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?
How does life grow from death? When we taste a fruit, are we, in some sense, ingesting everything the soil contains? Margaret Ronda [https://english.ucdavis.edu/people/mronda] joins the podcast to discuss a poem that poses these questions in harrowing ways, Walt Whitman's "This Compost [https://poets.org/poem/compost]."
[A note on the recording: from 01:10:11 - 01:12:59, Margaret briefly loses her internet connection and I awkwardly vamp. Apologies! Rest assured the remainder of the episode goes off without a hitch!]
Margaret Ronda is an associate professor of English at UC-Davis, where she specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End [https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28109] (Post*45 Series, Stanford UP, 2018), and her articles have appeared in such journals as American Literary History [https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/34/4/1389/6833096?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false], Post45 Contemporaries [https://post45.org/2023/06/abortions-poetic-figures/], and PMLA [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/work-and-wait-unwearying-dunbars-georgics/58F494BAF1F14008449165A565E34966] (for which she won the William Riley Parker Prize). She is also the author of two books of poetry, both published by Saturnalia Books: For Hunger [https://www.ipgbook.com/for-hunger-products-9781947817999.php?page_id=32&pid=SIA] (2018) and Personification [https://www.ipgbook.com/personification-products-9780981859156.php?page_id=32&pid=SIA] (2010). You can follow Margaret on Twitter [https://twitter.com/mronda77].
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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?
