribute to John Ashbery with a discussion of his poetry and readings of some of my favorite Ashbery poems, including a recording of the two voice poem Litany from As We Know. A special thanks to Jeff Pagano this week, as his music features heavilly in the episode.

Can a computer write poetry? We look back at the history of computer-generated poetry, read some poems made by computers, see if we can tell if a poem is written by a bot or not, and discuss why people are so interested in A.I. poetry and where the future might lead.

This episode is all about mimeo and the mimeograph revolution of the 60s and 70s and the poetry that was published throughout. Makkos talks about his experiences with mimeo and interviews poet, publisher, jazz aficionado, and political activist John Sinclair.

This week we talk about teaching children poetry and share some recordings from a children's poetry reading that was held at the Children's Resource Center Public Library in New Orleans. Check out the links to Kenneth Koch's books on teaching poetry in the show notes.

This week we talk about teaching children poetry and share some recordings from a children's poetry reading that was held at the Children's Resource Center Public Library in New Orleans. Check out the links to Kenneth Koch's books on teaching poetry in the show notes.

Does having a bigger vocabulary make you a better poet? Can we tell something about poets from the words they use? Does Wu Tang really use more vocabulary words than Shakespeare? We talk about all this and more as we examine the role of vocabulary in poetry.

It's the dead of the summer, so we decided we'd peek our heads out from behind the podcast hosting curtain and talk a little bit about our own current poetry projects. Check out our poems in the shownotes and listen to the end so you can hear a poetry performance with The Furniture Music Ensemble.

Poet David Rowe joins us to talk about 6 poets that are lesser known, and we read some of their poetry: Vicente Huidobro, Hélène d'Oettingen, Jack Gilbert, Billy Childish, Bernard Bador, and Amelia Rosselli.

In this episode we talk about a recent article by Matthew Zapruder from the New York Times, "Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think," which gets us thinking about how schools teach poetry, what it means for poetry to be "obscure," poetic tradition, and whether there is value in making poetry straightforward. We do get kind of critical of the article, but hopefully we add to the discussion more than just bitch about the article.