Planet Poet - Words in Space

Sharon Israel
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Poet Sharon Israel hosts the monthly radio show: Planet Poet - Words in Space on WIOX Community Radio, 91.3 broadcasting live from Roxbury in the Catskill Mountains of New York and streaming live on WIOXradio.com. These archived interviews feature poets and writers from the Catskills, the Hudson Valley and around the U.S reading their work and discussing their obsessions with poetry.

  1. 1d ago

    Jo Pitkin -Village Recession

    Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired August 24th, 2026) featuring award-winning poet and writer, teacher and editor, Jo Pitkin, on her new poetry collection Village: Recession, published by Finishing Line Press. Jo explores the Great Recession of the early 2000s from the intimate vantage point of an American village, documenting the effects of this worldwide economic meltdown on friends, family, and neighbors—like the hardworking snow plower or the carpenter who never finishes his own house renovation in order to avoid paying higher property taxes—and on the poet herself. When the “recession’s serrated edge” profoundly alters her daily life, Pitkin finds temporary relief in small acts of kindness and solace in everyday encounters. This show was recorded in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s erudite Poet-at-Large, also joins us later in the program.  Jo Pitkin earned a BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Kirkland College—one of the first undergraduate creative writing degrees in the United States—and an MFA in Poetry from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She is the author of a chapbook, The Measure, and four full-length collections: Cradle of the American Circus: Poems from Somers, New York; Commonplace Invasions; Rendering; and Village: Recession.   Her award-winning poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Review of Books, Little Star, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, Stone Canoe, Nimrod International Journal, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as the anthologies A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, In the Black: In the Red: Poems of Profit $ Loss, and The Poetry of Capital: Voices from Twenty-First Century America.  After working as an English Language Arts editor at Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston, Jo enjoyed a long and fulfilling career as a freelance textbook writer for educational publishers, narrowly weathering the Great Recession’s impact on the book publishing industry in the early 2000s. Currently a teaching artist with the Academy of Intentional Magic (formerly The Poetry Barn), she lives and works in New York’s Hudson River Valley.  Visit:  jopitkin.com,  pamelampearce.com, sharonisraelpoet.com  Praise for Village: Recession  “This deeply moving and highly accomplished book was surely written in a frenzy of making. Certainly, Jo Pitkin has inherited all the formality of line and elegance of thought that’s formed at an Iowa Workshop, but it’s her story, her personal myth of social history, that makes this collection so compelling and heart-shattering. Here is a fully formed poetic voice given over completely to great shocks of material, to deprivation and rat snakes, to the plundered pantry of a Great Depression, to fragmentary American survivors of ancient depression and rust-belt recession who float towards us upon rust-coloured waters. Here is work like no other American work since Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us, a brave survivor poetry that transforms us as we read.”  –Thomas McCarthy, author of Pandemonium and Prophecy: Poems

  2. May 5

    Poet Geoffrey Nutter - Emissaries - A Long-Form Poem

    Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired April 21st, 2026) featuring returning guest, award-winning poet, teacher, mentor and editor, Geoffrey Nutter, who’ll read from his Long-form Poem Emissaries, and share his thoughts on the importance of sound and dreams in poems and the emergence of AI.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s erudite Poet-at-Large, also joins us later in the program.  Geoffrey Nutter is originally from Sacramento, California, but has lived in New York City for many years. He is the author of Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021), A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016). He has taught poetry at several schools, including Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, and the New School; and currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City, where he conducts day-long writing sessions for people from all over the world, and also does private consultations  Visit:  Wallsonglass.com,   pamelampearce.com, sharonisraelpoet.com  Praise for Geoffrey Nutter  “With exquisite detail and humble sensibilities, Geoffrey Nutter’s sixth collection of poetry, Giant Moth Perishes, offers myriad delights in language and the imagination. In cityscapes, nature, books, and color, we find respite in the complexities of the commonplace—from clocks to teardrops to moths. Here are poems that teach us how to live in the world with curious attention. And at the heart of this daydreaming is a spectacular earnestness, firmly embedded in the idea that the landscape of poetry is limitless and wild.” – Wave Books  “Geoffrey Nutter is a celebrated poet, educator and mentor who works inspires audiences across generations.  Known to many as the “Poet Dad of TikTok,” he has become a symbol of the enduring power of poetry and creativity.  His daughter, Elaine, created a platform through her knowledge of social media, captivating audiences by portraying his life through her eyes…”  --Tegan Gould, K Magazine article “Poet Dad of TikTok – How Geoffrey Nutter Redefines Modern Creativity”

