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PoemTalk
PoemTalk
PoemTalk
The impalpable fog (PoemTalk #216)
Etel Adnan, "Return from London"
PoemTalk
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Claire Marie Stancek, Sarah Riggs, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House to record a conversation about a poem by the late Etel Adnan. The poem is “Return from London,” and it was translated by our own Sarah Riggs.
about The impalpable fog (PoemTalk #216)
March 22, 2026
Knot know now (PoemTalk #215)
Stacy Doris, "Ménage à Trois" & "A Month of Valentines"
PoemTalk
From left: Sarah Riggs, Laynie Browne, Lee Ann Brown
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Al Filreis met up with Sarah Riggs, Lee Ann Brown, and Laynie Browne at the
Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation
in lower Manhattan to talk about two poems by the late Stacy Doris. The discussion included remembrances of Doris as friend and poetry-world colleague; that happens along the way but in particular toward the end. Mostly, though, the group worked through close readings of parts of two poems from the book
Paramour
(2000, Krupskaya): “Ménage à Trois” and “A Month of Valentines.”
about Knot know now (PoemTalk #215)
February 21, 2026
The game is always on (PoemTalk #214)
Thomas Devaney, three poems from "Getting to Philadelphia"
PoemTalk
Thomas Devaney
Ernest Hilbert, Guy D'Annolfo, and Larry Robin joined Al Filreis in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House to talk about
three poems
from Thomas Devaney's
Getting to Philadelphia
(Hanging Loose Press, 2019). Recordings of Devaney performing these poems, “
The Blue Stoop
,” “
Oregon Avenue
,” and “
A Week in the Childhood of W.C. Fields
,” can be found on
his PennSound page
. (We think it is worth your while to listen to prefatory comments Devaney offers before reading each of these poems:
.)
about The game is always on (PoemTalk #214)
January 16, 2026
Momentary resting place (PoemTalk #213)
"The word, the mawqif" by Pierre Joris & "A letter to Paul Celan in memory" by Jerome Rothenberg
PoemTalk
From left: Nicole Peyrafitte, Charles Bernstein, Ariel Resnikoff
The title of this special episode of PoemTalk is taken from a short poem by the late Pierre Joris, “The word, the mawqif.” Our group — Charles Bernstein, Ariel Resnikoff, and Nicole Peyrafitte — understood the “momentary resting place” that is the poem itself, a stop, a station along the way, an oasis, as beckoning us toward a reading of this poem as a pre-elegy. Listen to
a recording
of Joris performing the poem and ponder its paradoxical idea of language's mortality as poetic renewal.
about Momentary resting place (PoemTalk #213)
January 4, 2026
Reflection affliction (PoemTalk #212)
George Quasha, three poems from “Hearing Other”
PoemTalk
From left: Chris Funkhouser, George Quasha, Anthony Elms
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
George Quasha, Christopher Funkhouser, and Anthony Elms joined host/moderator Al Filreis for a discussion of George's new book,
Hearing Other
(Chax). We chose
three poems
from this new series of “preverbs.” The poems are “Mind-degradable theory,” “Verb at first sight,” and “(Dis)play.” They appear in the book on pages 13, 147, and 194 respectively. George's
PennSound page
is an extraordinary archive of his preverbs and other kinds of poems. Many of the recordings were meticulously engineering and then shared with us at PennSound by Chris Funkhouser, who, during the discussion, had the occasion describe the process — and also the educational aspects and the sheer joy — of this elaborate, long-term audiographic project.
about Reflection affliction (PoemTalk #212)
November 3, 2025
POEMTALK
is a collaboration of the
Kelly Writers House
and
PennSound
. PoemTalk’s producer and host is
Al Filreis
, our engineer is
Zach Carduner, and our editor is the same talented Zach Carduner (whose predecessors were Amaris Cuchanski, Allison Harris, and for most of the early episodes, Steve McLaughlin).
PoemTalk is also available by subscription on many podcast platforms, including Spotify.
INDEX OF EPISODES:
PT#1
William Carlos Williams between walls
PT#2
: Adrienne Rich won’t wait
PT#3
: George Oppen’s ballad
PT#4
: Allen Ginsberg sings Blake
PT#5
: Ted Berrigan’s “3 Pages”
PT#6
: Jaap Blonk sound poem
PT#7
: Jerome Rothenberg’s paradise
PT#8
: Rae Armantrout’s “The Way”
PT#9
: John Ashbery at a crossroads
PT#10
: One of Gertrude Stein’s portraits
PT#11
: Erica Hunt’s “voice of no”
PT#12
: Ezra Pound’s America
PT#13
: Kathleen Fraser’s dangerous highway
PT#14
: Wallace Stevens at the end
PT#15
: Lyn Hejinian’s change
PT#16
: Creeley driving the car
PT#17
: Rodrigo Toscano’s political poetics
PT#18
: Lydia Davis has a position
PT#19
: Bob Perelman’s inner unruly child
PT#20
: Amiri Baraka’s Kenyatta
PT#21
: Charles Bernstein’s restlessness
PT#22
: Louis Zukofsky begins anew
PT#23
: Cid Corman really knew terror
PT#24
: Barbara Guest, a poem about painting
PT#25
: Alice Notley on the Lower East Side
PT#26
: wild Vachel Lindsay
PT#27
: Robert Duncan opens the field
PT#28
: Jack Spicer to shrink: drop dead
PT#29
: Kit Robinson ponders mad men
PT#30
: the W. C. Williams we remember
PT#31
: Robert Grenier’s box of poem-cards
PT#32
: Susan Howe’s Emily Dickinson
PT#33
: flarfist Sharon Mesmer
PT#34
: Charles Olson’s Maximus
PT#35
: Bruce Andrews at the center
PT#36
: J. Scappettone writes through H.D.
