Would you write a letter to a world leader? Do you think they’d listen? What would you say? Rafiq Kathwari is the first Kashmiri recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award. He obtained an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University and an MA in Political and Social Science from the New School University. Rafiq divides his time between New York City, Dublin, and Kashmir. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. We’re pleased to offer Rafiq Kathwari’s poem, and invite you to sign up here ...
May 13, 2022•15 min•Season 5Ep. 10
Children’s demands can be high, and their standards can be exacting. It’s a good thing they’re loveable. Caroline Bird grew up in Leeds, the daughter of noted theater director and producer Jude Kelly. Bird’s first collection of poems, Looking Through Letterboxes (2002), was published when she was just 15. Her other collections of poetry include Trouble Came to the Turnip (2006); Watering Can (2009); The Hat-Stand Union (2013); In These Days of Prohibition (2017), which was shortlisted for both t...
May 09, 2022•15 min•Season 5Ep. 9
What do we achieve in our fighting? How can we turn to hope and our deepest nature? Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of a school teacher and a U. S. serviceman, a member of the last graduating class of Tuskegee Airmen. She is the author or translator of more than 20 books and chapbooks for adults and children. A professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, Marilyn was Poet Laureate of Connecticut, 2001– 2006, and founding director of Soul Mountain Retrea...
May 06, 2022•14 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Is something lost once it’s gone? How do we blend sadness with sweet memory? Richard Blanco practiced civil engineering for more than 20 years. He is now an associate professor of creative writing at his alma mater, Florida International University. His books of nonfiction and poetry include Looking for the Gulf Motel and, most recently, How to Love a Country . Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. We’re pleased to offer Richard Blanco’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the l...
May 02, 2022•18 min•Season 5Ep. 7
Is the light a comfort and the night disturbing? Yusef Komunyakaa explores the life and brilliance of what’s in shadow and darkness. Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The son of a carpenter, Komunyakaa has said that he was first alerted to the power of language through his grandparents, who were church people: “the sound of the Old Testament informed the cadences of their speech,” Komunyakaa has stated. “It was my first introduction to poetry.” He has taught at numerous instituti...
Apr 29, 2022•12 min•Season 5Ep. 6
A poem inviting us to discover our brilliance and our nothingness. Both true. Both vital. Hannah Emerson is the author of The Kissing of Kissing . She is also the author of a chapbook, You Are Helping This Great Universe Explode . Emerson is a nonspeaking autistic writer whose work has appeared in BOMB Magazine , the Poetry Society of America, Literary Hub, and the Brooklyn Rail . She lives in Lafayette, New York. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. We’re pleased to offer Hannah Em...
Apr 25, 2022•14 min•Season 5Ep. 5
A song of praise to the crop-top from a crop-top-wearing man who encounters comments in public and sings and swings. Kyle Carrero Lopez was born to Cuban parents in northern New Jersey. He is the author of the chapbook MUSCLE MEMORY , winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest. He is also a founding member of LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. We’re pleased to offer Kyle Carrero Lopez’s poem, and invite yo...
Apr 22, 2022•12 min•Season 5Ep. 4
A seven-year poem: from the start of the process to bring a mother to live in the US to the time she walks through the gate. Divya Victor is the author of Curb (Nightboat Books, winner of PEN America Open Book Award and the Kinglsey Tufts Poetry Award); Kith (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag); Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow), Unsub (Insert Blanc), Things To Do With Your Mouth (Les Figues). She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Michigan State...
Apr 18, 2022•15 min•Season 5Ep. 3
We carry memory in our body: memories of our own selves, but memories of our forebears, too — talking with them as we walk, learning from them as they inquire. Denise Low is the former Kansas Poet Laureate, and an award-winning author of 30 books of prose and poetry. She blogs, reviews, and co-publishes Mammoth Publications, which specializes in Indigenous American authors. Recent poetry books are A Casino Bestiary and Mélange Block , poetry based on geologic structures and mixed-blood experienc...
Apr 15, 2022•12 min•Season 5Ep. 2
How do you speak with your mother when she’s forgotten who you are? By turning to myth, it seems, and by holding gentleness with bewilderment, love with patience. Rita Dove lets us overhear a phone call, and in this listening, we hear lifetimes unfold. Rita Dove was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993–1995 and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004–2006. In 1987 she received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book Thomas and Beulah. She is currently Commonwealth Professor of English at...
