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?
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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?
Why might a poet set poetry aside for more than two decades and then return to it? What would the return sound like? When, as a young man, George Oppen stopped writing poetry, it was because, in his words, "I couldn't make the art I wanted to make while also pursuing the politics I wanted to pursue." David Hobbs [https://www.davidbeehobbs.com/] joins the podcast to discuss "Ballad [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=30791]," one of the poems Oppen wrote upon his return to poetry.
David B. Hobbs is an assistant professor of English at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, where he is working on his first monograph, What Can You Do Alone?: Lyric Sociality & the Global Depression. He is also the editor of George Oppen's 21 Poems [https://www.ndbooks.com/book/21-poems/] (New Direcitions, 2017). You can read David's introduction [https://www.nybooks.com/online/2017/09/01/the-lost-poems-of-george-oppen/] to that volume in The New York Review of Books and his scholarly article [https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/854595] on Oppen in Modernism/modernity.
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Close Readings
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?
