Read Me a Poem

This week, we have a special bonus interview with host Amanda Holmes, in conversation with Stephanie Bastek, the show’s producer and the host of The American Scholar’s Smarty Pants podcast. For the past year and a half, Holmes has recited poems ranging from English classics by W. B. Yeats and Maya Angelou to works in translation by Kamala Das and Wislawa Szymborska to mournful sonnets by Rupert Brooke and lighthearted romps by Kenneth Patchen and Laura Riding. Holmes’s gift lies in treating each poem with equal attention, whether it’s by a new poet she’s just encountered or a canonical master. These days, with listener requests flooding in during the pandemic, the show’s tagline seems truer than ever: we all need more poetry in our lives.

Go beyond the episode:

• Subscribe to Smarty Pants: Spotify • iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
• Read Amanda Holmes’s book reviews and feature column at the Washington Independent Review of Books

Poems mentioned:

• Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
• Jane Hirshfield, “For What Binds Us”
• W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”
• Rabindranath Tagore, “Dungeon” and an excerpt from Gitanjali
• Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!”
• Emily Dickinson,“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
• Kamala Das, “Summer in Calcutta”
• Toru Dutt, “Our Casuarina Tree”
• Leonardo Sinisgalli, “Elderly Tears”
• Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”