PT#37
: Jena Osman drops leaflets
PT#38
: Norman Fischer would like to see it
PT#39
: Etheridge Knight and Gwendolyn Brooks
PT#40
: Susan Schultz blogs dementia
PT#41
: Ezra Pound in Venice
PT#42
: Nathaniel Tarn’s ecopoetics
PT#43
: John Weiners by night
PT#44
: Fred Wah’s race to go
PT#45
: Eileen Myles does what they teach
PT#46
: Jackson Mac Low writes through Ezra
PT#47
: Rosmarie Waldrop’s America
PT#48
: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Dream-Land”
PT#49
: P. Inman advocates slow writing
PT#50
: Tom Raworth’s state of error
PT#51
: Linh Dinh on race, food, and war
PT#52
: Cole Swensen on art and gardens
PT#53
: Joan Retallack’s homage to Cage
PT#54
: Ron Silliman’s “You”
PT#55
: Jennifer Moxley’s line
PT#56
: Charles Reznikoff’s Mishnaic poetics
PT#57
: Djanikian and the alphabet of genocide
PT#58:
Mayer’s Statue of Liberty
PT#59
: Blackburn on baseball and imperialism
PT#60
: The bebop verse of Clark Coolidge
PT#61
: Bill Berkson’s signature song
PT#62
: Charles Alexander’s post-9/11 poem
PT#63
: Laynie Browne’s daily sonnets
PT#64
: Bergvall chants Dante translations
PT#65
: Lisa Robertson on the weather
PT#66
: W. B. Yeats longs for Ireland
PT#67
: Catherine Wagner’s fucking poem
PT#68
: Ray DiPalma’s languagy optimism
PT#69
: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s
Drafts
PT#70
: Laura Mullen on wars and weddings
PT#71
: Claude McKay’s political sonnet
PT#72
: Bob Cobbing sound poem
PT#73
: Steve Benson improvises questions
PT#74
: Basil Bunting performs Whitman
PT#75
: Will Alexander’s galvanics
PT#76
: Anne Waldman vs. Jesse Helms
PT#77
: Lorine Niedecker, home and country
PT#78
: Muriel Rukeyser teaches in East Harlem
PT#79
: Joanne Kyger’s revolutionary notes
PT#80
: Tom Leonard does Shelley in voices
PT#81
: Fanny Howe’s deep descent
PT#82
: Carl Rakosi and what makes the poetic “I”
PT#83
: Wallace Stevens climbs a mountain poem
PT#84
: H.D. rewrites the story of Helen
PT#85
: James Schuyler’s New York February
PT#86
: Tyrone Williams’s eshuneutics
PT#87
: Emily Dickinson reckons requirements
PT#88
: Kathy Acker’s punk translations
PT#89
: Nathaniel Mackey on survival
PT#90
: Gertrude Stein and her brother(s)
PT#91
: Gil Ott and the invisible wound
PT#92
: Bob Perelman’s confession
PT#93
: Helen Adam’s witchy ballad
PT#94
: CA Conrad’s somatic poetry
PT#95
: Rob Fitterman’s “Sprawl”
PT#96
: Allen Grossman in the synagogue
PT#97
: Larry Eigner’s unyielding rock
PT#98
: James Weldon Johnson’s onward feet
PT#99
: William Bronk, poet of bleakness
PT#100
: A PoemTalk retrospective
PT#101
: Ed Dorn’s ’60s political synthesis
PT#102
: Robert Lowell in the off-season
PT#103
: Simone White and the ferocity of dispersal
PT#104
: Akilah Oliver’s flesh memory
PT#105
: Michael Magee walks Philadelphia
PT#106
: C. D. Wright on mass incarceration
PT#107
: Paul Celan declares that it’s time
PT#108
: Tracie Morris radicalizes the voice
PT#109
: Kate Colby’s long poem on meaning
PT#110
: Philip Whalen in Bolinas
PT#111
: Naomi Replansky’s metrical radicalism
PT#112
: Patrick Rosal’s “Instance of an Island”
PT#113
: Robin Blaser’s “A Bird in the House”
PT#114
: Claudia Rankine’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely”
PT#115
: Lorenzo Thomas’s “An Arc Still Open”
PT#116
: Ann Tardos’s “Uxudo”
PT#117
: Larissa Lai’s “Nascent Fashion”
PT#118
: M. Nourbese Philip’s “Zong!”
