logo
episode-header-image
Dec 2024
12m 18s

Robert Hayden — Those Winter Sundays

ON BEING STUDIOS
About this episode

What sacrifices were made by your parents when you were a child? How did you think about them as they were happening? And how do you think about them now? In his poem “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden holds space for a weighted childhood memory and the regret, love, and pain it evokes.

Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was the first Black American poet to be appointed the Consultant of Poetry to the Library of Congress (now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate); he held this role from 1976 to 1978. Hayden was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Hopwood Award, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, and Russell Loines Award for distinguished poetic achievement from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Robert Hayden’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

 

Up next
Mar 2025
Denise Duhamel — How It Will End
Have you ever gotten consumed by watching a couple argue in public and trying to decipher what’s really going on between them? Denise Duhamel’s deliciously entertaining “How It Will End” offers us that experience. Come for the voyeurism, stay for the awareness it stirs up. Why ar ... Show More
17m 2s
Feb 2025
Fady Joudah — [...]
Even though Palestinian-American Fady Joudah’s poem is sparingly titled “[...],” an ellipsis surrounded by brackets, this work itself is psychologically dense. Through crisp lines and language, it wrestles with the nature of human ambivalence — about things like fear, desire, dis ... Show More
12m 55s
Feb 2025
Benjamin Zephaniah — To Michael Menson
Benjamin Zephaniah’s urgent, imperative “To Michael Menson” was written when he was a poet in residence at a human rights barrister in England. His poem resonates with his repeated calls for justice for a murdered Black musician — not a justice that is gullible, impotent, or hope ... Show More
12m 52s
Recommended Episodes
Nov 2024
Craig Arnold's "Meditation on a Grapefruit"
Craig Arnold, born November 16, 1967 was an American poet and professor. His first book of poems, Shells (1999), was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His many honors include the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, the Amy Lowell P ... Show More
9m 13s
Aug 2024
1180: The Gardener 85 by Rabindranath Tagore
Today’s poem is The Gardener 85 by Rabindranath Tagore. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Poetry has a way of collapsing time, and by working the senses, having us experience an era. In the blues rhythms of Langston Hughes’ poetry, I hear e ... Show More
6m 17s
Jul 2021
John Keats' "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket"
John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet prominent in the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, although his poems were in publication for only four years before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.[1] They ... Show More
7m 13s
Oct 2024
Walter Savage Landor's "To Robert Browning"
Though we remember Browning far more readily than we do Landor, this poem dates from a period when their fortunes were reversed and the latter was eager to acquaint the world with the budding talent he had discovered.Walter Savage Landor (30 January 1775 – 17 September 1864) was ... Show More
7m 20s
Nov 2023
Two Poems About Butter
Today we pay tribute, with poems by Andrea Cohen and Elizabeth Alexander, to the indispensable golden wonder. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe 
4m 48s
Dec 2024
[encore] 1022: Two Shadows by Maurice Manning
Today’s poem is Two Shadows by Maurice Manning. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on D ... Show More
5m 33s
Oct 2023
Episode 64: Rupert Recites from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus
In celebration of National Poetry Day in the UK, we invite you to enjoy Rupert’s recital of Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. The spontaneous and joyful delivery comes in response to a request to comment on the topic of food. The poem is from Rilke’s collection ‘Sonn ... Show More
1m 31s
Oct 2024
Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"
Though its author remained otherwise undistinguished, today's poem–with all its ecstasy, agony, and irony–has become almost as essential to the American experience as baseball itself. Happy reading!Ernest Lawrence Thayer was born on August 14, 1863, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He ... Show More
7m 15s