  3. Apr 1

    Poets Richard Parisio and Guy Reed - Nature and Transcendence

    Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired March10th, 2026) featuring award-winning poets Richard Parisio and Guy Reed. Richard and Guy live in and write about the Catskills and the Hudson Valley and read from and discuss their respective poetry collections Trailside Register and Time Under The Overlook, both published in 2025 by Bushwhack Books.  Richard Parisio was DEC’s environmental educator in the Catskills and Hudson Valley for 25 years. He has worked as a naturalist for Everglades National Park, in the Pocono mountains, and at Assateague National Seashore. For five years, Parisio wrote a nature column for the New Paltz Times. He won the 2014 Slapering Hol Press Poetry Chapbook Contest for The Owl Invites Your Silence, and he holds an MFA degree in poetry from Cedar Crest College. Parisio’s full collection, Trailside Register, was published in 2025 by Bushwhack Books.  Visit: Bushwhack books  Guy Reed is author of the poetry books Time Under The Overlook (Bushwhack Books), Second Innocence (Luchador Press), The Effort To Hold Light (Finishing Line Press), and co-author, with Cheryl A. Rice, of Until The Words Came(Post Traumatic Press). He won the 2022 Littoral Press poetry prize and has published numerous essays. He co-directed two short, environmental films with filmmaker Katie Cokinos. From Minnesota, Guy has now lived longest in the Catskills Mountains.  Visit:     Praise for Richard Parisio  “Like his great predecessor, the English Romantic nature poet John Clare, Richard Parisio is a poet laureate of the meadows, forests, mountains, and waterways of the bioregion he so fully inhabits, the Catskills and the Hudson Valley. His eye and ear are deeply engaged with the minute particulars of the natural world—with salamanders ‘whose silent passage breathes a kind of prayer,’ or mockingbirds ‘flinging mad arias of desire,’ or the call-and-response of ‘windchimes and wren song.’ But he also trains his clear, sharp focus on the fraught human relationship to that world of essential, yet increasingly endangered sovereignty—that world of trees, bees, and beasts that is inextricably interwoven with ours.”         ~Mikhail Horowitz  Praise for Guy Reed  “There is a lineage of poets—Wang Wei, Thoreau, James Wright—who remind us that deep attention is its own kind of virtuous devotion. In Time Under the Overlook, Guy Reed follows in this tradition, illuminating the overlooked and the everyday. Here, mosquitoes and the Milky Way command equal reverence, and a hundred dragonflies rise like tiny miracles. With the sharp eye of a field guide and the soul of a poet, time itself stretches just a little longer under his watchful gaze. These poems do what time rarely allows—pause, linger, and open the door to wonder.”  ~Jeffrey Davis, author of Tracking Wonder: Reclaiming a Life of Meaning and Possibility in a World Obsessed with Productivity

  4. Feb 23

    Poet Barbara Leff - "AND GOD SAID . . . A Brief History of Creation" and "Undertow"

    Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired February 10th, 2026) featuring poet Barbara Leff.  Barbara, joining the show from San Francisco, discusses and reads from her books AND GOD SAID…A Brief History of Creation, and Undertow. Planet Poet’s Poet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce, also appears on the show.  Born and raised in New York, Barbara Leff discovered poetry at the age of 12 and has explored the genre ever since.  Her work has appeared in various journals, including Fourteen Hills, Fault Line and Ibbetson Street. Her first collection, AND GOD SAID . . . A Brief History of Creation, finalist for the DA VINCI prize for the book cover, is based on the Book of Genesis and published by Broadstone Books.  Her second Collection, LUCK, a collaboration with visual artist, David Maxim is devoted to forms and her most recent collection, UNDERTOW was published in 2024, also by Broadstone Books.  She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Arlene Singer, and their dog, Baxter. barbaraleffpoet.com,  pamelampearce.com Praise for AND GOD SAID . . . A Brief History of Creation  …AND GOD SAID... is a brilliant retelling of The Book of Genesis, one of the foundational texts of Western culture. The biases, gaps and silences of the original are given voice and texture by Leff's humane and compelling imagination which brings a fresh and passionate angle of vision to these familiar stories, transforming in the process not only our understanding of our religious past but also of the contemporary life which is in part a product of that past. This is a wonderful and exhilarating book --- Alan Shapiro, Author of ten poetry collections including Tantalus in Love and Old War Poems  Praise for UNDERTOW  ….These deftly crafted poems treat the quotidian, the metaphysical, and the magical- “as if I could grab a handful of stars from the sky and toss them on the tiles at your feet.” Sharply observed, heartrending and celebratory by turns, UNDERTOW conducts us through a lifetime of landscapes its fascination with orientation in shifting memory and place becoming our own.--Susan Cobin, Author, What You Choose