Apr 11, 2022•15 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama is back on Monday, April 11. Featured poets in this season include Rita Dove, Joshua Bennett, Tiana Clark, Yu Xiuhua, and many more. New episodes released every Monday and Friday through June 3. Follow us on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts , Overcast , or wherever you listen. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising....
Apr 04, 2022•2 min
While preparing for the next season of Poetry Unbound , host Pádraig Ó Tuama sat down with Krista Tippett for a conversation about the power of poetry to find us at the exact moment we need it. Pádraig and Krista also invite listeners to share their experience of Poetry Unbound through our survey . You can also sign up for the latest updates from Poetry Unbound . Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advert...
Mar 28, 2022•16 min
In a poem brimming with love and nostalgia for winter, a poet leaves California to return to their Minnesotan homeplace, a place where winter makes sense, where sadness makes sense, where the isolation that’s at the heart of humanity can be met with a landscape that can contain it. Here, solitude is looked at with wisdom and necessity. A season can deepen the human experience. Joy finds new expressions. Danez Smith is a Black, queer, HIV-positive writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. Th...
Dec 17, 2021•14 min•Season 4Ep. 24
What if the planet were as loved as a child? Taking the story of his daughter’s fever when she was one, Craig Santos Perez reflects on everything he did — and would have done — for his daughter’s health. Her temperature rose and his love and response did, too. The temperature of the world rises, and he wonders who loves the earth enough to respond, and who doesn’t. Craig Santos Peres is an indigenous Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is a poet, scholar, editor, publ...
Dec 13, 2021•15 min•Season 4Ep. 23
Standing at the edge of a desert, surveying the stars on a December morning, the speaker in this poem observes the everything of everything. He is so small; the universe is so loud and so silent. Thinking about the enormity of all this, he thinks of the smallness of the hearts of birds, wasps, moths, bats, and dragonflies — all flying things around him, suspended in space, like the earth is suspended in space. His own heart, too, echoes the universe’s noise. Alberto Ríos is Arizona’s inaugural p...
Dec 10, 2021•16 min•Season 4Ep. 22
Yeshiva students stand around in the middle of the night while firemen find the cause of the alarm. It’s a student — distressed by distressing news at home. The teachers cancel classes for the morning after. A poem can describe one thing, but point to another, and beyond the drama of this 2 a.m. scene is a question about whether the presence of God can dwell among those plagued by sadness, or whether God only dwells there. Yehoshua November is the author of two books of poetry, God's Optimism (w...
Dec 06, 2021•15 min•Season 4Ep. 21
In a taxi, a poet speaks to the driver. It’s the only taxi in town. He mentions travel, mentions Afghanistan, that he was there with the forces. She’s from Afghanistan and the conversation continues — awkward; complicated; him trying to say good things, but failing; her feeling like she should rescue him, but deciding not to. War is upended by the point of view of a person in whose country the war was fought. Underneath the action of the poem is a question about whether conversation is possible,...
Dec 03, 2021•18 min•Season 4Ep. 20
Why do empty places sometimes lend themselves to reflection or contemplation? In this poem, a poet — describing herself as a nonbeliever — goes into a chapel to sit. In the corner there are some girls talking, there are stained glass windows, and the poet is at once at home in herself and far from the woman she loves. The high emptiness of the church seems to give a resting place for the emptiness she’s feeling. While there’s no resolution, the larger empty space offers a holding place for the p...
Nov 29, 2021•15 min•Season 4Ep. 19
In a poem called a “Song,” Linda Hogan crafts a song for turtles and other creatures killed through oil spills in the gulf. At once a praise song for the beauty of the sea, the earth, and its animals, this song also functions as a lament: for the history erased by industrial practices; for the lack of respect and love for living breathing other-than-human lives; for plastic and the plastic containers used to hold the body of a dead sea turtle. The poem veers towards a prayer, too, begging forgiv...
Nov 26, 2021•16 min•Season 4Ep. 18
The exile’s return to the motherland is the theme around which Lory Bedikian’s poem “On the Way to Oshagan” circles. She, a proud Armenian, stops by a roadside stall on a trip to her home country; and is immediately understood as an Amerigatzi , even though she’s speaking Armenian, not English. The poem could end with this awkward exchange, but instead pushes through, and a connection occurs between the returned-departed and the never-departed: there’s a gift, an invitation, and a bridge across ...
