Close Readings

"What is more precise than precision? Illusion." I talked with my friend, the scholar Siobhan Phillips [https://www.dickinson.edu/site/custom_scripts/dc_faculty_profile_index.php?fac=phillisi], about Marianne Moore's poem "Armor's Undermining Modesty [https://poetryarchive.org/poem/armors-undermining-modesty/]." Siobhan Phillips is a professor of English at Dickinson College, where she teaches courses on American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, food studies, and creative writing. She is the author of The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-poetics-of-the-everyday/9780231520294/] (Columbia UP, 2010) and the novel Benefit [https://www.blpress.org/books/benefit/] (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022). Her essays have appeared in such journals as Contemporary Liiterature, Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/modernity, Literary Imagination, Twentieth-Century Literature, and PMLA. Her essay on Marianne Moore and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was published on the website of the Poetry Foundation [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/92768/the-students-of-marianne-moore]. Please follow the podcast, and leave us a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And stay tuned for more episodes to come soon.

How is a poem like a session of psychoanalysis? The scholar Daniel Katz [https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/people/katzdrd/] joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem that poses that question, Jack Spicer's "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51396/psychoanalysis-an-elegy]." Daniel Katz is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and is the author of several books and articles on modernism, modern and contemporary poetry, and psychoanalysis. His work on Spicer includes a monograph, The Poetry of Jack Spicer [https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-poetry-of-jack-spicer.html] (Edinburgh UP, 2013), and Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819578150/be-brave-to-things/] (Wesleyan UP, 2021), for which he served as editor. He is currently finishing a book called "The Big Lie of the Personal: Poetry, Politics, and the Lyric Subject." In our conversation, we refer to a few other Spicer volumes: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819570901/my-vocabulary-did-this-to-me/], Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819501905/even-strange-ghosts-can-be-shared/], The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819502124/the-house-that-jack-built-new-edition/], and finally Spicer's book After Lorca [https://www.nyrb.com/products/after-lorca]. If you're enjoying the podcast, please share it with your friends and networks. Please also subscribe and leave us a rating and review. More soon!

The second in a series of conversations about the poet Alice Notley, who passed away on May 19, 2025. The poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney [https://www.joyellemcsweeney.com/] joins the podcast to talk about selections [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JLzep_QTApzg9vxEbo7_vmiQ05-yKmH8/view?usp=sharing] from Notley's epic The Descent of Alette [https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-descent-of-alette-alice-notley/11626144?ean=9780140587647&next=t]. (A brief note on audio quality: we listen to three recordings of Notley reading from her book during this episode. The volume on playback of those recordings seems somewhat low to me—sorry!—but hopefully listeners will be able to adjust the volume on their devices so as to hear Notley well enough.) Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's latest book, Death Styles [https://nightboat.org/book/death-styles/], appeared from Nightboat Books in Spring 2024; her previous title, Toxicon and Arachne [https://nightboat.org/book/toxicon-and-arachne/] (2020), was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/joyelle-mcsweeneys-poetry-of-catastrophe] and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults [https://press.umich.edu/Books/T/The-Necropastoral2], is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. Her debut poetry volume, The Red Bird [https://fenceportal.org/book/the-red-bird/], inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books [https://actionbooks.org/], which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at the University of Notre Dame [https://english.nd.edu/people/joyelle-mcsweeney/]. You can see Alice Notley read the entirety of The Descent of Alette in a series of recordings made over two nights at The Poetry Center [https://poetry.sfsu.edu/archive/events/29027-alice-notley-reads-descent-alette-2-nights-lab.html] at SFSU. Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! (Post it to your social media feeds?) You can also subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], which I haven't used in a while, but may again. I'm also on Bluesky [https://bsky.app/profile/kjavadizadeh.bsky.social], now and then.

