The Poetry Magazine Podcast

This week, a celebration of collaboration. Su Cho had the honor of speaking with poets and scholars Kimberly Blaeser, Molly McGlennen, and Margaret Noodin. They talk about how language is a kind of time travel; it helps us preserve our memories, but also puts us in conversation with our ancestors and larger histories. You’ll hear from their collaborative poem in the November issue of Poetry, written in both English and Anishinaabemowin, and how, for each poet, language acquisition is an ongoing, creative, and radical act of resistance.

This week, poet, memoirist, and translator E.J. Koh on the untranslatability of Han. “Han is very difficult for me to define,” Su Cho agrees. “The dictionary definition is ‘an internalized feeling of deep grief, regret, anger, and sorrow, which is felt by all Koreans,’ but this is complicated because what does it mean to define an entire country by its trauma? And how can those of us who feel the lingering effects, but didn’t live through its history, write about it?” Koh’s work runs into the fog of what we don’t know—yet. This conversation features excerpts from her memoir, The Magical Language of Others, which includes translated letters written by Koh’s mother, and her poem “American Han” from the October issue of Poetry.

This week, Holly Amos speaks with poet Su Cho. Cho guest edited the magazine and hosted the podcast for the last few months. They talk about loneliness, anger as a secret weapon, and food! It’s all about food really. Cho reveals her love of Cool Whip on white bread, and she makes Amos cry—though those two things are totally unrelated. We hear several poems from The Symmetry of Fish, Cho’s first book, forthcoming from Penguin in 2022.

The editors discuss Jennifer Givhan’s poem “Headless Mama Returns (Xmas ’18 Redux)” from the December 2019 issue of Poetry.

The editors discuss Hanif Abdurraqib's poem "For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut" from the May 2018 issue of Poetry.