Poetry For All

As we prepare for the new school year, we turn to Walt Whitman's poem "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer." We discuss Whitman's influence, the effects of war, the role of poetry as Whitman saw it, and the importance of experiencing the world both in and beyond the classroom.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer

For a brief account of Whitman, see The Poetry Foundation.

For all things Whitman, see The Whitman Archive.

Image credit: "Walt Whitman by Mathew Brady, ca. 1865 - 1867." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 07 August 2026. http://www.whitmanarchive.org.

In this episode, Laura Evers (who has done so much work for this podcast), joins us to discuss the poem that drew her into poetry. We explore Katie Ford's haunting poem of longing, absence, and the desire to know, and we examine how her grammatical choices (including the absence of punctuation or breath marks) enhance the experience of reading and rereading the poem.

"The Shroud of Turin" can be found in Katie Ford's first book of poems, Deposition.

For more on Katie Ford, visit her website: https://www.fordkatie.com/

Thanks to Graywolf Press for permission to read the poem on this episode.

In this third installment of our series on the aubade, we feature a contrapuntal poem that explores various states of grief and loss.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections: Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. To learn more about her work, visit her website. Thanks to SIU Press for granting us permission to read this poem on the podcast.

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To read this poem, click on this link.

This episode continues our series on the aubade (a morning love song) with a dramatic turn. Larkin reinvents the tradition as waking to the fact that every new day brings a person one day closer to death.

To see the tradition that Larkin reimagines, see our previous episode on John Donne, "The Sun Rising."

For the text of Larkin's "Aubade" see the Poetry Foundation.

For more on Larkin, see the Poetry Foundation.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, as well as Faber and Faber, for permission to read Larkin's "Aubade" for this episode.

Photo by Barry Wilkinson/Radio Times via Getty Images

In a special episode, we celebrate the release of Joanne Diaz's latest book, Electric Dress, by reading "The Face," a poem of double ekphrasis that reflects on the hope of tomorrow in the losses of today.

To order the book Electric Dress, see Barrow Street Press here:

https://barrowstreet.org/press/product/electric-dress-joanne-diaz/

For more on Joanne Diaz, see her faculty homepage:

https://www.iwu.edu/english/faculty/diaz.html

For more on the work of William Utermohlen, see this article and exhibition:

https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=utermohlen

For the work of Catherine Drabkin, see her website:

https://catherinedrabkin.com/