Poetry Unbound

A central duality appears in the work of Henri Cole: the revelation of emotional truths in concert with a “symphony of language” — often accompanied by arresting similes. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Henri, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they discuss the role of animals in Henri’s work, the pleasure of aesthetics in poetry, and writing as a form of revenge against forgetting.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan and raised in Virginia. He has published many collections of poetry and received numerous awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent books are a memoir, Orphic Paris (New York Review Books, 2018), Blizzard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), and Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). From 2010 to 2014, he was poetry editor of The New Republic. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems are filled with butchery and blood as she carves space for desire, motherhood, and an encyclopedic knowledge of plants to coexist in life and on the page. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Aimee, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they explore the beauty of solitude, eroticism in poetry, and a letter writing practice for taking inventory of a life.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of a book of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions, 2020), which was named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and four award-winning poetry collections, most recently, Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). Awards for her writing include fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in NYTimes Magazine, ESPN, and Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Through her poetry, Patricia Smith generously, skillfully puts language around what can be seen both in the present and deliberately looking back at oneself. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Patricia, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they explore how memory, persona, and a practice of curiosity inform Patricia’s work, and the ways writing a poem is like writing a piece of music.

Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023); Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House, and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. Smith is a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, a visiting professor in creative writing at Princeton University, and a faculty member in the Vermont College of Fine Arts postgraduate residency program.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So much of what was once deemed impossible was found — during Covid — to be possible. Here, a poet watches a tent, a huge temporary hospital, be raised up on the green of Central Park, a place she’d previously walked her dog.

Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022) and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), which was a recipient of the North American Book Prize and a runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. She is also the author of two chapbooks, both from the Diagram Chapbook series: You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave (New Michigan Press, 2018) and The Bees Have Been Canceled (New Michigan Press, 2017). She is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at New York University. She is Director of Creative Writing at the Nightingale-Bamford school, where she oversees visiting writers, workshops, and readings. She holds degrees from Oxford University, NYU, and Barnard College, and is currently pursuing her PhD on the role of wonder in poetry at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Maya C. Popa’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How to remember a beloved who died tragically, violently? Remember the violence? Sometimes, yes. But also this: remember his love of flowers.

Jenny Mitchell is the author of the poetry collections Her Lost Language (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2019) and Map of a Plantation (2021). Her latest collection, Resurrection of a Black Man (2022), is a Poetry Kit Book of the Month. Mitchell is a winner of the Poetry Book Awards and joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize. She is also a recipient of the inaugural Ironbridge Prize, the Bedford Prize, and the Gloucester Poetry Society Open Competition. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Jenny Mitchell’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What self-consciousnesses do artists carry? It can be difficult to know how to hold onto confidence in your work, especially when small jibes from others remain long after apologies have been offered. Art compels and calls, and also complicates.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize, and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), won a Northern Writers Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015); a collection of essays, Worlds Woven Together (Columbia University Press, 2022); a critical study, Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (OUP, 2020); and Asian/Other, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir forthcoming from Icon in the U.K. and Norton in the U.S. Ravinthiran is an associate professor of English at Harvard University.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Vidyan Ravinthiran’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A poet reads to a room full of youths who seem to have some residual resentment to the poet. The poet doesn’t mind — he understands, and calls on the listeners to share in the power of focused anger, to make it a motivation for their creativity.

Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) is the author of The Feathered Heart (Michigan State University Press, 1998) and Exploding Chippewas (Triquarterly Books, 2002). He lives in Chicago, where he teaches at DePaul University.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Mark Turcotte’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What do sandwiches, laundry, therapy, childhood homes, and forgiveness have to do with each other? Wo Chan weaves a poem that charts the many things a single day can hold.

Wo Chan is a poet and drag artist who performs as The Illustrious Pearl. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (Nightboat Books, 2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Wo Chan’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A note from the Poetry Unbound team:
We’ve updated the audio for our episode “Amanda Gunn — Ordinary Sugar.” This updated version includes an additional stanza initially omitted from the recording and additional reflection from Pádraig.

How can russet potatoes be made to taste of sugar and caramel? By dedication, love, and craft. Amanda Gunn places her poetry in conversation with the farming and culinary skills of her forebears: women who cultivated land, survival, strength, and family bonds.

Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is the author of Things I Didn’t Do with This Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Gunn is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a PhD candidate in English at Harvard, where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and Narrative Magazine. Photo credit: Moon Duchin

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Amanda Gunn’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Old stories — of mythology or religion — have sometimes been depicted as having one narrative and one interpretation. Here, J. Estanislao Lopez takes on the voice of a character whose story ended in violence, inviting listeners to claim their agency as this character claims hers.

J. Estanislao Lopez is the author of We Borrowed Gentleness (Alice James Books, 2022). His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and Poetry Magazine, as well as the anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. Lopez received his MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer J. Estanislao Lopez’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.