Poetry Unbound

Marie Howe’s poetry shimmers with the keen attention she pays to language: the language of the body (both the human body and “the beautiful body of the world”), of people’s everyday speech, and of religious myth. We are thrilled to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Marie, recorded as an online component of the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2025. Marie reads several poems, and together, they discuss Mary Magdalene as complex everywoman, the “eternal energy” of dead loved ones that fills Marie’s life and work, and her current efforts to listen to what the Earth is saying to us.    We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  Marie Howe is the former Poet Laureate of New York and the author of five collections of poetry, including Magdalene, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, and What the Living Do. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2025 New and Selected Poems, published in the US by W .W. Norton. The same book is published in the UK as What the Earth Seemed to Say by Bloodaxe Books. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“Spending time in hell is not my idea of something that one should do,” says poet Lorna Goodison, yet she immersed herself there for years to create her extraordinary modern Jamaican translation of Dante’s Inferno. We are thrilled to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Lorna, recorded as an online component of the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2025. She reads from her work, and together, they discuss Lorna’s inspiration for her underworld undertaking, how she found her Virgil, and why she calls The Inferno “bitter, necessary medicine for now.”   We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  Caribbean poet Lorna Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017. In 2018, she received a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2019 she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 are we so captivated by other people’s disagreements? And how can what we notice about them teach us about ourselves?Denise Duhamel is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Pink Lady, Scald, and Blowout. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Denise Duhamel’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. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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, disaster, liberty — and it finds certainty only in the shaky universal ground of that ambivalence.Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published five other collections of poems, including Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and children, where he works as a physician in internal medicine.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Fady Joudah’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. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 hopeless but one that is clear-eyed, collaborative, and mighty.Benjamin Zephaniah was born and raised in Birmingham, England. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including City Psalms, Propa Propaganda, and Too Black, Too Strong. In 2000, he was poet in residence for the chambers of human rights barrister Michael Mansfield, where he worked on numerous cases, including the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Zephaniah appeared on the TV show Peaky Blinders and is also known for his poetry books for children.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Benjamin Zephaniah’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. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.