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?
Michelle A. Taylor on Patricia Lockwood ("The Ode on Grecian Urn")
Close Readings
1 hour 56 minutes
1 year ago
Michelle A. Taylor on Patricia Lockwood ("The Ode on Grecian Urn")
What is a poem worth? What does beauty do to the person who wants it, or to the person who makes it? Michelle A. Taylor [https://twitter.com/scriblerian] joins the pod to talk about Patricia Lockwood's poem "The Ode on a Grecian Urn [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143936/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 [https://poets.org/poem/ode-grecian-urn]").
Michelle A. Taylor is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University's Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry [https://fchi.emory.edu/home/fellows/index.html]. 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 [https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/mod.2023.0403], College Literature [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/746213/summary], Modernism/ modernity Print+ [https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/discomfort], Literary Imagination [https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article-abstract/21/3/324/5583714], and Modernist Archives: A Handbook [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury-handbook-of-modernist-archives-9781350450592/], and she has also written essays and reviews for The Point [https://thepointmag.com/author/mtaylor/], Post45 Contemporaries [https://post45.org/2021/05/come-slowly-eden/], The Fence [https://www.the-fence.com/author/dr-michelle-alexis-taylor/], Poetry Foundation [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158199/because-i-have-not-existed], the Financial Times Magazine [https://www.ft.com/content/1e1342ea-97ae-4816-aa6f-3b7158f72df2], and The New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-secret-history-of-t-s-eliots-muse]. 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.
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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?
