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.

Oksana Maksymchuk joins us for a reading and discussion of "Tempo," a poem that explores the how war causes us to "whirl with / planets and stars that coil / around our fragile core."

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, published by University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). And while Still City is Oksana’s first poem in English, she is an accomplished poet in the Ukrainian as well. She is also the co-editor of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry.

In this episode, Monica Ong joins us to discuss "Her Gaze," a visual poem that celebrates the achievements of astronomer Caroline Herschel. "Her Gaze" appears in Planetaria, Ong's new collection that merges archival materials with striking lyric poems.

Monica Ong is the author of two books: Silent Anatomies, which was the winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in 2015; and Planetaria, which will be released in May 2025. Last year, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow. Ong’s visual poetry has been published in many literary magazines and exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world.

To learn more about Ong's work, please visit her website.

To purchase a copy of Planetaria, visit the Proxima Vera website.

Gwendolyn Bennett was a poet, journalist, editor, and activist whose contributions helped to fuel the Harlem Renaissance. In this episode, we read "I Build America," a poem that exposes and critiques the exploitation and suffering of ordinary workers.

To learn more about Gwendolyn Bennett, see Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Gwendolyn Bennett's Selected Writings, edited by Belinda Wheeler and Louis J. Parascandola (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). Thanks to Pennsylvania State University Press for granting us permission to read this poem.

You can also click here to read a brief biography of Bennett.

In this episode, we read and discuss a poem that takes its inspiration from a painting by Andrew Wyeth. The poem provides a meditation on what we perceive and interpret when we look at a painting, and at one another.

In this episode, we offer close readings of poems from Ted Kooser's_ Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison_. Kooser's poems allow us to think about the poem as a social act, as a form of healing, and as a kind of meditation.

To learn more about Ted Kooser, visit his website.

If you like these poems that we discussed in this episode, please read Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001). Thanks to Carnegie Mellon Press for granting us permission to read these poems aloud.

In this episode, we read and discuss Emily Dickinson's poem about the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We discuss Dickinson's innovative syntax, her use of deep pauses, and her meditations on death and grief that create surprising effects in this short lyric.

I went to thank Her

I went to thank Her—

Who went to thank Her—

Psalm 52 concerns a lying tyrant and God's impending judgment. Mary Sidney, who lived 1561-1621, was an extraordinary writer, editor, and literary patron. Like many talented writers of her time, she translated all the psalms. Here we talk about translation, early modern women's writing, religious engagements with politics, and the power of Psalm 52.

For more on Mary Sidney, see The Poetry Foundation page: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-sidney-herbert

For the Geneva translation of Psalm 52, which Mary Sidney would have known, see here:

For a new collection of English translations of the psalms in the early modern era, see The Psalms in English 1530-1633 (Tudor and Stuart Translations), edited by Hannibal Hamlin.

Psalm 52

Tyrant, why swell’st thou thus,

Lewd lies thy tongue contrives,

Falsehood thy wit approves,

Not words from cursed thee,

Think’st thou to bear it so?

The just shall fearing see

Lo, lo, the wretched wight,

I as an olive tree

My trust in his true love

Thee will I honour still,

Thy saints trust in thy name,

In this episode, Niki Herd joins us to read and discuss an excerpt from The Stuff of Hollywood, a collection in which Herd experiments with a range of forms and procedures to examine the history of violence in America.

To learn more about Niki Herd, you can visit her website.

The Stuff of Hollywood was just published by Copper Canyon Website. Please visit their website to purchase a copy.

Photo credit: Madeline Brenner

In this episode, we closely read Shelley's "Ozymandias," a poem written in a time of revolution and social protest. We focus on the poem's sonnet structure, its engagement with--and critique of--empire, its meditation on the bust of Ramses II, and its afterlife in an episode of _Breaking Bad. _

To learn more about Percy Bysshe Shelley, click here.

Here is the text of the poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Photo: Ramses II, British Museum