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: Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham UP, 2019) and The American House Poem, 1945 - 2021 (Oxford UP, forthcoming in 2023). He is also the author of a book of poems, Some Flowers (Mad Hat Press, 2022), and the translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Frédéric Neyrat's Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham UP, 2017). He edits poetry for The Atlantic, where he is also a frequent contributor, and has published in such journals as New Literary History, American Literary History, Essays in Criticism, Modern Philology, and ASAP/Journal. Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and share an episode with a friend! Follow my Substack to get news of the podcast. 

How should we deal with the fact that we have to read the lines of a poem in order, one after another—or, for that matter, that we have to live our days one after the other? That's some of what comes up in my conversation with Evan Kindley about Kenneth Koch and his funny, didactic, and haunting poem "One Train May Hide Another."Evan is an associate editor at the Chronicle Review. He is the author of two books: Questionnaire (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (Harvard UP, 2017).  With Kara Wittman, he is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Essay (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is currently writing a "group biography" of the New York School Poets (of which Koch, along with previous podcast subjects Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery, is a crucial member), which is under contract with Knopf, and his essays can be found in such publications as The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and n+1. You can follow Evan on Twitter.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and share an episode with a friend. Finally, subscribe to my Substack to stay up to date on our plans.

I've been waiting for a chance to talk about an Emily Dickinson poem on the podcast, and no one better to do it with than my friend Johanna Winant. She chose "My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —" for our conversation. (If you're curious, you can find an image of Dickinson's manuscript here.)Johanna is an assistant professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, where she works on transatlantic modernism, twentieth-century American literature, philosophy and literature, and transhistorical poetry and poetics. She is completing a book manuscript with the working title "Lyric Logic: American Modernism and the Problem of Induction," and her articles and reviews have appeared in James Joyce Quarterly, Paideuma, Journal of Modern LIterature, Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere. You can follow Johanna on Twitter.As ever, please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack, and you'll get (eventually!) a newsletter to go with each episode.

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" You may know the line, even if you don't know the poem it ends. I had the great pleasure of talking with one of the most accomplished poetry critics of our time, Dan Chiasson, about that poem, William Butler Yeats's fascinating "Among School Children."Dan Chiasson was born and raised in the city of Burlington, Vermont, and received a BA in 1993 from Amherst College and a PhD from Harvard University in 2002. He has written regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Chiasson is the author of six books, including five books of poetry, most recently The Math Campers (Knopf, 2020), and one book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (Chicago, 2007). He is at work on a study of politics and change in American life, Bernie for Burlington: His Rise in a Changing Vermont, 1964-1991, based partly on his own close observation of Sanders since Chiasson was nine years old. Dan Chiasson is Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College.Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Spread the word, and share an episode with a friend. Finally, follow my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter to go with each episode.

I talked with my friend Sarah Osment about "Governors on Sominex," a poem by David Berman. In addition to being a poet, Berman was the frontman and lyricist of the band Silver Jews.Sarah works in the Writing Program at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses in Media Aesthetics. She has devoted her intellectual energy to more public-facing projects since earning her PhD in English  from Brown University in 2016: she is the co-founder of Hyped on Melancholy, an online magazine devoted to smart words about sad songs and the reasons we cleave to them. Sarah's own essay for Hyped—on Wilson Phillips's "Hold On" and much else besides—is here. She is also co-editor, along with David Hering, of a recent cluster of essays on the poetry and music of David Berman published at Post45.Please follow, rate. and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter to go with each episode.