The Beat

David Baker is a poet, educator, editor, and literary critic. His most recent books are Swift: New and Selected Poems, Whale Fall, and Transit. In 1984, he began teaching at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where he now serves as an emeritus professor. He has also taught in writing programs and writers’ workshops around the country, including the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College, and others. For many years he was Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.

Stanly Plumly was born in Barnesville, Ohio in 1939, and he grew up in Virginia and Ohio. He earned a BA from Wilmington College and a PhD from Ohio University. He published numerous books of poetry, and his work won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and eight Pushcart prizes. He taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of Houston, and the University of Maryland. He was poet laureate of Maryland from 2009 to 2018.

Links:

David Baker

Bio and poems at The Poetry Foundation

Bio and poems at Poets.org

"Rather Than Nothing: On David Baker’s Transit: Poems" at Literary Matters

A review of Transit in Publishers Weekly

Video: "David Baker--Great Writers, Great Readings", a reading at Hofstra University

Stanley Plumly

Bio and poems at The Poetry Foundation

Bio and poems at Poets.org

Stanley Plumly Memorial Digital Archive at GR2

Video: "Poet Stanley Plumley Reads from His Collection Orphan Hours"--PBS News Hour

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Jesse Graves joined us at Lawson McGhee Library for a reading of his work. Jesse Graves is the author of five poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, Basin Ghosts, Specter Mountain, Merciful Days, the forthcoming A Little Light in the Grave, and a book of prose, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, as well as two Weatherford Awards in Poetry from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Graves has served as co-editor for several collections of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and The Complete Poetry of James Agee. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English.

Links:

Jesse Grave's website

"Jesse Graves and the Cosmic Appalachian Boogie," in Salvation South

Six Poems by Jesse Graves in Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature

"Two Stones" in New Verse Review

"Above Johnson City" in As the Crow Flies

Three poems in Cutleaf

Donovan McAbee is a poet, songwriter, and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME magazine, The Hudson Review, The Sun, Garden & Gun, Poetry London, and others. McAbee grew up in a small town in South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. McAbee lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and two children.

Kathleen Jamie was raised in Currie, Scotland, and she studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. Her awards include the Forward Prize for best poetry collection of the year, a Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, a Paul Hamlyn Award, and a Creative Scotland Award. From 2021 to 2024, Kathleen Jamie served as Scotland’s Makar (a title given to the national poet).

"The Whale-watcher," "The Buddleia," and "The Wishing Tree" were recorded with permission from Kathleen Jamie.

Links:

Donovan McAbee

Read "The Tunnel," "Holy the Body," and "Sightings" in The Sun Magazine

Read "Coming Back Down" in Reflections

Donovan McAbee's website

Hear Major Jackson read McAbee's "Desert Sayings" on The Slowdown

Kathleen Jamie

Read "The Whale-watcher," "The Wishing Tree," and other poems at Scottish Poetry Library

Bio and poems at The Poetry Foundation

Hear 19 poems by Jamie at The Poetry Archive

Matt Broaddus is the author of Deeper the Tropics and Temporal Anomalies. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Annulet, Denver Quarterly, and The Paris Review. He lives in Colorado and serves as an Advisory Poetry Editor for The Paris Review.

Links:

Matt Broaddus' website

"'Blue Prints' and Other Poems" at Changes

"The Seal of Approval" at American Poetry Review

"The Sun Is a Disembodied Thought: An Interview with Matt Broaddus" at Poetry Daily

"These Lit Particulars: On Matt Broaddus’ Deeper the Tropics" at Cleveland Review of Books

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

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Shuly Xóchitl Cawood teaches writing workshops, doodles with Sharpies and acrylic paint, and is raising two poodles and a dwindling number of orchids. Her books include Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough (Press 53, 2023) and Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Sun, and Rattle.

Links:

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood's website

"Poem in Which I Fail to Teach My Dog How to Fetch" at The Sun

Two Poems at Have Has Had

Interview and four poems at Does It Have Pockets

Video: Cawood reading her poem "You Are Not a Cat"

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

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Arlene Keizer, an Afro-Caribbean American poet and scholar, writes about the literature, lived experience, theory, and visual culture of the African Diaspora. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, she later earned an MA in English and Creative Writing (Poetry) at Stanford University and a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery (Cornell UP), and her poems and articles have appeared in African American Review, American Literature, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, PMLA, Poem-a-Day, TriQuarterly, and other venues. Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black, her collection of poems about the African American painter Beauford Delaney, won the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was published in 2023 by the Kent State University Press. She is a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Links:

Arlene Keizer  

Arlene Keizer’s page at Pratt Institute 

Interview with Arlene Keizer at Speaking of Marvels 

“Canopy” in Poem-A-Day 

Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black at Kent State University Press 

 Beauford Delaney 

 Bio and artwork at Knoxville Museum of Art 

 Bio and Artwork at the Smithsonian  

 Bio and artwork at Studio Museum in Harlem 

 Artwork at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery 

 “Beauford Delaney in Knoxville” at Knoxville History Project 

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

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Chris Barton is the author of the poetry chapbook A Finely Calibrated Apocalypse, published by Bottlecap Press in 2024. His writing has appeared in Epiphany, Peach Magazine, The Plenitudes, Hotel, and elsewhere. From 2016 to 2019, he co-hosted the Electric Pheasant Poetry in Knoxville, TN. 

Peter Gizzi grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His many books of poetry include Artificial Heart, Threshold Songs, In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 and Archeophonics, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His book Fierce Elegy, published in 2023, won the T. S. Eliot Prize. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

“In Defense of Nothing” from In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 © 2015 by Peter Gizzi. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.

