In this third episode in our series on the pantoum, we read and discuss Oliver de la Paz's "Pantoum Beginning and Ending with Thorns," a poem that draws its inspiration from a visual art object as well as the story of migration that shapes the poetic speaker's lived experience.

To learn more about Oliver de la Paz, visit his website.

If you love this poem as much as we do, please purchase a copy of The Diaspora Sonnets (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2023), which was long-listed for the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize. Thanks to Liveright and W. W. Norton for granting us permission to read this poem.

In this episode, we continue our three-part series on the pantoum, this time focusing on Arthur Sze's "Papyrus Pantoum." We consider the poem's collage-like qualities, Sze's ability to juxtapose abundance and scarcity, and the way he attends to both beauty and danger in the natural world.

Arthur Sze is the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. To learn more about Arthur Sze and his amazing work, click here.

Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem. You can find "Papyrus Pantoum" in Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press, 2025).

This episode begins a three-part series on the pantoum and looks at how the repetitions work especially well for a poem that dwells incessantly in memories of the past, trying to recover, trying to move forward.

For the text of the poem, see The Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58080/pantoum-of-the-great-depression

For more on Donald Justice, see The Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/donald-justice

Copyright Credit: Donald Justice, "Pantoum of the Great Depression" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2004 by Donald Justice. Read on our podcast by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Today we look at a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins that dwells equally in the grandeur of God and the wreck made of earth. Hopkins wonders how these two aspects of our world could possibly relate, and he holds out hope for the dearest freshness deep down things.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

It's back to school time, and we're back at Poetry For All, heavy with hope for another season. Today we look at a poem unified by an extended metaphor describing a student who makes his heroic way to the library. Short and simple--and so much to love.

This poem comes from Ted Kooser's Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Delights and Shadows, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2004. Thank you to Copper Canyon Press for permission to read the poem for this episode.

For the text of the poem, see here: https://www.versedaily.org/student.shtml

For Ted Kooser's personal webpage, see here: https://www.tedkooser.net/

In this episode, we offer a close reading of "Sumer is icumen in," a Middle English song that anticipates the abundant joys of summer.

Thanks to the Pias Group for granting us permission to share the Hilliard Ensemble's rendition of this song. You can find the manuscript that includes the lyrics and music at the British Library.

In this episode, we read and discuss "Singer," a narrative poem that celebrates the poetic speaker's mother in all of her complexity.

Dorianne Laux is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Life on Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of a new craft book titled Finger Exercises for Poets.

“Singer” appears in LIFE ON EARTH by Dorianne Laux. Copyright © 2024 by Dorianne Laux. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

In this episode, Katy Didden and Abram Van Engen discuss the extraordinary leaps, narrative disjunctions, and temporal frames that fill Diaz's extraordinary ekphrastic poem, a reflection on Bruegel's painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" written in conversation with W.H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts."

"Two Emergencies," appears in My Favorite Tyrants (University of Wisconsin Press 2014), winner of the 2014 Brittingham Prize in Poetry.

For more poetry of Joanne Diaz, see also The Lessons (Silverfish Review Press 2011), winner of the Gerald Cable Book Award.

For W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Artes" see The Poetry Foundation

This episode explores the incantation and mystic union of Momaday's famous delight poem, ending with a recorded recitation in his own rich voice. We explain anaphora and explore its power, and we trace the links and connections from one thought to the next throughout the poem.

Special thanks to Universty of California Television (UCTV) for permission to share the audio of Momaday's reading. For the interview with Momaday from which this reading has been pulled, see "A Conversation with N. Scott Momaday -- Writer's Symposium by the Sea 2023" on Youtube. "The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee" appears in In the Presence of the Sun by N. Scott Momaday. Copyright © 2009 University of New Mexico Press, 2009.

For the text of the poem, see The Poetry Foundation here.

For more on Momaday, see his biography at the Poetry Foundation.

This episode was recorded on March 2, 2025 at the Phillis Wheatley Heritage Center in St. Louis., Missouri. In this conversation, Pádraig Ó Tuama reads several poems from Kitchen Hymns (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), his newest collection. We discuss subversive speech, belief and doubt, lyrical poetry, the psychology of poetic forms, and the power of ancient myths.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet with interests in conflict, language and religion. He presents Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios, and has published two anthologies (2022, 2025, both with WW Norton) from that podcast. A freelance artist, one of Ó Tuama’s projects is poet in residence with the Cooperation and Conflict Resolution Center at Columbia University. He splits his time between Belfast and New York City.

To learn more about Ó Tuama, you can visit his website.