Podcast
Close Readings
Hosted by Kamran Javadizadeh · EN
One poem. One guest. Each episode, Kamran Javadizadeh, a poetry critic and professor of English, talks to a different leading scholar of poetry about a single short poem that the guest has loved. You'll have a chance to see the poem from the expert's perspective—and also to think about some big questions: How do poems work? What can they make happen? How might they change our lives?
16episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Michelle A. Taylor on Patricia Lockwood ("The Ode on Grecian Urn")
Feb 19, 202401:56:45Tap to summarizeWhat is a poem worth? What does beauty do to the person who wants it, or to the person who makes it? Michelle A. Taylor joins the pod to talk about Patricia Lockwood's poem "The Ode on a Grecian Urn," a wild and funny and ultimately quite moving poem (which is also, obviously, a riff on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn").Michelle A. Taylor is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Michelle is a scholar of 20th century literature, and more specifically, literary modernism. She is currently finishing her first book, tentatively titled Clique Lit: Coterie Culture and the Making of Modernism. Her academic essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Modernist Cultures, College Literature, Modernism/ modernity Print+, Literary Imagination, and Modernist Archives: A Handbook, and she has also written essays and reviews for The Point, Post45 Contemporaries, The Fence, Poetry Foundation, the Financial Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. She received her PhD in English from Harvard in 2021, and from 2021 to 2023, she was the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.If you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get the occasional update on the pod and on my other work.
Transcribe →Sylvie Thode on Tim Dlugos ("The Far West")
Feb 12, 202401:32:58Tap to summarizeHow might a poem map the passage from life to death? Sylvie Thode joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem by Tim Dlugos, "The Far West." Sylvie is a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley, where she works on poetry and poetics, with particular interest in the poetry of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Though that focus roots her in the 20th century, she has written on poetry from a range of time periods. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Chicago Review, Cambridge Literary Review, and Jacket2. You can follow her on Twitter.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get an occasional update on the pod and my other work.
Transcribe →Marisa Galvez on William IX ("The Song of Nothing")
Feb 5, 202401:03:44Tap to summarizeFor the first time in the run of this podcast (though certainly not the last!) today we have a poem in translation. Marisa Galvez joins Close Readings to discuss "The Song of Nothing," a poem by the first attested troubadour, William IX. The poem is something like 900 years old, and Marisa helps us see both its strangeness and the sense in which it feels like it might have been written yesterday. You'll hear Marisa read the poem both in an English translation and in its original language, Old Occitan, where its musicality and verve really come through. This was a fascinating conversation about how poems are made—and why, and who and what for—with lessons to offer both about the medieval period and about the poems and songs we encounter today.Marisa Galvez is Professor of French and Italian (and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature) at Stanford University, where she specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. She is the author of two books, both published by University of Chicago Press: Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (2012) and The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 (2020). Her current book project concerns contemporary and modern translations of medieval lyric and how they propose new ways of "lyric knowing" the Global South.Remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates about the pod and about my writing.
Transcribe →Stephanie Burt on Allan Peterson ("I thought all life came from the alphabet")
Jan 22, 202401:23:01Tap to summarizeVery few scholars have as much enthusiasm for poetry as Stephanie Burt, and so it was a delight to have her back for this episode. Steph has been in the news of late for offering a (very popular) course at Harvard on Taylor Swift, and we begin this episode by talking in fascinating ways about the long history of the relation between popular music and poetry. And then we move on to this episode's poem, Allan Peterson's marvelous "I thought all life came from the alphabet." Peterson was a new poet to me, and I was totally won over by Steph's framing of him as a poet of science, of intellect, and of fun. This is a poet thinking in surprising ways about the match and mismatches between the world as we find it and the consciousness with which we receive it. He is, in that sense, an epistemological poet, but also at his core a naturalist, a poet whose mind grows in relation to the world he describes.Stephanie Burt is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her most recent book of poems is We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022) and her most recent book of criticism is Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic Books, 2019). You can follow her on Twitter.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you're enjoying it. Share it with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.
Transcribe →Paul Fry on William Wordsworth ("A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal")
Jan 15, 202401:31:17Tap to summarizeSome of the most profound insights I have ever had as a student of poetry occurred in the classroom of Paul Fry, and so this episode really is a dream for me. Paul Fry joins the podcast to talk about William Wordsworth's poem "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal." Just an eight-line poem, but it opens for us into some big questions: Where does Wordsworth fit into the history of autobiography and poetry? How should we think of his phrase "spots of time"? Who was "Lucy," the girl who seems to be memorialized in this and a handful of Wordsworth's other poems? What does poetry have to tell us about death? Can it console? Why do we read literature at all, and what does that have to do with the relation between "doing" and "being"? Paul Fry is William Lampson Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, where he has taught for many decades. He is the author of several books, most recently Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (Yale Studies in English, 2008) and Theory of Literature (Yale UP, 2012), a book based on his brilliant Yale lecture course, which you can find online (and entirely for free!) here.As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, please follow it and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and on my other work.
Transcribe →Keegan Cook Finberg on Harryette Mullen ("Dim Lady")
Jan 8, 202401:32:35Tap to summarizeWhat kind of love do we find in comparison? Keegan Cook FInberg joins the podcast to discuss Harryette Mullen's poem "Dim Lady," which is simultaneously a love poem and a (perhaps?) loving tribute to Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 (itself a love poem and parody). Keegan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is finishing a book called Poetry in General: Interdisciplinarity and U.S. Public Forms. You can find a sample of the work she's doing in that book in her article in Textual Practice on Frank O'Hara and the Seagram Building. And you can find samples of her new project, on poetry and surveillance, in essays she has written on Claudia Rankine and Solmaz Sharif. Follow Keegan on Twitter.As ever, please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you're enjoying it. And share an episode with a friend! You can also subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.
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