  5. Jan 15

    Guy Elston and Margo LaPierre - Two Canadian Poets

    LISTEN to my December 30th, 2025 WIOX show (also a podcast!) featuring Canadian poets Margo LaPierre and Guy Elston. Margo and Guy will read from and discuss their respective poetry collections Ajar and The Character Actor Convention and talk about their lives in poetry.  Margo LaPierre (she/her) is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, PRISM, and Arc, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario. Visit: www.margolapierreeditor.com  Guy Elston was born and raised in Oxford, UK.  Guy has an MA in History from the University of Amsterdam and since moving to Canada his poetry has been published by The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Event, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, The Antigonish Review and other journals. His chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. His debut full-length collection, The Character Actor Convention, was published by The Porcupine's Quill in 2025. Visit: https://guyelston.com/home-page/  Praise for Ajar Ajar follows the time travel of a mind haunted by chemistries of violence and suicidality. LaPierre’s keen lyrical voice creates a palimpsest of overlapping timelines and selves, and methodically crafts an expansive theory of Mad temporality and survival. These poems are rituals for haunting oneself into the future. —Rebecca Salazar, author of antibody  Praise for The Character Actor Convention "What's certain is voice," quips one of the speakers in The Character Actor Convention, and voices certainly abound in this inventive, hilarious, and slyly wise collection… Guy Elston delves slantwise into the absurdities of our present and the disasters and solaces of our imagined futures. A lively and delightful debut!" –  Catriona Wright, author of Continuity Errors

  6. 12/08/2025

    Molly Peacock - Poet, Biographer, Arts Activist

    Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired November 18th, 2025) featuring renowned, groundbreaking poet Molly Peacock.  Molly will read from her acclaimed books and discuss her life as a poet, biographer and arts activist.    Molly Peacock is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Widow’s Crayon Box. Her poems appear in leading literary journals such as Poetry and American Poetry Review and are anthologized in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. She is the cofounder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses. After her husband of 28 years died, she began The Widow’s Crayon Box, realizing that the variety of feelings after a beloved partner dies comprise far more than an 8-color crayon box—it’s the whole 152.  A former Leon Levy Biography Fellow, Peacock is also the author of two biographies about the lives of women artists, The Paper Garden and Flower Diary.  PRAISE FOR MOLLY PEACOCK  “Peacock has a luxuriantly sensual imagination—and an equally sensual feel for the language. In mood her poems range from high-spirited whimsy ... to bemused reflection. ... Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of her baton.” - David Lehman writing in Washington Post Book World  “Ms. Peacock uses rhyme and meter as a way to cut reality into sizeable chunks, the sense of the poem spilling from line to line, breathlessly.” - The New York Times Book Review  [The Widow’s Crayon Box] bears ample witness to [Molly Peacock’s] wit and gusto, her sensuousness and curiosity, and her courage . . . Her poetic artistry, honed over the course of her distinguished career, enables her to find beauty and zest even in the most forbidding places—and having found them, to offer them to us. — Rachel Hadas, author of Ghost Guest

  7. 10/30/2025

    Lee Slonimsky, Poet and Carol Goodman, Novelist -A Trip to Greece!

    Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired September 23rd, 2025) featuring returning guests, award-winning poet Lee Slonimsky and award-winning novelist Carol Goodman.  Lee and Carol will discuss and read from their new books - Lee’s latest bilingual poetry collection Pythagoras in Exile, which is published in Greece and translated by Katerina Mardakioupi, and Carol’s latest Literary Mystery - Writers and Liars, set on a Greek Island. We’ll also hear about their life together as mutual literary muses, and their fascination with the ancient world.    Lee Slonimsky has published twenty books of poetry around the world, ten in the U. S. and ten others in countries ranging from Greece to Italy to Israel to India.  His work has been anthologized several times, including in Everyman Library’s Buzz Words.  His latest book, a bilingual edition of Pythagoras in Exile, was published by Enipnio Press in Athens, Greece this past May. Visit: Enipnio Press and Mod.Lunar - The River  Carol Goodman’s rich and prolific career includes novels such as The Widow’s House and The Night Visitor, winners of the 2018 and 2020 Mary Higgins Clark Awards.  Her books have been translated into sixteen languages.  She lives in the Hudson Vallley. Visit:  carolgoodman.com  Praise for Lee Slonimsky  “If Pythagoras and Sappho had ever met, they might have written soulful poems like these to each other.” – Anne Carson  “The sonnet turns out to be the perfect—maybe even the Platonic—form for Lee Slonimsky’s Pythagorean meditations…These variations on themes serve as an entrance into the philosopher’s mind, as if we are thinking and discovering along with him.” -- A. E. Stallings (2011 winner of the MacArthur Foundation  “Genius Prize”:  Praise for Carol Goodman  “An excellent riff on And Then There Were None unfolds within a setting steeped in sinister mythology.... An absolutely perfect vacation read.” —Booklist (starred review)  “Goodman’s latest delivers a mash-up of Greek mythology and Agatha Christie’s classic mysteries, to delightful effect.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  8. 08/26/2025

    Poets Bertha Rogers and Mary Gilliland

    Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired August l2th, 2025) featuring poets Bertha Rogers and Mary Gilliland. Bertha and Mary discuss their new books and talk about their work and their lives in poetry over the last few decades.  Mary Gilliland is the author of Ember Days, The Devil’s Fools (winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and the CNY Book Award), and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Prize). Honors include the 2023 International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry and a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant. Mary is a poet, ecologist, and occasional essayist in New York’s Finger Lakes Region where she has transformed a rocky acre of Six Mile Creek into a fawn-filled woodland garden. https://marygilliland.com/  Bertha Rogers is a poet, translator, and visual artist who lives and writes and walks on a mountain in New York’s Catskills. Her recent poetry collection (Salmon, Ireland), is What Want Brings: New & Selected Poems. Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle Poems from the Exeter Book was published in 2019; and her translation of Beowulf  in 2000 (Birch Brook, NY).  Bertha, named First Poet Laureate of Delaware County, New York, in March 2005, and was the founding director of Bright Hill Press and Word Thursdays, a nonprofit organization in New York's Catskill Mountain Region.  www.bertharogers.com.  Praise for Bertha Rogers and Mary Gilliland  "The richness of Bertha Rogers's poetry flows from each line, each word, not just on the page to be seen, but heard as we silently mouth the words. Oh, how perfectly musical hervoice is, sometimes celebratory, sometimes sad, but always in tune with the matter at hand, whether it be nature or love or loss. Now I trust/in poems, rustling red leaves/I lay carefully on white pages,' she tells us. Her trust is well placed. What Want Brings brings us a most welcome treasure of poems new and selected."  --Matthew J. Spireng - author of Good Work, winner of 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize  Mary Gilliland’s In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder is a modern classic; an elemental deep-dive into the life of her brother, as Freddy, whose life was tragically cut short. Here, time and memory are distilled by ‘listening into the dark’ in a poetics so sensitively attuned to loss and written through a myriad of forms and voices. Within the elegiac energy, there are echoes of Muriel Rukeyser’s activist commitment in the documentary approach here. Tender yet ludic, this is a work of searing intelligence. Gilliland is a visionary poet writing at her peak.—JAMES BYRNE

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5
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3 Ratings

About

Poet Sharon Israel hosts the monthly radio show: Planet Poet - Words in Space on WIOX Community Radio, 91.3 broadcasting live from Roxbury in the Catskill Mountains of New York and streaming live on WIOXradio.com. These archived interviews feature poets and writers from the Catskills, the Hudson Valley and around the U.S reading their work and discussing their obsessions with poetry.

Information

  • Creator
    Sharon Israel
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    68
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Planet Poet - Words in Space
  • Show Website
    Planet Poet - Words in Space