What can a poem do in the face of calamity? This was an extraordinary conversation. Huda Fakhreddine [https://nelc.sas.upenn.edu/people/huda-fakhreddine] joins the podcast to discuss "Pull Yourself Together [https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-01/pull-yourself-together-and-seven-skies-of-homeland-hiba-abu-nada-huda-fakhreddine/]," a poem that Huda has translated into English and that was written by the Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator Hiba Abu Nada. Hiba was killed by an Israeli airstrike in her home in the Gaza Strip on October 20, 2023. She was 32 years old. In the episode, Huda describes watching a clip of Hiba reading the poem. You can find that clip here [https://youtu.be/G21gSWYWh4Y?si=I_bjrAZahNud5lhX]. Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on modernist movements and trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is the author of Metapoeisis in the Arabic Tradition [https://brill.com/display/title/31773] (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice [https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-arabic-prose-poem.html] (Edinburgh UP, 2021) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry [https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Arabic-Poetry/Stetkevych-Fakhreddine/p/book/9780367562359] (Routledge, 2023). She is also a prolific translator of Arabic poetry: you can find another of her translations of HIba Abu Nada in Protean [https://proteanmag.com/2023/11/03/i-grant-you-refuge/]. Follow Huda on Twitter [https://twitter.com/FakhreddineHuda]. Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. You can also subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.

"Poetry," according to this episode's poem, "makes nothing happen." But as our guest, Robert Volpicelli [https://www.rmc.edu/profile/robert-a-volpicelli/], makes clear, that poem, W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats [https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats]," offers that statement not as diminishment of poetry but instead as a way of valuing it for the right reasons. Robert Volpicelli is an associate professor of English at Randolph-Macon College and the author of Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/transatlantic-modernism-and-the-us-lecture-tour-9780192893383?cc=us&lang=en&] (Oxford UP, 2021). That book, which won the Modernist Studies Association's first book prize, will be out in paperback in April 2024. Bob's articles have appeared in journals like PMLA, NOVEL, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He and I co-edited and wrote a brief introduction for "Poetry Networks [https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/41709]," a special issue of the journal College Literature (a journal for which Bob has since become an associate editor). As ever, if you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get very occasional updates on the pod and my writing.

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. If you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get the occasional update on the pod and on my other work.

For the first time in the run of this podcast (though certainly not the last!) today we have a poem in translation. Marisa Galvez [https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/marisa-galvez] joins Close Readings to discuss "The Song of Nothing [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j8TlS0yViDK4Ab-ZIz9R1dFizkAuR4Ul/view?usp=sharing]," a poem by the first attested troubadour, William IX. The poem is something like 900 years old, and Marisa helps us see both its strangeness and the sense in which it feels like it might have been written yesterday. You'll hear Marisa read the poem both in an English translation and in its original language, Old Occitan, where its musicality and verve really come through. This was a fascinating conversation about how poems are made—and why, and who and what for—with lessons to offer both about the medieval period and about the poems and songs we encounter today. Marisa Galvez is Professor of French and Italian (and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature) at Stanford University, where she specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. She is the author of two books, both published by University of Chicago Press: Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13249857.html] (2012) and The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo49911567.html] (2020). Her current book project concerns contemporary and modern translations of medieval lyric and how they propose new ways of "lyric knowing" the Global South. Remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates about the pod and about my writing.

Some of the most profound insights I have ever had as a student of poetry occurred in the classroom of Paul Fry, and so this episode really is a dream for me. Paul Fry [https://english.yale.edu/people/professors-emeritus/paul-fry] joins the podcast to talk about William Wordsworth's poem "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal [https://poets.org/poem/slumber-did-my-spirit-seal]." Just an eight-line poem, but it opens for us into some big questions: Where does Wordsworth fit into the history of autobiography and poetry? How should we think of his phrase "spots of time"? Who was "Lucy," the girl who seems to be memorialized in this and a handful of Wordsworth's other poems? What does poetry have to tell us about death? Can it console? Why do we read literature at all, and what does that have to do with the relation between "doing" and "being"? Paul Fry is William Lampson Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, where he has taught for many decades. He is the author of several books, most recently Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300126488/] (Yale Studies in English, 2008) and Theory of Literature [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300180831/theory-of-literature/] (Yale UP, 2012), a book based on his brilliant Yale lecture course, which you can find online (and entirely for free!) here [https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300]. As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, please follow it and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and on my other work.