Links:

Read "our free trial lives," "last supper," and "the bafflement" by Chris Barton

Read "In Defense of Nothing" by Peter Gizzi

Chris Barton

A Finely Calibrated Apocalypse by Chris Barton (Bottlecap Press)

"2 Poems by Chris Barton" in Peach Magazine

"Ouroboros as a Treat" in The Plentitudes

"Three Poems" in Potluck Magazine

Peter Gizzi

Bio and poems at The Poetry Foundation

Bio and poems at Poets.org

"Peter Gizzi Talks About His Work" (YouTube Video--T.S. Eliot Prize)

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

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Charles Douthat is a poet, retired litigator, and visual artist. Born and educated in California, he practiced law for many years in New Haven and began writing poems during a long mid-life illness. His first collection, Blue for Oceans, received the PEN New England Award, as the best book of poetry published in 2010 by a New England writer. Concerning Douthat’s newest book, Again, the poet Alan Shapiro writes, “This book is impossible not to love.” Douthat lives in Weston, Connecticut, with his wife, the artist Julie Leff.

Robert Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco. When he was just ten years old, his father died, and Frost’s family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts to live with his paternal grandparents. Though Frost attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, he never earned a formal degree. He spent much of his twenties and thirties farming and teaching. In 1912, he moved, with his wife and children, to England where publishers were more receptive to his work. But he moved back to the States in 1915 after the start of the First World War. He lived for the rest of his life mostly in Massachusetts and Vermont. Robert Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Congressional Medal of Honor. He died in Boston in 1963.

Links:

Read "Polk Street" and "Mercy" by Charles Douthat

Read "After Apple-Picking" by Robert Frost

Charles Douthat

Charles Douthat's website

"Charles Douthat Unbound," Authors Unbound podcast

"A Few Minutes After Nine" in The Los Angeles Review

"The Planting" in The Nature of Our Times

"Grounds" in Leon Literary Review

Robert Frost

Bio and poems at Poets.org

Bio and Poems at The Poetry Foundation's website

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

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Matthew Minicucci is an award-winning author of four collections of poems including his most recent, Dual, published in 2023 by Acre Books. His poetry and essays have appeared widely in various publications, including American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, the Kenyon Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review. His work has garnered numerous awards including the Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award and the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, along with fellowships from organizations including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the National Parks Service, and the James Merrill House, among others. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Blount Scholars Program at the University of Alabama.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly was born in 1951 in Palo Alto, California. Her first book, To the Place of Trumpets, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was published in 1987. Her poems appeared in Best American Poetry, The Nation, The Yale Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and others. She won awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, the Whiting Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. Her third book, The Orchard, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Kelly taught at the University of California-Irvine, Purdue University, Warren Wilson College, and the University of Illinois. She died in October of 2016, in Urbana, Illinois.   

Special thanks to Boa Editions, Ltd, for permission to record Brigit Pegeen Kelly's poem "Song," which appeared in her book Song, and "Brightness from the North," which was published in The Orchard.

Links:

Matthew Minicucci

Matthew Minicucci's website

Bio and poems at The Poetry Foundation

"Nostalgia" at poets.org

Two poems in Poetry Northwest

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Bio and poems at The Poetry Foundation

Bio and poems at poets.org

"Dead Doe" in The Kenyon Review

Reading at Breadloaf Writers' Conference

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast. Explore life-changing resources and events, sign up for newsletters, follow us on social media, and more through our website, www.knoxcountylibrary.org.

Rate & review on Podchaser

Sara Pirkle is a Southern poet, an identical twin, a breast cancer survivor, and a board game enthusiast. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The Disappearing Act, won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry and was published by Mercer University Press in 2018. In 2019, she was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, and in 2022 she was shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize. She also dabbles in songwriting and co-wrote a song on Remy Le Boeuf’s album, Architecture of Storms, which was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY in the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album category. Pirkle's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, the Best of the Net Anthology twice, and the Independent Best American Poetry Award. She earned a PhD in English from Georgia State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia College & State University. She is an Associate Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama.

Anya Krugovoy Silver was born in Media, Pennsylvania in December of 1968, and she grew up in Swarthmore. The child of immigrants, her first two languages were German and Russian. She graduated from Haverford College, and she earned a PhD in literature from Emory University in Atlanta. In 1998, Silver and her husband began teaching at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. While pregnant with their son in 2004, she was diagnosed with and treated for inflammatory breast cancer. After five years of remission, her cancer returned as bone metastasis in 2010. She published four books of poetry and one book of criticism in her lifetime. She won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2015, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry in 2018, the same year in which she died. At the time of her death, she was in the process of editing her fifth book, Saint Agnostica, which was published in 2021 by Louisiana State University Press.

The following poems were recorded with permission from Louisiana State University Press:

Silver, Anya Krugovoy. “Blush” and “The Poem in My Childhood.” The Ninety-Third Name of God: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2010

Silver, Anya Krugovoy. “There’s a River.” I Watched You Disappear: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2014

Silver, Anya Krugovoy. “From Nothing.” From Nothing: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2016

Silver, Anya Krugovoy. “Being Ill.” Saint Agnostica: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2021

Links:

Sara Pirkle

Sara Pirkle's website

"Weighing the Options" in Delta Poetry Review

"Not Prometheus" in Eclectica

"Pretend You Don’t Owe Me a Thing" in Rattle

"Evolution of the Writing Process: A Conversation with Dr. Sara Pirkle Hughes"--University of Alabama

Anya Krugovoy Silver

Bio and poems at The Poetry Foundation

"Anya Krugovoy Silver, 1968-1018" in New Georgia Encyclopedia

"Reading Poetry in Illness," podcast episode at The SlowDown

"Anya Silver’s Heart-Wrenchingly Beautiful Last Poems," a review in The Christian Century

Anya Silver Archives in Image