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In the sixth and final episode of this season, Saretta Morgan and Bo Hwang invite listeners to create a guided meditation that allows for arrival. _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly—  it’s late, we've miles  to go together.  Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Morgan’s prompt: Write a guided meditation that’s inspired by two things: one, questions that rise for you in what you’ve been reading lately, and, two, your view of our political moment. Focus on the simplest version of questions that you feel are most critical right now. Determine what kind of language and what kind of containers for silence are necessary alongside your questions. Another way of putting it: what is the language for this moment and what does it need to arrive? 

In the fifth episode, Amelia Bande invites listeners to play a game. _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together. Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Bande’s prompt: Think about a word. Any word. And then write a poetic definition of the word that does not include the word in it. And then you're going to use this poem as lyrics of a song. Once you have your song, you can sing it to someone else or to a group of people. And it's a riddle because then they have to try and guess what the word was. So, this is one: I wrote the definition. It’s in Spanish but I did a translation so I’m going to read the translation now: You smell it. You perceive it. It activates fugitive instincts of primary protection to fight, flight, freeze, or transform my fear in ways to charm you. What's the word? (Want to know what word is the answer to Bande’s riddle? It’s also the final word in the title of this poem.)

In the fourth episode, Pamela Sneed invites listeners to create a protest poem and an antidote. _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together. Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Sneed’s prompt: Create a protest poem. It can be based on something that you’ve heard in the news or something that’s really been bothering you in the past few weeks, and you can tie it into a current event. For an added twist, add in an action at the end or something that you think people should or can do to remedy the situation.

In the third episode, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge invites listeners to observe a plant and receive its messages. _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together. Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Berssenbrugge’s prompt: Choose a plant and observe it with care for five minutes and intensity. Now, draw the plant with a pencil, shading from the center of the plant outward rather than outlining the plant. Now sit with the plant again, opening yourself to what the plant says to you. Now put the plant away, and for fifteen minutes write a visual description of your plant. There will be an interweave or seepage between perception, memory, and imagination. Now, as a stream of consciousness, quickly write down all the things that you receive from the plant. If you imagine your plant has said something to you, they did say that. The final part of the exercise is to compose an essay, a song, a piece of prose or poetry combining your written phenomenological description of the plant and your reception of messages from your plant.  _____ The poem read in this episode is “Consciousness Self-Learns,” by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, from A Treatise on Stars, copyright ©2020 by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

In the second episode, Edward Salem invites listeners to find what’s beyond “so what.” _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together. Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Salem’s prompt: Write a poem that responds to the question, “What is beyond so what?” You can replace “so what” with “eternity.” What is beyond the void? What is beyond the body? What is beyond your little human life? What is beyond the life cycle of the universe?  _____ The poem Salem reads in the episode, “The Palestinian Chair,” is from his book Monk Fruit (Nightboat Books, 2025).

In the first episode, Gabrielle Calvocoressi invites listeners to make a web. _____ Matsuo Bashō wrote: Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together. Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. The series is produced by Rachel James with sound design by Axel Kacoutié. _____ Here’s an edited version of Calvocoressi’s prompt:   Make a web. Use whatever form of web making comes naturally to your orb-weaving self. Could you make a web that connects one part of your room or the place where you are to another? This can be theoretical, spiritual, pragmatic; it can be tactile, it can be sonic, it can be visual, or just the deep web of memory.    Could you make enough space for a ghost to come through?    What’s your web? Get as intricate as you want. Weave and weave, and just let your mind make the form. Or you want to get physical? Find yourself a ball of string and whatever mobility means to you. This can be done in bed. This can be done alone or with others. Construct a web.    You can stop right there. You don’t have to make a poem. Nobody has to make a poem. But if you want to keep going, you could make a poem that contains all the things that you caught in that web.   Could you make a form called an orb weaver? What would that look like? What would your orb weaver look like? 

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Kiki Petrosino, who has published five elegant and remarkable books, all with Sarabande, including the memoir Bright (2022) and the poetry collection White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (2020). Petrosino speaks about crestfallenness and her new essay in the October issue of Poetry, “On Crestfallenness: A Pilgrim, Not a Tractor,” which appeared as part of the Hard Feelings series. She also talks about having her mother join her for her research, teaching across languages, and her love of cookbooks and the stories they tell. With thanks to Danelle Cadena Deulen for the clip of her reading Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Closing Time; Iskandariya” on the podcast Lit from the Basement. And to Sarabande Books, Inc. for permission to include Kiki Petrosino’s poem “Pergatorio” from Witch Wife (2020).

