Close Readings Kamran Javadizadeh

This is the kind of conversation I dreamed about having when I began this podcast. Emily Wilson [https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/] joins Close Readings to talk about Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite [https://public.websites.umich.edu/~celueb/sappho-poems/single-page/]," a poet and poem at the root of the lyric tradition in European poetry. You'll hear Emily read the poem in the Ancient Greek and then again in Anne Carson's English translation. We talk about the nature of erotic desire, what it's like to have a crush, and how a poem can be like a spell. 

Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor of the Humanities. She is a celebrated translator of Homer, having translated both The Odyssey [https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-odyssey] and, more recently, The Iliad [https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-iliad-sept-2023] (both from Norton). Wilson has also published translations of Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca—and is the author of three monographs: The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford, 2014), The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard, 2007), and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins, 2004). You can follow Emily on Twitter [https://twitter.com/emilyrcwilson].

If you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get very occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.

"Poetry," according to this episode's poem, "makes nothing happen." But as our guest, Robert Volpicelli [https://www.rmc.edu/profile/robert-a-volpicelli/], makes clear, that poem, W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats [https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats]," offers that statement not as diminishment of poetry but instead as a way of valuing it for the right reasons.

Robert Volpicelli is an associate professor of English at Randolph-Macon College and the author of Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/transatlantic-modernism-and-the-us-lecture-tour-9780192893383?cc=us&lang=en&] (Oxford UP, 2021). That book, which won the Modernist Studies Association's first book prize, will be out in paperback in April 2024. Bob's articles have appeared in journals like PMLA, NOVEL, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He and I co-edited and wrote a brief introduction for "Poetry Networks [https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/41709]," a special issue of the journal College Literature (a journal for which Bob has since become an associate editor). 

As ever, if you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get very occasional updates on the pod and my writing.

How does life grow from death? When we taste a fruit, are we, in some sense, ingesting everything the soil contains? Margaret Ronda [https://english.ucdavis.edu/people/mronda] joins the podcast to discuss a poem that poses these questions in harrowing ways, Walt Whitman's  "This Compost [https://poets.org/poem/compost]."

[A note on the recording: from 01:10:11 - 01:12:59, Margaret briefly loses her internet connection and I awkwardly vamp. Apologies! Rest assured the remainder of the episode goes off without a hitch!]

Margaret Ronda is an associate professor of English at UC-Davis, where she specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End [https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28109] (Post*45 Series, Stanford UP, 2018), and her articles have appeared in such journals as American Literary History [https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/34/4/1389/6833096?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false], Post45 Contemporaries [https://post45.org/2023/06/abortions-poetic-figures/], and PMLA [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/work-and-wait-unwearying-dunbars-georgics/58F494BAF1F14008449165A565E34966] (for which she won the William Riley Parker Prize). She is also the author of two books of poetry, both published by Saturnalia Books: For Hunger [https://www.ipgbook.com/for-hunger-products-9781947817999.php?page_id=32&pid=SIA] (2018) and Personification [https://www.ipgbook.com/personification-products-9780981859156.php?page_id=32&pid=SIA] (2010). You can follow Margaret on Twitter [https://twitter.com/mronda77].

As ever, if you enjoy the episode, please follow the pod and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And sign up for my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work. 

What is a poem worth? What does beauty do to the person who wants it, or to the person who makes it? Michelle A. Taylor [https://twitter.com/scriblerian] joins the pod to talk about Patricia Lockwood's poem "The Ode on a Grecian Urn [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143936/the-ode-on-a-grecian-urn]," a wild and funny and ultimately quite moving poem (which is also, obviously, a riff on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn [https://poets.org/poem/ode-grecian-urn]").

Michelle A. Taylor is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University's Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry [https://fchi.emory.edu/home/fellows/index.html]. Michelle is  a scholar of 20th century literature, and more specifically, literary modernism. She is currently finishing her first book, tentatively titled Clique Lit: Coterie Culture and the Making of Modernism. Her academic essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Modernist Cultures [https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/mod.2023.0403], College Literature [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/746213/summary], Modernism/ modernity Print+ [https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/discomfort], Literary Imagination [https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article-abstract/21/3/324/5583714], and Modernist Archives: A Handbook [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury-handbook-of-modernist-archives-9781350450592/], and she has also written essays and reviews for The Point [https://thepointmag.com/author/mtaylor/], Post45 Contemporaries [https://post45.org/2021/05/come-slowly-eden/], The Fence [https://www.the-fence.com/author/dr-michelle-alexis-taylor/], Poetry Foundation [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158199/because-i-have-not-existed], the Financial Times Magazine [https://www.ft.com/content/1e1342ea-97ae-4816-aa6f-3b7158f72df2], and The New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-secret-history-of-t-s-eliots-muse]. She received her PhD in English from Harvard in 2021, and from 2021 to 2023, she was the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

If you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get the occasional update on the pod and on my other work.

How might a poem map the passage from life to death? Sylvie Thode [https://english.berkeley.edu/people/sylvie-thode] joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem by Tim Dlugos, "The Far West [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RvLedWDwYwdtdVOJQ3wh4yessLsitBlz/view?usp=drive_link]." 

Sylvie is a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley, where she works on poetry and poetics, with particular interest in the poetry of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Though that focus roots her in the 20th century, she has written on poetry from a range of time periods. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Poetry [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/856456], Chicago Review [https://www.chicagoreview.org/drew-daniel-joy-of-the-worm/], Cambridge Literary Review [https://cambridgeliteraryreview.wordpress.com/issue-13/], and Jacket2 [https://jacket2.org/reviews/writing-trauma-silence-and-stillness]. You can follow her on Twitter [https://twitter.com/sylviethode].

Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get an occasional update on the pod and my other work.

For the first time in the run of this podcast (though certainly not the last!) today we have a poem in translation. Marisa Galvez [https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/marisa-galvez] joins Close Readings to discuss "The Song of Nothing [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j8TlS0yViDK4Ab-ZIz9R1dFizkAuR4Ul/view?usp=sharing]," a poem by the first attested troubadour, William IX.  

The poem is something like 900 years old, and Marisa helps us see both its strangeness and the sense in which it feels like it might have been written yesterday. You'll hear Marisa read the poem both in an English translation and in its original language, Old Occitan, where its musicality and verve really come through. This was a fascinating conversation about how poems are made—and why, and who and what for—with lessons to offer both about the medieval period and about the poems and songs we encounter today.

Marisa Galvez is Professor of French and Italian (and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature) at Stanford University, where she specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. She is the author of two books, both published by University of Chicago Press: Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13249857.html] (2012) and The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo49911567.html] (2020). Her current book project concerns contemporary and modern translations of medieval lyric and how they propose new ways of "lyric knowing" the Global South.

Remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/], where you'll get occasional updates about the pod and about my writing.