PT#119
: Fatemah Shams and the wars of Iran
PT#120
: Ann Lauterbach’s complex dream
PT#121
: Jerome Rothenberg sings
Poland/1931
PT#122
: Sean Bonney’s happiness (in London)
PT#123
: A David Antin talk-poem about war
PT#124
: Jack Kerouac’s experimental poetry
PT#125
: Erica Baum’s ‘Dog Ear’
PT#126
: A live PoemTalk on Baraka
PT#127
: Ashbery’s short answer
PT#128
: Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s “perfect villagers” series
PT#129
: Sylvia Plath’s “The Stones”
PT#130
: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Riot”
PT#131
: Syd Zolf’s Markov Chain text
PT#132
: Maria Hindmarch on Vancouver’s poetry scene
PT#133
: Divya Victor on Whitman’s colonial extraction
PT#134
: Berssenbrugge greets the roses
PT#135
: Cage's writing through James Joyce
PT#136
: Nasser Hussain writes with airport codes
PT#137
: psychiatrists talk about Anne Sexton
PT#138
: Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets”
PT#139
: poems from the Worker Writers School
PT#140
: Barbara Guest ascends the blue stairs
PT#141
: Rosmarie Waldrop remembers Nazi Germany
PT#142
: an early Charles Bernstein poem
PT#143
: Hannah Weiner’s “Clairvoyant Journal”
PT#144
: Michael McClure’s “Ghost Tantras”
PT #145
: Tonya Foster’s
A Swarm of Bees in High Court
PT #146
: Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”
PT #147
: “By the road to the contagious hospital”
PT #148
: Erica Hunt’s “Should You Find Me”
PT #149
: Kamau Brathwaite’s “Negus”
PT #150
: Two Terrance Hayes poems
PT #151
: Two Eileen Myles poems
PT #152
: “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain”
PT #153
: Daphne Marlatt’s “Arriving”
PT#154
: Liz Willis & her great flower
PT#155
: Lorenzo Thomas on passion & race
PT#156
: Steve Dalachinsky remembers Brooklyn
PT #157
: Kevin Killian’s “Is It All over My Face?”
PT #158
: Bob Kaufman’s “Suicide”
PT #159
: bpNichol’s small songs
PT #160
: Sonnets from Edna St. Vincent Millay
PT #161
: Sarah Dowling’s
Entering Sappho
PT #162
: Tuli Kupferberg’s verse
PT #163
: Daphne Marlatt, “Steveston, B.C.”
PT #164
: Scalapino’s “‘Can’t’ is ‘Night’”
PT #165
: Punch fascists
PT #166
: Cecilia Vicuña in performance
PT #167
: Myung Mi Kim’s “And Sing We”
PT #168
: Jayne Cortez’s “She Got He Got”
PT #169
: George Quasha’s preverbs
PT #170
: di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letters”
PT #171
: Two poems from Eugene Ostashevsky
PT #172
: Harryette Mullen & her dictionary
PT #173
: Divya Victor on anti-Asian violence
PT #174
: Sawako Nakayasu's girls on the run
PT #175
: Joan Retallack's poethical wager
PT #176
: cruising John Ashbery's early poem
PT #177
: Maggie O'Sullivan paw mouthings
PT #178
: Matvei Yankelevich's "Dear Winter"
PT #179
: Armand Schwerner's tablet
PT #180
: Lisa Fishman in Chicago
PT #181
: Hoa Nguyen's "Long Light"
PT #182
: Doug Kearney's sounded art
PT #183
: Dodie Bellamy's "Vomit Journal"
PT #184
: John Giorno's sound art
PT #185
: Frank O'Hara's dirty songs
PT #186
: Tina Darragh's wire boxes
PT #187
: Mina Loy's love songs
PT #188
: Ted Pearson's catenary odes
PT #189
: Gregory Corso in Europe
PT #190
: Aldon Nielsen's "Tray"
PT #191
: Kenward Elmslie sings
PT #192
: Owen Dodson's "For Billie Holiday"
PT #193
: Ariana Reines' "To the Reader"
PT #194
: Veronica Forrest-Thomson's
S/Z
PT #195
Ron Padgett's “The Austrian Maiden”
PT #196
Hart Crane’s “The Harbor Dawn”
PT #197
Marjorie Welish's
“Begetting Textile”
The recording of
PoemTalk #11
on Erica Hunt’s “The Voice of No.” Clockwise from left: Julia Bloch, our editor Steve McLaughlin, Elizabeth Willis, Al Filreis, and Jessica Lowenthal.
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