This week, Esther Belin speaks with Manny Loley, a Diné poet and storyteller who writes in both the Navajo and English languages. Belin and Loley talk about stories as medicine, the unique poetics of the Navajo language and the meanings and musicality that don’t translate into English, and the importance and industriousness of queer people in Diné creation stories and in the Navajo Nation today. Loley also shares why his most important readers and listeners are his grandma, his mom, and the land. Loley is ‘Áshįįhi born for Tó Baazhní’ázhí; his maternal grandparents are the Tódích’íi’nii, and his paternal grandparents are the Kinyaa’áanii.He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, and he serves as the director of the Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute. You can read two of Loley’s poems in Navajo and English in the July/August 2022 issue of Poetry, in print and online.
This week, guest editor Esther Belin speaks with poet and scholar Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Although Belin’s and Wesley’s homelands are far from each other—Wesley’s in Liberia and Belin’s in Diné bikéyah of the Navajo people—they share a deep commitment to their roles as storytellers, and their writing bears witness to the effects of war and invasion in their homelands. Wesley, who now lives in Altoona, Pennsylvania, is a survivor of the civil war in Liberia. She explains how poetry allows her to tell the truth of that experience while leaving some details unwritten. We’ll hear Wesley’s poem, “Black Woman Selling Her Home in America,” from the June 2022 issue of Poetry, and we’ll also hear her wonderful recipe for self-care (which includes teaching everyone to do their own laundry and sleeping in). Content note:Wesley explicitly describes the effects of war including graphic violence against pregnant people.
In our very first mini episode, Esther Belin shares two writing prompts to helppropel you to a place that comforts and aligns you back to center.
This week, Esther Belin and Orlando White talk about Diné thought and poetics, sound and breath in Diné bizaad, the Navajo language, and what it means, as Indigenous writers, to use the English language as a vessel to integrate tribal concepts. They also discuss one of White’s one-word poems, “Water.” Although the poem is only six letters long, there was barely enough time to unpack its complexity. Orlando White is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and faculty member of Diné College, a tribal college on the Navajo reservation in Tsaile, Arizona. He is the author of LETTERRS (Nightboat Books, 2015) and Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009). You can read two poems by White in the June 2022 issue of Poetry.
This week, we return to the little-known world of Margaret Danner with guest editor Srikanth Reddy, historian Liesl Olson, and poet Ed Roberson. Olson and Roberson were the people who first introduced Reddy to Margaret Danner’s poetry. Olson is the Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library, the building where Margaret Danner worked as an editor of Poetry magazine from 1951 to 1956. Roberson is a celebrated poet living in the South Side of Chicago—probably not far from where Danner grew up and wrote much of her poetry. Born in 1915, Danner was a contemporary of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes—and knew them personally—but she never achieved the recognition she deserved in her lifetime. It’s hard to find her poetry in print; in fact, Reddy might have borrowed one of the last copies of her collected poems left in Chicago in preparation for this podcast. Danner wrote about many things—the civil rights movement, African art, gender, class, and faith (there’s a previo...
Today we explore the Popol Vuh, the foundational sacred narrative of the K’iche people. This Mayan epic tells the story of creation, the role of the gods in human affairs, and the history of migration and settlement in Central America up to the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. The story of the Popol Vuh is pretty amazing itself. It was passed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years, first orally and then written in Mayan glyphs in the mid sixteenth century. The original Mayan text was hidden from Spanish invaders—until the K’iche people allowed a Dominican friar, Francisco Ximenez, to make a Spanish translation in the early 1700s. Today there are many translations of the Popol Vuh—but it’s not nearly as well known as other texts, like the Bible or the Epic of Gilgamesh, even though it’s considered by many to be the oldest book in the Americas. One incredible thing about the translation we’ll be talking about today is that it’s a family affair. Juan...
This week, Srikanth Reddy talks shit, quite literally, with the poet and translator James Shea. Shea recently co-translated, with Ikuho Amano, a little-known essay by the Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki titled “Haiku on Shit.” It’s a surprisingly serious, if not a little deadpan, essay about art and reality, beauty and ugliness, and poop and poetry. One favorite that’s shared in the episode is this one by Issa: “When you show it some sympathy, the baby sparrow takes a crap on you.” Here’s another favorite, this time by Buson: “Fallen red plum blossoms appear to be ablaze on clumps of horse shit.” To begin, Shea and Reddy take us through the history of haiku, starting with the four great poets of the form: Issa, Buson, Basho, and—200 years later—Shiki, who published the essay “Haiku on Shit” over a century ago.
Srikanth Reddy first encountered the complex poetic world of Don Mee Choi as a translator of avant-garde Korean poetry before reading Choi’s own poetry. As a poet, Choi invites readers into her personal history—which is also the history of her father and of war. Even if you haven’t read Choi’s poetry, you’ve probably seen the work of her father—a photojournalist who filmed much of the news footage that Americans saw of the Vietnam War and the Cold War era. Choi is at work on a new book, Wings of Utopia, which is the final book in what unintentionally became a trilogy. In Hardly War, Choi set out to explore the dictatorship era of South Korea, but to understand Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship, she felt she also needed to delve into the 1945 national division of Korea, so she wrote a second book, DMZ Colony. Today you’ll hear three poems from the final book, where Choi orbits around her father’s memories as a way to explore the Gwangju Massacre, and what Walter Benjamin called ...
When Srikanth Reddy was reading about Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis’s work as a curator at the Smithsonian, he was surprised to learn about Davis’s interest in ghosts.This week on the podcast, Reddy speaks with Davis about ghosts and “ghost practice,” and about the unusual way Davis’snovelis being haunted by other writers.They also talk about the Center for Refugee Poetics, founded by Davis with the poet Ocean Vuong, which Davis describes as “a mobile literary arts and education project, a Center without a physical home, a roving sanctuary.” To learn more about the Center for Refugee Poetics, check out Davis’s essay in the April 2022 issue of Poetry, “On Refugee Poetics and Exophony.”
This week, guest editor Srikanth Reddy and poet CM Burroughs dive into the world of Margaret Danner. Danner was a contemporary of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, whom she knew personally, but she never achieved the recognition she deserved in her lifetime. If you look for Danner’s poetry in your local bookstore, you won’t find anything in print. Recently, Burroughs connected with Danner, a poet from her lineage as a Black woman writing in America, but not through Danner’s poems—through her archival “hair-down letters.” Reddy and Burroughs talk about Danner, race in America, and also faith. Danner converted to Baha’i, a relatively new world religion devoted to the unity of all faiths, in the early sixties. Burroughs reads one of her poems titled “God Letter,” from her newest book Master Suffering, and we’ll hear two poems by Danner. We’re grateful to also share a bit from the choir at the Bahá'í House of Worship and their director of music, Van Gilmer. You can read...