Poems in Practice and in Theory

The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday this summer, giving Americans a chance to reflect on the nation’s past and imagine its future. Who better to help us make sense of this moment than Jill Lepore? The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, longtime staff writer at The ... Show More

“Yesteryear,” Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, tells the story of Natalie Heller Mills: an ultrasuccessful tradwife influencer who posts about her life on Yesteryear Ranch, a homestead where she grows her own food, tends to cows and chickens, raises her six children and models a ... Show More

In April 1989, a newspaper clipping about an art exhibit landed in the mailbox of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the founder of a conservative evangelical group, the American Family Association. Partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the exhibit included a now-infamous p ... Show More

This is the kind of conversation I dreamed about having when I began this podcast. Emily Wilson joins Close Readings to talk about Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite," a poet and poem at the root of the lyric tradition in European poetry. You'll hear Emily read the poem in the Ancient Gr ... Show More

What a delight this was, to talk to my friend Walt Hunter about the marvelous Gwendolyn Brooks poem "kitchenette building." Walt is an associate professor and the Chair of the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of two books of criticism: Fo ... Show More

In “Hebrews 13” by Jericho Brown, a narrator says: “my lover and my brother both knocked at my door.” The heat is turned on, scalding coffee is offered and hastily swallowed, and silence is the soundtrack. What an exquisitely awkward triangle it is, and what a human, beautiful, a ... Show More

Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The Second Sex incorporates anthropology, psychology, historiography, mythology and biology to ask an ‘impossible’ question: what is a woma ... Show More

With her new memoir, The Critic's Daughter (Norton), Priscilla Gilman explores her relationship with her father, Theater Critic and Yale Drama professor Richard Gilman (as well as with her mom, literary agent Lynn Nesbit). We get into the perils of literary-kid memoir, the NYC bo ... Show More

What a searching, stimulating conversation this was. Elisa Gabbert joins the podcast to talk about a poem she and I have both long loved, Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus."Elisa is a poet, critic, and essayist—and the author of several books. Her recent titles include Normal Distance ... Show More

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Part One). This is the first of two episodes devoted to one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century, wherein Eliot’s enigmatic speaker invites us on an evening stroll through his memories, his fears and his inhibitions ... Show More