"New Year is nearly here / and who, knowing himself, would / endanger his desires / resolving them / in a formula?" So asks James Schuyler in this episode's poem, "Empathy and New Year [https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/schuyler/schuyler_empathy.html]." No resolutions for me this year, but instead an indulgence, a gift to myself, and I hope to you: my friend Eric Lindstrom [https://www.uvm.edu/cas/english/profiles/eric_lindstrom] rejoins the podcast to talk once again about Schuyler, poetry, and friendship. Eric Lindstrom is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the author of two books: Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230299412] (Palgrave, 2011) and Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/jane-austen-and-other-minds/C1E29C95B481498C7030894BA1CE6427](Cambridge, 2022). He is now completing a third book, James Schuyler and the Poetics of Attention: Romanticism Inside Out, which would be the first scholarly monograph dedicated to Schuyler's work. Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get the occasional update on the podcast and on my other work.

How can a poet choose between his language and his idea of home? A postcolonial turn this week, as Jahan Ramazani [https://english.as.virginia.edu/people/profile/rr5m] joins the podcast to talk about Derek Walcott's "A Far Cry from Africa [https://poets.org/poem/far-cry-africa]." Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Professor and the Director of Modern and Global Studies in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books, most recently Poetry in a Global Age [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo59347589.html] (Chicago, 2020). Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates about the podcast and my other work.

A conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time: Hanif Abdurraqib [https://www.abdurraqib.com/]joins the podcast to talk about Umang Kalra [https://linktr.ee/umangkalra]'s poem "Job Security [https://proteanmag.com/2023/02/07/job-security/]." Hanif is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, A Fortune for Your Disaster, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and The Crown Ain't Worth Much. He has a new book coming out in March, 2024: There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. You can find links to all of these titles on Hanif's website [https://www.abdurraqib.com/book]. Follow Hanif on Twitter [https://twitter.com/NifMuhammad]. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend, and follow, rate, and review the podcast. Subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get an occasional newsletter to update you on the pod and my other work.

The second episode in our cluster on the great Louise Glück, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/facts/], and who passed away on October 13. Lanny Hammer rejoins the podcast to talk about his friend and colleague Louise and her poem "A Foreshortened Journey [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/poetry/]." Langdon Hammer [https://english.yale.edu/people/tenured-and-tenure-track-faculty-professors/langdon-hammer] is Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University, where he studies poetry and its place in the culture. Among his recent publications are James Merrill: Life and Art [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/74410/james-merrill-by-langdon-hammer/] (Knopf, 2015) and A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/251165/a-whole-world-by-james-merrill-edited-by-langdon-hammer-and-stephen-yenser/](Knopf, 2021), which he edited with Stephen Yenser. Lanny has also remembered Louise in print: you can find pieces by him about her in The Yale Review [https://yalereview.org/article/langdon-hammer-louise-gl%C3%BCck] and The Paris Review [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/10/20/remembering-louise-gluck/]. I hope you'll hear the beautiful resonances that begin to emerge between the episodes in this cluster—and that, via the poems, they'll give you some sense of the person, the life, and the world she made and left behind. Make sure you're following the podcast to get new episodes as they roll out, and please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Follow my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/] to get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.

"Dear heart, how like you this?" There's really nothing better than that, is there? I talked to Jeff Dolven [https://jdolven.princeton.edu/] about Sir Thomas Wyatt's gorgeous poem "They Flee from Me [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45589/they-flee-from-me]." It's one of the hottest poems I know, and after talking to Jeff I know it much better. Jeff Dolven is Professor of English at Princeton University [https://english.princeton.edu/people/jeff-dolven], where he teaches courses in poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. He is the author of three books of criticism, including, most recently, Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo27315203.html] (Chicago, 2018), and two books of poetry: Speculative Music [https://www.sarabandebooks.org/all-titles/speculative-music-jeff-dolven] (Sarabande, 2013) and *A New English Grammar [https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9798986799001/a-new-english-grammar.aspx?bCategory=1SP] (dispersed holdings, 2022). Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share the episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get updates on the podcast.