David B. Hobbs on George Oppen ("Ballad")

"What is more precise than precision? Illusion." I talked with my friend, the scholar Siobhan Phillips, about Marianne Moore's poem "Armor's Undermining Modesty." Siobhan Phillips is a professor of English at Dickinson College, where she teaches courses on American literature of ...  Show more

"Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" I've been waiting to record this episode for a long time: Megan Quigley, my dear friend and colleague, joins the podcast to talk about T. S. Eliot and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."Megan Quigley is an associate professor of English at V ...  Show more

For the ninth episode of their series, Seamus and Mark discuss the life and work of Seamus Heaney, whose first collection, Death of Naturalist, established him immediately as a leading poetic voice in world in which modernism seemed to have run its course. They look at how his wo ...  Show more

Sometimes leaving feels like you’re splitting yourself in two, but you leave anyway. What compels us? What holds us together even as we look back? David Whyte’s poem combines pain and promise as someone is both departing and venturing at the same time. David Whyte is the author o ...  Show more

Born George Mpanga, George the Poet is a British spoken-word artist and podcast host. Having started out as a rapper, he made his name as a spoken-word performance poet after leaving Cambridge University. His debut collection Search Party was published in 2015. The same year he w ...  Show more

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

The longtime New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman is the first person ever to hold that ...