Ode & Psyche Podcast

“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. […]

The hero dominates the 6th elegy w his strange cosmic presence against the lovers; as a fig tree & its self-contained fruit/flower fuels Rilke’s sundry metaphor & crescendos into the Samson myth. Much is gleaned in the complex image of the fig tree & its strange fruit-flower-seed pod, that encompasses so much rich metaphor and […]

Talking with critic, novelist, poet and translator, Ryan Ruby about his new book Context Collapse, which investigates the secret history of poetry in a verse essay filled with wit and wisdom. Order the book here Check out the recording of the reading on Saturday, November 13th in The Flow Chart Foundation’s Flow Chart Space, celebrating […]

Bianca Stone and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Forest Gander, look at the complexities of multiple selves, and the very DNA that shows our biologically mongrel being, informed constantly by the landscape in which it is situated. We continue our discussion of the inward-outward, and the material and immaterial reality we have been honing in on with […]

Poet and translator Alfred Corn, joins Bianca Stone to discuss his stunning translation of Rilke's, Die Fünfte Elegie.

“Angel and Puppet: then, finally, the play begins” Bianca Stone in conversation with poet Peter Gizzi discussing Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Fourth Elegy,” (Edward Snow translation). We’re working our way though the entire Duino Elegies. In today’s episode we begin by discussing the elegy form and both Gizzi’s personal uses of the form, as well […]