Soapbox Where I Can Shout It Podcast

Last month I shared a newsletter about Ben, Ben’s bicycle, and the Billy Collins poem “On Turning Ten.” You can read that here, but I thought it might be nice to share some summertime bicycle thoughts as, at least here in the midwest, we’re being pummeled by rain and thunderstorms as Fall wrestles humidity out of the skies. Enjoy.

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Yesterday I published a newsletter about The Concert for New York, a fundraiser benefit show recorded in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on The World Trade Center in New York City.

You can read that here, but the piece is concerned with music, and this podcast includes the newsletter’s full text and some snippets from a few of the performances.

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I’m teaching an online asynchronous introduction to literature class this summer and - blessedly! - we have arrived at the poetry section of the course. I always encourage students, readers, friends, anybody who will listen to read poetry aloud. It is an oral tradition, a multisensory experience. You can’t get poetry speed reading it off the microscopic pages of some arduous anthology (shout out The Norton Introduction to Literature Portable 15th Edition though). You have to hear it to feel it. So join me, my students, in hearing what they are reading this week!

Featured poems:

* “I wandered lonely as a cloud” - Wordsworth (pg. 432)

* “The sky is low” - Dickinson (pg. 436)

* “I celebrate myself” - Whitman (pg. 461)

* “Persimmons” - Li-Young Lee (pg. 478)

* “I Invite My Parents to a dinner Party” - Chen Chen (pg. 480)

* “Pilgrimage” - Natasha Trethewey (pg. 489)

* “Down to my elbows” - Jose Olivarez (pg. 498)

* “My Papa’s Waltz” - Theodore Roethke (pg. 512)

* two poems by William Carlos Williams (pg. 516)

* “Ode to the West Wind” - Percy Bysshe Shelley (pg. 577)

* “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” - Dylan Thomas (pg. 591)

* “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” - Robert Frost (pg. 643)

* “I, Too” - Langston Hughes (pg. 647)

* “The Raven” - Poe (pg. 657)

* “Words Are Birds” - Francisco X. Alarcón (not in book, follow link)

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A sloppy send-off of National Poetry Month 2026 with some original poems.

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Nick Axene joins the pod for the month’s penultimate episode celebrating National Poetry Month 2026 with a recitation and conversation about his excellent - and criminally un-titled! - poem about his guitar.

You can see Nick’s poem in the Spring 2026 issue of Gesture, found at this link.

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A few choice cuts from Billy Collins’ latest collection, Dog Show to celebrate (belated) Desi’s birthday and an upcoming newsletter on recent books by “America’s favorite poet.”

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Last night, ODU I hosted a poetry reading to celebrate the long and wonderful history of Ohio Dominican’s literary magazine, Gesture, and the future of Her wonderful writers. In this podcast you’ll hear a few cuts from the magazine’s history as well as a bit of an artist’s statement for what the literary arts means to me. Once the University gets around to publishing the full audio from the event I’ll share it in the feed! It was super fun! Enjoy!

If you are curious to learn more about Gesture, check it out here.

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Welcome to the audio version of the “Notes from the Classroom” newsletter published last weekend. Enjoy!

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Happy birthday to our featured poet, my mom, sharing work from when

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Super-sized podcast episode today! We celebrate the work of Kaveh Akbar with a poem from his debut chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic and most recent monograph, Pilgrim Bell (2021) which I reviewed for my old blog. I thought it would be fun to revisit that review, sandwhiching it between an old Kaveh poem and a new Kaveh poem.

The review can be enjoyed in newsletter form by clicking right here! And just for fun here is a picture of me meeting the poet back in 2017:

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