The Poetry Magazine Podcast

One thing Ashley M. Jones knows to be absolutely true is that her work is made possible by the poetry and spirit of Lucille Clifton. This week, Jones speaks with Sidney Clifton, one of Lucille Clifton’s daughters. Sidney Clifton is the President of the Clifton House, a new endeavour to transform her childhood home in Baltimore into a gathering place for writers and artists. They speak about mothers, their impenetrable connection to family, and how important it is to honor our journeys, no matter how winding they might be. Jones says, “It was unreal for me to get to spend time with Sidney, and what a joy to also get to invite Ms. Clifton’s poems into the room to join the conversation. What a celebration, indeed.”

When we asked Leila Chatti who she wished to speak with most, she chose one of the poets who gave her permission to be a poet herself: Sharon Olds. And not just to be a poet, but to write from a voice she thought wasn’t possible. You’ll hear why.

This episode features more poems than we’ve ever had on the Poetry Magazine Podcast. Chatti asked Sharon to read a selection of poems that span 40 years – ranging from her first book, Satan Says, to her most recent book, Arias. Leila also reads from the December issue of Poetry, and her latest collection, Deluge, a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.

Today on the podcast: Joy Harjo. Harjo is the nation's first Native American poet laureate and a playwright, musician, author, and editor. Not everyone knows that Harjo also started playing saxophone at the age of forty. Today, we have the pleasure of hearing from her new album, I Pray for My Enemies, which features musicians from some of the biggest bands of the nineties grunge scene—including R.E.M., Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. We also spoke with Harjo about her early activism, how she came to befriend Audre Lorde, her obsession with maps, and her new memoir, Poet Warrior. The memoir celebrates the influences that shaped Harjo’s poetry and reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland. She writes about her sixth-generation grandfather, who survived the Trail of Tears, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member.

Harjo has been creating her own maps for decades—with her poetry, the way she lives in the world, and recently, with the project Living Nations, Living Words, a collaboration with the Library of Congress and her signature project as United States Poet Laureate. It’s an online map where poems by Native Nations poets can be heard. The conversation starts with how Harjo found poetry.

This week, Suzi F. Garcia sits down with Jennifer Shyue, a translator focusing on contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers. We hear two poems by Julia Wong Kcomt, whose work Shyue has been translating for the past three years. Kcomt was born into a Chinese Peruvian family in 1965, and although Shyue was born in the US decades later, they share many obsessions. Kcomt traveled from an early age, traversing borders, languages, and cultures, and these multiplicities motivated her to write poetry. Shyue’s interest in hybrid identities and linguistic border crossings also motivated her to translate. Garcia and Shyue talk about what it means to write and translate from hyphenated or adjectival identities, as well the connections between language and identity.

This week, a conversation on worldbuilding. Su Cho hosts a roundtable of sorts on what it’s like growing up Asian American in white suburbia with poets Marianne Chan and Lisa Low. They also get into armpit hair, sad mom poems, and how motherhood means having a constant audience–whether we want one or not.

Marianne Chan and Lisa Low read poems from the September 2021 issue of Poetry.