Black Box Poetry

Sep 05 2019 15 ep. 63 mins 770

Black Box Poetry Podcast artwork

Anastasia Nikolis, Isaac Wheeler, and Sean C. Hughes started talking about poetry a decade ago at Haverford College and never stopped. Now they talk about poems they love and explain how they work to each other and their podcast audience. Black Box (n.): A device which performs intricate functions but whose internal mechanism may not readily be inspected or understood; any component of a system specified only in terms of the relationship between inputs and outputs. Black Box Poetry (n.): A podcast which performs intricate functions to explain a poem's internal mechanisms that may not readily be inspected or understood; poetry elucidation machine.

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Love Poems

Sep 05 2019 54 mins

As Sean said, we did curse poems in the last episode, so we're doing love poems next to get the bitter taste out of our mouths." In this episode, we talk about how love poems are always starting with the threat of sentimentality, always have an implied narrativity, and are always in defiance of Rilke's directive to his young poet addressee, "Don't write love poetry." In this episod

Curse Poems

Aug 01 2019 53 mins

HEXES! CURSES! ILL WISHES! What makes a curse a curse and not just rage? How much does the backstory needs to be present to make a hex effective? How quietly savage can language be? Sean, Isaac, and Anastasia answer these questions and more when they talk about how poems seek vengeance and spew forth ire. We talk about "I am Rowing" by Henri Michaux, (https://www.goodreads.com/quot

Outer Reaches of Metaphor

Jun 07 2019 52 mins

This episode was recorded before we recorded episode 12, but we recommend listening to that episode on METAPHOR before listening to this episode on the OUTER REACHES OF METAPHOR. In this episode that might be our most off-the-rails one yet, we talk about how sunflowers can look like almost anything in Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra"; how metaphors are era-specific and typewriter

Metaphor

May 03 2019 62 mins

In this track, Anastasia, Isaac, and Sean talk about metaphor! We talk about the academic jargon (a "tenor" is the thing being described, the "vehicle" is the thing the tenor is being compared to). We talk about how poets use metaphor, how good metaphor makes our brain feel, and what happens when the vehicle makes us forget what was being described in the first place (THOSE BARE RU

Poetry in Translation

Apr 02 2019 68 mins

After a one year hiatus, Sean, Isaac, and Anastasia are BACK! In the episode, they discuss how reading translated poems isn't that different (but also, is different) from reading poems in your native language. Poems discussed include "Red Scissors Woman" by Kim Hyesoon, translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi; "After the Flood," by Arthur Rimbaud, translated from the French by J

Long Poem: "The Undressing" by Li-Young Lee

Mar 01 2018 70 mins

Rather than choosing three short poems that teach us something about a theme, Isaac, Sean, and Anastasia allow one long poem, "The Undressing" by Li-Young Lee, to teach them a few things... http://aprweb.org/poems/the-undressing

Sonnets

Feb 16 2018 59 mins

In this episode, Isaac, Sean, and Anastasia talk about sonnets! In talking about Shakespeare's sonnet 9, Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias." and Terrance Hayes's "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin," the team chats about how tracing the development of the sonnet helps us to trace the history of lyric poetry. https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/sonnets/sonnet_view.

Poems of Address

Feb 02 2018 57 mins

In this episode we discuss poems of address and we read "The Sun Rising" by John Donne; "To Sleep" by John Keats ; and "The Applicant" by Sylvia Plath. Donne: (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44129/the-sun-rising) Keats: (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44487/to-sleep-56d2239b832a2) Plath: (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57419/the-applicant)

Persona Poems

Jan 19 2018 48 mins

In this episode, the team talks about persona poems and--spoiler alert!--finds that persona poems might not have as much to do with voicing as we expected! We talk about "Trillium" by Louise Glück, "Coal" by Audre Lorde, and "Dream Song 4" by John Berryman. https://poetrying.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/trillium-louise-gluck/ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42577/coal https:

Short Poems

Oct 30 2017 76 mins

In this episode, Isaac, Sean, and Anastasia work through the weirdness of short poems. First we go through three different translations of the same Basho haiku. Then we look at one of Emily Dickinson's signature short poems and a fragment poem by John Keats, "This Living Hand." Finally, we conclude with Ezra Pound's famous Imagist poem, "In a Station of the Metro," and one of his l