We’re talking today with Mathias Svalina and David St. John about the new collected Larry Levis book Swirl and Vortex, which has just come out from Graywolf Press. Mathias has been a long-time reader and scholar of Levis’ work, and so I knew I needed him on here today. He’s been on this podcast many […]

“What kind of knowledge, if any, does poetry provide?” Joseph Acquisto, French language and poetry professor at the University of Vermont, asks in his incredible book, Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance (Bloomsbury). Friedrich Schlegel said that “one can say that it’s a distinguishing mark of poetical genius to know a great deal more than he knows he […]

Bianca Stone talks with Mathias Svalina and Ben Pease about two poems, Paul Celan’s posthumously published book Schneepart, “I HEAR THE AXE HAS FLOWERED,” and “[God Talks to Each of Us as He Makes Us]”. https://www.mathiassvalina.com

There is a tension in the poet’s longing towards the complete book, wanting not to be too swept up in the commercialism, yet needing some kind of readership to engage with the poems. As poetry has evolved from the utterance from the mouth alone, and has changed and moved with technology over the centuries, consciousness […]

Bianca Stone is joined with the host of Moral Minority Podcast, Charles Dashings, for the penultimate moment: Rilke’s 9th elegy. The Ninth Elegy. The “last but one.” We are not actually at the end, yet the end has somehow begun, like a wave just as it begins to form into a visible wave, nearing the […]

“With all its eyes the natural wo,rld looks out / into the Open. Only our eyes are turned / backward, and surround plant, animal, child / like traps, as they emerge into their freedom. Bianca and Mathias Svalina talk about Rilke’s 8th elegy! Find out more about Mathias Svalina here! ‘

Bianca Stone reads and discusses Rilke’s 7th Elegy, translation by Stephen Mitchell. Also some Wallace Stevens, Larry Levis, Lucretius, and more…. Not only all the dawns of summer–, not only how they change themselves into day and shine with beginning. Not only the days, so tender around flowers and above, around patterned treetops, so strong, […]

Bianca Stone talks with the Romanian born poet, Alina Stefanescu about her incredible new collection of poetry, My Heresies, from Sarabande Books. We discuss the art of the heretical, the absurdity of confessional speaker, the dialectical push through fallenness and goodness; the barbaric and so much more. The Illiterate By William Meredith Alina Stefanescu was born […]

Read along with the PDF available in the show-notes! Bianca Stone is back to discuss Rilke, taking a break from the Elegies to look back at Rilke’s first collection, A Book for the Hours of Prayer (Das Stundenbuch) from the Robert Bly translated “Selected Rilke.” In these poems there is a fierce commitment to the […]

In this rich and searching episode, Bianca Stone talks with the translator Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright about her partner, the late poet, Franz Wright, focusing on a new chapbook from Foundling Press, At His Desk In The Past. This chapbook is the first U.S. publication of new work by Franz Wright since his death in 2015. […]