Nov 22, 2021•18 min•Season 4Ep. 17
Telling some of the story of the Flower Wars of the Aztec era, Nico Amador’s poem pits wars against creation. In a poem that begins by recalling creation myths from multiple cultures, he then poses questions about why: Why would people sacrifice their own people to keep a god happy? Why would any god benefit from people’s deaths? Evoking how the Flower Wars contributed to the Aztec downfall, this poem also wonders about wars today: Who benefits from a war? Who decides who should die? Why? Nico A...
Nov 19, 2021•12 min•Season 4Ep. 16
In a poem that directly addresses Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Darrel Alejandro Holnes asks questions: who gets to build walls, or guard borders?. Do good fences really make good neighbors? Taking a poem that’s been part of an American imagination both of poetry and of citizenship, Darrel offers a critique that places contemporary migrant experiences at the center, challenging contemporary ideas of territory, conquest, and expansion. Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland &...
Nov 15, 2021•17 min•Season 4Ep. 15
This sestina poem considers a scene from Elizabeth Bishop’s own childhood through the sounds of six repeating words: house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, tears. These six words repeat — in different order — as the final words of the poem’s lines, creating a kind of contemplation on how those repeated words informed her childhood: a childhood marked by loss, displacement, and a kind grandmother. “Time to plant tears” the poem states, in one of its most famous lines, as if the scene recalled...
Nov 12, 2021•16 min•Season 4Ep. 14
Some friends gather and smoke at a doorway in a city. There’s Malik, and Johnny Cash, and Lefty, and Jësus. And the poet, Major Jackson. They’ve known each other their whole lives, and they wonder who they’ll turn out to be. In a moment of disclosure, Major tells his friends he wants to be a poet, astonishing them, and himself too it seems. In friendship and ribbing, in desire and teasing, this poem wonders who a person is, and what it means to hope. Major Jackson is the author of five books of ...
Nov 08, 2021•16 min•Season 4Ep. 13
Andrés Cerpa recollects how his father’s early dementia was an increasing influence on his early years. As he grew, his father diminished. The burden of this was heavy on him — he stayed awake listening for information, and fell asleep at school. Older now, he looks at his younger self with tenderness and sadness. This poem gives attention to the experience of the growing presence of absence, and the ways that affects memory, family, and perspective. Andrés Cerpa is the author of Bicycle in a Ra...
Nov 05, 2021•17 min•Season 4Ep. 12
A narrative prose poem about two brothers — one on a visit home from college — who are turning to face east in their small shared room. With seven years between them, one is a young man and the other, the poet, is nearing his teens. Their prayer is interrupted by a sudden surprising noise, and the sound of this makes them fall over each other in laughing. Their bodies, their joy, their uncontrollable delight is the prayer of their own lives. Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet and scholar. H...
Nov 01, 2021•15 min•Season 4Ep. 11
In a poem that addresses a worm directly as “you,” Gail McConnell considers how these tube-shaped beings live: ingesting the earth, aerating it, digesting it, making its nourishment accessible for all kinds of growth. The worm burrows, knows dead things, and knows underground ways. Tiny and segmented though a worm is, nonetheless it senses that “all there is // can be gone through.” The poem’s close attention to the worm’s tactics of survival seems to indicate that much could be learned from its...
Oct 29, 2021•14 min•Season 4Ep. 10
A club is a place for dancing, for abandon, for music, and for meeting strangers. Romeo Oriogun recalls a gay club that was for all those things, but also for escape. Living in a place where queer lives were under threat, he offers a praise song for this cathedral of safety and movement. Outside the world is silent, but inside the bar, people carry stories of their own desire, of their families, of their hopes; both for the future and the present. Romeo Oriogun is a Nigerian poet, essayist, and ...
Oct 25, 2021•17 min•Season 4Ep. 9
In a poem of extraordinary poise, Kathleen Flenniken recounts her parents’ lively parties, their rich social life, their summer trips, and their friendships: friendships that were not always straightforward. The poem closes with an observation of a moment of sexual tension between her mother and another man. Kathleen’s right there, but feels like she’s barely noticed. Everyone goes to bed alone, and we are left with the poet and her awareness of what lay underneath the surface. Kathleen Flennike...
Oct 22, 2021•17 min•Season 4Ep. 8
A love poem with a playful title that sounds like an ad from a travel agent unfolds into a poem about choosing to stay at home. Imtiaz Dharker’s husband died in the years between this poem’s setting and its publishing. The poem, too, moves from long lines across the page into shorter and shorter lines. In sensuality, locality, intimacy, and simplicity, this poem is all about the man she loved, and moves from noise to focus: “You Are / Here” its final lines assert. Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artis...
Oct 18, 2021•12 min•Season 4Ep. 7
