Close Readings

I talked with my friend Sarah Osment about "Governors on Sominex," a poem by David Berman. In addition to being a poet, Berman was the frontman and lyricist of the band Silver Jews.

Sarah works in the Writing Program at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses in Media Aesthetics. She has devoted her intellectual energy to more public-facing projects since earning her PhD in English from Brown University in 2016: she is the co-founder of Hyped on Melancholy, an online magazine devoted to smart words about sad songs and the reasons we cleave to them. Sarah's own essay for Hyped—on Wilson Phillips's "Hold On" and much else besides—is here. She is also co-editor, along with David Hering, of a recent cluster of essays on the poetry and music of David Berman published at Post45.

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An episode I've been waiting for from the beginning: Andrew Epstein joins the podcast to talk about John Ashbery, one of the most important poets of the last hundred years, and his beautiful and haunting poem of mid-career, "Street Musicians."

Andrew is Professor of English at Florida State University and the author of three books: Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford UP, 2009), Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford UP, 2016), and The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry since 1945 (Cambridge UP, 2022). He blogs about the poets and artists of the New York School at Locus Solus and his essays and articles have appeared in such publications as the New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, LARB, American Literary History, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Comparative Literature Studies, Jacket2, and Raritan. You can follow Andrew on Twitter.

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The last of three episodes in our cluster on Louise Glück: one of her oldest and dearest friends, the marvelous poet Ellen Bryant Voigt joins the podcast to talk about Louise's poem "Brooding Likeness."

Ellen's books of poetry have recently been assembled into a staggering single volume, Collected Poems (Norton, 2023). She is also the author of two books of prose: The Flexible Lyric (Georgia, 1999) and The Art of Syntax (Graywolf, 2009).

A couple notes on things that come up in the episode:

Ellen discusses Louise's autobiographical note for the Nobel Prize. You can find that autobiographical piece here.

We listen, during the episode, to a recording of Louise reading "Brooding Likeness." The recording contains an alternate phrase in its penultimate line, and during the episode Ellen and I surmise that it was an earlier version of the poem than the one that appeared in The Triumph of Achilles.

I've since been able to confirm that. The poem first appeared (with the penultimate line as she reads it here) in The New Yorker on April 12, 1981. The reading we listen to happened on October 22, 1981. The book version, with the version of the line we both prefer, wouldn't be published until 1985.

I hope these three episodes on Glück will add something to the beautiful array of memories that have appeared in writing since her passing. I think the guests speak to each other, even as I talk to them one on one, and they do so through their mutual devotion to the poetry of their friend.

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What kind of love do we find in comparison? Keegan Cook FInberg joins the podcast to discuss Harryette Mullen's poem "Dim Lady," which is simultaneously a love poem and a (perhaps?) loving tribute to Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 (itself a love poem and parody).

Keegan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is finishing a book called Poetry in General: Interdisciplinarity and U.S. Public Forms. You can find a sample of the work she's doing in that book in her article in Textual Practice on Frank O'Hara and the Seagram Building. And you can find samples of her new project, on poetry and surveillance, in essays she has written on Claudia Rankine and Solmaz Sharif. Follow Keegan on Twitter.

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What if life were like a book that you could open at will and know in real time? Gillian White joins the podcast to talk about Elizabeth Bishop's fascinating poem "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance."

Gillian is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also runs the Poetry and Poetics Workshop. She is the author of Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry (Harvard UP, 2014). Her essays have also appeared in The New York Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation website, and London Review of Books. You can follow Gillian on Twitter.

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