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Kimiko Hahn, who won the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and who is featured in the October 2023 issue of Poetry. Hahn talks about how her work has changed over the years, including her current love of form, and how she’s been mentoring her younger self while putting together her forthcoming new and selected, The Ghost Forest (W.W. Norton). She also discusses being wrong about Elizabeth Bishop, not getting an MFA, and what it was like studying at the University of Iowa as an undergraduate while the graduate program was filled with now-canonical poets like Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Tess Gallagher, and others. Hahn shares two of her incredible poems from the October issue with listeners.

This week, Cindy Juyong Ok talks with Cathy Park Hong, who has published three volumes of poetry and the collection of essays Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Hong introduces us to a new selection from “Spring and All,” featured in the September 2023 issue of Poetry. She discusses how feeling like a “shit mom” during the early days of the pandemic has influenced her new writing, as did the work of other artists and writers who address “failing” at motherhood, like that of visual artist Tala Madani and her “Shit Moms” series.

On this week’s episode, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with poet, essayist, and translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha about the life and work of the renowned Palestinian poet and writer Zakaria Mohammed. Born in Nablus, Palestine, Mohammed was a freelance journalist, editor, and poet who authored nine volumes of poetry. In 1994, after twenty-five years in exile, he returned to his homeland to live in Ramallah where he recently died at the age of seventy-three. Ok and Khalaf Tuffaha discuss Mohammed’s rebelliousness, his democratizing practice of posting early drafts of his poems to Facebook, and how he approached writing in the shadow of Mahmoud Darwish. They also talk about grief, the politics of translation, and the always tricky task of composing an email. Finally, Khalaf Tuffaha treats us to some of Mohammed’s poems in Arabic and English translation that appear in the September 2023 issue of Poetry.

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Kevin Young, who has authored or edited over twenty books including the poetry collection Stones (Knopf, 2021) and the nonfiction investigation Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017). In addition to directing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Young is also the poetry editor at the New Yorker, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the conversation today focuses on all that poetry does. As Young says: “It does the most important things … It’s waiting for you.” We’ll also hear two new gorgeous poems by Young from the July/August 2023 issue of Poetry: “The Stair” (4:20) and “Diptych” (38:06).

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok talks with Richie Hofmann, whose latest book is A Hundred Lovers (Knopf, 2022), about the ancient tale of Hermias of Iasos which informs Hofmann’s poem “Dolphin.” The poem appears in the July/August issue of Poetry alongside “Breed Me,” and we’ll hear both on today’s episode. Hofmann and Ok reveal they are both “Cavafy heads,” and Hofmann discusses the influence of Robert Mapplethorpe on his poems, as well as why lineation is one of the “erotic touchstones” of poetry.

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok talks with torrin a. greathouse, a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist who is the author of the forthcoming DEED (Wesleyan University Press), as well as Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020). Ok and greathouse get into poetic forms—which they liken to open-source software—particularly the beloved “burning haibun” form that greathouse created and that she wrote about for Poetry’s “Not Too Hard to Master” series. The essay appears in the July/August issue of Poetry alongside their Springsteen-inspired burning haibun, “Dancing in the Dark,” which greathouse reads on the podcast. They also interrogate the anti-trans rhetoric and language of radical white feminist poets, and greathouse reads “There’s No Trace of the Word ‘Transgender’ in Adrienne Rich’s Biography,” which previously appeared in Poetry. 

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Douglas Kearney, who joins from Saint Paul, Minnesota. Kearney is the author of eight books of poetry, prose, and libretti, and his poems are often highly distinctive both on and off the page. Today’s conversation begins with spite and Scrabble, which Kearney writes about in his new essay in the July/August issue of Poetry, a continuation of the “Hard Feelings” series. They also talk about the changing topographies in Kearney’s work, the “dintelligibility” of his new poems, and the vital importance of discomfort. Thanks to Douglas Kearney and Wave Books for permission to include Kearney’s reading of “Sand Fire (or The Pool, 2016)” from his book Sho, and to Fonograf Editions for permission to include clips from Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty’s Fodder.

This week, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Elisa Gabbert, who joins us from Providence, Rhode Island. Gabbert is the author of six, soon to be seven, collections of essays and poems, including Normal Distance (Soft Skull Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Any Person Is the Only Self (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Ok writes, “For Elisa, seemingly no field, no form, no fondness, is exempt from her thought or, lucky for us, her writing. She is a lover of surprising etymology and misunderstood quotes. She works toward clarity in play and in study.” Today, the two discuss Gabbert’s essay “On Self-Pity: Go Eat Worms,” which is part of a new series called “Hard Feelings” that makes its debut in the July/August 2023 issue of Poetry. Gabbert explains why she was excited to write a “spirited defense” of self-pity, and more.