Poetry Today
In fifteen-minute episodes, the Poetry Unbound podcast brings poetry into our daily routines—and opens our eyes along the way.
Review by Kathleen Hartsfield Spicer
Poetry gives language to our lives when our everyday prose is lacking. It allows us to hold up a mundane piece of existence to the light and see it in a new way. Too often we relegate those transformative moments to whatever time we can set aside to sit down with a poetry book. On Being’s podcast, Poetry Unbound, invites us to include poetry in our routines by sharing a poem and commentary on that poem each week, along with a guiding question for the week posted on their website. Having completed their second season last fall, there are now forty-one episodes of Poetry Unbound available, with more on the way April 26th.
When I first listened to Poetry Unbound, it was because my friend shared the episode on Christian Wiman’s “All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs.” I love podcasts and poetry (particularly that poem), so I immediately started listening. Normally when I experience poetry, I like to read it aloud to myself to hear how the words fit together while seeing it on the page. Hearing poetry without the text to reference was a little disorienting at first, but after listening to all of Season 2 of Poetry Unbound, I’ve found host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s readings to be grounding. On Being makes all of the poems featured on the show available for reading online, so there is always the option to read along, too.
The format of Poetry Unbound provides space to experience the poem and form your own thoughts while also guiding the listener through the reading. Ó Tuama begins each episode with a quick thought about why he loves poetry that gives a rough context for why he chose that poem and goes into the first reading of the poem. After that, he reflects on what the poet is doing in the poem, giving the listener a mini poetry workshop along with some personal anecdotes. The episodes end on a second and final reading of the poem.
As I have listened to Poetry Unbound almost every day for the last month, I’ve found the routine to be almost devotional. This is similar to how On Being advertises it. The fifteen-minute episodes drop the listener into the world of the poem and can reframe their mindset of the everyday. In the malaise of routine, Poetry Unbound descends into each poem with such care that I emerged wanting to give the same care and wonder to the customs of my own life. The best example of this is the episode on Gregory Pardlo’s “Wishing Well.” As Ó Tauma explains, “Poetry bows down to unexpected human encounters, to unexpected moments, to meetings with strangers that we have—something surprising that comes out of nowhere, that we want to hold and honor and bow down to.” This was probably my favorite episode of the season. In “Wishing Well,” Pardlo tells the story of meeting a stranger outside the Met Museum. It’s a scenario we’ve all experienced—unwanted conversation and uncertainty of what the stranger will do or say next. This stranger asks if the water fountain is a wishing well and then takes out two pennies and pulls Pardlo into making a wish.
“. . . hey my man I’m going
to make a wish for you too.
I am laughing now so what you want
me to sign a waiver? He laughs along ain’t
say all that he says but you do have to
hold my hand. And close your eyes.”
The poem goes on to describe an otherworldly experience after the poet closes his eyes: “I hear the coins blink against / the surface and I cough up daylight like I’ve just / been dragged ashore.”
Pardlo’s experience with this stranger brought him out of his own private pain because he was willing to step into that moment, however skeptically. This episode made me want to look for small treasures like this in my daily life. Poetry, as with any meditation or prayer practice, can slice open your day to reveal new possibilities, and that’s what I have loved so much about Poetry Unbound.
Poetry is for everyone. Poetry Unbound is making it possible for more people to access and engage poetry in the everyday.
For me, poetry is as much about the sounds of the words as the words themselves. In “Ceist na Teangan” (“The Language Issue”) by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, this is demonstrated by initially getting to hear the poem read in its original form in the Irish language. To simply meditate on the sounds without the word association reveals how poetry can transcend language, which was a good primer for the English version. The central theme of the poem is trusting one’s life work to another as Moses was placed in the basket in the river and nurtured by Pharaoh’s daughter: “I place my hope on the water / in this little boat / of the language.” Ní Dhomhnaill’s work is preserving the Irish language, and she knows that the work must outlive her. This episode explores what poetry can accomplish as language shifts over time.
Ó Tauma has also done an excellent job of curating poems from a diverse set of poets. From Lucille Clifton’s “song at midnight” to Layli Long Soldier’s “WHEREAS my eyes land on the shoreline” to Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi’s “Say My Name,” Poetry Unbound has centered marginalized, non-white voices. Most piercing for me was Zaffar Kunial’s “The Word,” which tells the story of being an awkward teenager growing up with immigrant parents and having a better grasp on the language of their adopted country. It’s a poem about shame and embarrassment as an adolescent, but this goes deeper:
“….Ashamed. Aware.
That I knew better, though was stuck inside
while the sun was out. That I’m native here.
In a halfway house…”
This poem illustrates many difficulties of growing up, but Kunial’s experience also includes the question of being able to speak English fluently. He’s whiling away his summer indoors, and his dad says, “Whatever is matter, / must enjoy the life.” The first time I listened, I started thinking about physical matter and turning that phrase around in my head. Kunial takes us beyond the grammatical rules of the English language and shows us how his father’s care for him transcends language.
Poetry Unbound functions as a text to return to. I’ve returned to “Wishing Well,” “Wonder Woman,” and “All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs” several times because walking through the park or taking a drive with those episodes as companions imbues my day with a new willingness to observe my life. This is how poetry functions in general, and Poetry Unbound makes this form of art that much easier to engage. It adds new depth and dimension to poetry by presenting it in auditory form.
Simply by being an accessible and welcoming podcast, Poetry Unbound shows us that poetry isn’t just an artistic or academic pursuit. Poetry is for everyone. Poetry Unbound is making it possible for more people to access and engage poetry in the everyday. As Ó Tuama describes it in the intro of episode seven, poetry “is not an escape from the world, but an embrace of it…[it] is a way to open [oneself] up to being alive in the world.”
Kathleen Hartsfield Spicer is a former coffee professional working in the Nashville tech industry. Lately, she hosts a wine show called JuiceBox and spends as much time as possible in her backyard.
Poetry Unbound is produced by On Being and hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama. You can listen to past episodes and the current season on their website here.
