The Paradox of Poetry

The Poetry Magazine Podcast

Poetry presents a paradox. We often assume it’s inaccessible and abstruse, an elite means of expression that, as W. H. Auden put it, “makes nothing happen.” At the same time, poetry pervades public space, enhancing ceremonial expressions with elegiac significance, an essential element in American speechifying. Underscoring this paradox is the understandable predisposition among consumers of the poetic moment: We crave the payoff—“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—without doing the work of getting there.

The Poetry Magazine Podcast, hosted by editor Don Share and associate editor Lindsay Garbutt (and often joined by consulting editor Christina Pugh), encourages a more integrative understanding of the poetic form. Readers of Poetry magazine know that a lot of contemporary poetry hardly hits the ear like cold water on a hot skillet. Murky confessional verse marked by self-referential formulations, imbued with veiled allegory and symbolism, all of it arranged in lines unfettered to the point of chaos, characterizes a lot of this stuff. Intrepid readers stick with it, perhaps taking pleasure in the difficulty, but sometimes we could use a Virgil as we enter what feels like a purgatory of verbiage.

This podcast helps obscure poems come alive in part because the poets (all of whom are published in Poetry) read their work aloud, adding inflections and pronunciations that lend even the most allusive verse a sense of cohesion. (Listeners of audio books will immediately understand the benefit of putting voice to text.) Then, the podcast’s commentators unravel the poems with a casual erudition that is refreshingly devoid of academic affectation. These qualities—often accompanied by the hosts’ sincere sense of wonder—render poems into fluent expressions that, Auden notwithstanding, do make something happen, even if it is only a tender bloom of insight into the mystery of human expression.

Take a “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado),” by Monica Youn, a Princeton University professor. The poem, with its disjointed reference to Greek mythology and Korean history, does not tolerate a passive approach. Before reading her poem aloud, Youn tells Share and Pugh that it follows logic that “works in very small increments.” Her recitation reiterates the work’s academic, formulaic, and almost robotic qualities. For example:

Both figures are counterfoils to their strategizing spouses, figures of excessive desire, requiring containment.

Both containers are wooden.

Both containers are camouflaged with a soft, yielding substance—one with grass, one with fur.

Both containers are ingenious solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

One problem is political. One problem is sexual.

They are both the same problem.

The repetition, playfulness, and obscurity (what is “the problem”?) intensify as the poem progresses. Things quickly get weird (“The tourist can climb into the rice chest … The artist can look into the hollow cow”), then bestial (“pressing her genitalia back against the hollow cow’s genitalia”), then finally celebratory of the female form’s redemptive power (“I shine for all of you.”). The poem might indeed follow an incremental logic. But for most readers, it is seductively elusive.

Share suggests that “the audience for poetry has to adjust itself and understand how to encounter a poem.” The reader must try to “find new ways to read poems” and to avoid “the enclosures of our habitual thinking.” We should meet the poem on its own terms, evasive as they may be. In other words, as Share put it, we must “acclimate.”

It is worth noting that Poetry magazine has been asking us to acclimate since 1912. It first published T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” as well as the early works of Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore. Each of these poets, in their day, presented interpretive challenges to readers to do what this brilliant podcast teaches us to do today: reach out to the poets who reach out to us.

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books

If you love books and you love Boston, you probably know Brattle Books. Located near the Boston Common, the city’s premier bookshop occupies three floors in an architecturally distinctive building and offers an outdoor, mural-lined pavilion of books priced between $1 and $5. These bargain books, which can be a goldmine of idiosyncrasy, reflect the interests of the Brattle’s proprietor, Kenneth Gloss, a nationally known book dealer who is as familiar with cheap paperbacks as he is with the most prestigious rare volume.

Co-hosted by Jordan Rich, a radio broadcaster whose job here consists of asking Gloss a question and standing back, Brattlecast delves without pretension into what often comes off as a pretentious topic: the rare books trade. Gloss, an inveterate chatterbox, keeps his soaring bibliophilia down to earth by balancing the rarified with the mundane. Episodes easily transition from the first 1,000 printings of Joyce’s Ulysses (volumes sometimes valued at over $250,000) to a discussion of a guy who obsessively acquires any text from the year 1968 (including Sears catalogs).

The podcast shines brightest when it challenges conventional notions of what makes a volume “rare.” A tip from Gloss: old does not necessarily mean valuable. Young collectors will benefit greatly (and maybe also financially) from knowing that a book from the 1940s on computer electronics is worth far more than a grease-splattered cookbook from the 1830s. Also, look for bookplates. Gloss remembers finding an issue of Harper’s with a bookplate from Alcatraz Island on the inside. (He admits that he paid more for it than it was worth “because I just liked it.”) Finally, if you ever happen to find in your attic a book published in America in the 17th century, give it a warm hug.

Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon

“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?” asked Oscar Wilde. The Times Literary Supplement’s decision to name its podcast after this quote is apt. Wilde was a literary wonder, but his persona was inescapably political. This mixture of art and public life is evident in every edition of the TLS, and even more so in its consistently thoughtful—and occasionally profound—podcast.

Usually hosted by TLS editor Stig Abell, the podcast seamlessly segues among disparate topics. A single episode could range from narratives of sexual assault to the rise of “le globish” (the shorthand for “global English,” a pseudo-language of some 1,500 English words that can be memorized in a week) to the books up for a translation prize. The podcast also ventures into obscure but compelling literary nooks, often building on articles that ran in TLS: Henry James’s formative experience in Los Angeles; the archival discovery of a “new” ending to Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark (or, Camera Obscura); and three books on the political and cultural history of being overweight.

Another way that Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon manages to balance the literary and the political is by interviewing authors whose books engage issues that preoccupy the popular media. To hear Ian McEwan explore the implications of artificial intelligence or Dave Eggers deliver a riveting speech on the role of digital technology in human communication is to get insight generally lacking from conventional takes on these important developments in modern life.

Another way that Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon manages to balance the literary and the political is by interviewing authors whose books engage issues that preoccupy the popular media. To hear Ian McEwan explore the implications of artificial intelligence or Dave Eggers deliver a riveting speech on the role of digital technology in human communication is to get insight generally lacking from conventional takes on these important developments in modern life.

As with the best podcasts, the producers know when to allow the material to proceed without interruption or even commentary. You’d be hard pressed to find a listening experience as unpredictable, humorous, upsetting, and intense as Lisa Dwan, the Irish stage actress, reading Paul Muldoon’s 40-minute poem, “American Standard.” A word of friendly warning: be seated for the ending, and don’t even think about skipping ahead to the payoff.