Poetry For All

This live episode looks at the power of poetry for defamiliarizing the familiar and increasing our attention to the world around us. We met with First United Methodist Church in Normal, Illinois to discuss Richard Wilbur's sonnet and Abram Van Engen's book "Word Made Fresh."

Check out Abram Van Engen's book, "Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church," wherever you get books.

For the text of the poem, see here.

For more on Richard Wilbur, see The Poetry Foundation.

Credit Line: "Praise in Summer" from Collected Poems 1943-2004 by Richard Wilbur Copyright (c) 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

In this episode, we continue our series on the villanelle with Patricia Smith's "XXXL." In this poem, Smith uses the constraints of the villanelle form to create a powerful portrait of familial love.

Patricia Smith is the author of numerous collections of poetry, a winner of the National Book Award for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2025), and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

In this episode, we continue our villanelle series with the incredible formalist poet A.E. Stallings. Every form begs for a bending of the rules, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ways. We look here at how slight bends in the rules bring home the poem.

For more on A.E. Stallings, see her biography at The Poetry Foundation.

Thank you to Northwestern University Press for permission to read the poem. This poem comes from A.E. Stallings' remarkable collection of poems titled Olives. We encourage you to check it out.

For another great villanelle of Stallings that is available online, see Daedal.

In this episode, we introduce the first villanelle in our three-part series on that poetic form. We begin with Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," a poem that attempts to stave off the inevitability of mortality.

To learn more about Dylan Thomas, visit the Poetry Foundation.

In this episode, we read one of Langston Hughes's most famous poems. We discuss Hughes's conversational style, how he evokes the topography of Harlem, and the way the poetic speaker addresses the complexity of the power dynamics in the classroom.

You can read the text of this poem here.

To learn more about Langston Hughes, visit the Poetry Foundation website.

Thanks to Harold Ober Associates for granting us permission to read and discuss this poem.