In this IPRP Poetry Playlist, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón reads three selections from the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, out now from Milkweed Editions. The collection, edited and introduced by Limón, offers “fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated contemporary writers.” Click here to learn more about the anthology, including upcoming events and how to share your own “You Are Here” nature poem. https://open.spotify.com/episode/21B1WXPUDJ9WNDH4LMROeD TRACKLIST 1. “Reasons to Live” by Ruth Awad 2. “Lullaby for the Grieving” by ..read more

In this episode, Roy Foster reads “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats. Foster is the Emeritus Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and the author of many books, including his classic, two-volume biography of Yeats, published in 1997 and 2003. In a review of the first volume published in the New York Review of Books, the Irish novelist John Banville wrote: “W.B. Yeats: A Life is a great and important work, a triumph of scholarship, thought, and empathy such as one would hardly have thought possible in this age of disillusion. It is an achievement wholly of a scale w ..read more

In this episode, Dessa reads an excerpt from “Natural Enemies of the Conch” by Alan Dugan. Dessa first gained prominence as a rapper with the Twin Cities hip hop collective Doomtree, but has since worked across many genres and creative disciplines. She has collaborated with the Minnesota Orchestra, published a memoir and poetry collections, and even hosted a BBC science podcast. Her fantastic new album, Bury the Lede, is an embrace of dance floor-ready pop music.  Alan Dugan was an American poet born in New York City in 1923. “Natural Enemies of the Conch” appears in Poems Seven: New ..read more

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily like a dog looking for a place to sleep in, listen to it growling. –ELIZABETH BISHOP For each IPRP Poetry Playlist, we curate a selection of three poems, loosely thematically related, presented with musical score, but without any commentary or historical context. We encourage you to approach these shorts with the same relaxed attitude you might take toward a playlist on a burnt CD, given to you by a friend, which you casually pop in on a long road trip. Don’t worry about perfect comprehension, and steer clear of academic analysis. Just turn up the vo ..read more

What would it be like to experience a selection of poems with the same relaxed attitude you might take toward a playlist on a burnt CD, given to you by a friend, which you casually pop in on a long road trip? That’s the question we’re exploring with this new, extra-short episode format, which we’ll be publishing in-between our full-length releases. We’re calling it a Poetry Playlist: three poems, loosely thematically related, presented with musical score, but without any commentary or historical context. Don’t worry about perfect comprehension, and steer clear of academic analysis. Just turn u ..read more

In this episode, Makoto Fujimura reads an excerpt from “Burnt Norton” by T. S. Eliot. Fujimura is a leading contemporary painter whose work fuses abstract expressionism with traditional Japanese painting styles. He is also the author of several books, including Art + Faith: A Theology of Making, out now from Yale University Press. T. S. Eliot was an influential modernist poet, playwright, and literary critic born in St. Louis in 1888. His late masterpiece, Four Quartets, is a collection of four linked poems partially inspired, in sound and structure, by Beethoven’s late string quartets. “Burnt ..read more

In this episode, Theo Padnos reads “The Drunken Boat” by Arthur Rimbaud. Padnos is an American writer and journalist. In 2012, he was kidnapped and held hostage for two years by an Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. His new book about the experience, “Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment,” was described in the Atlantic as “the best of the genre, profound, poetic, and powerful.” Arthur Rimbaud was a French symbolist poet born in 1854. He composed “The Drunken Boat” when he was just 16 years old, and stopped writing poetry altogether in his early twenties. “The Drunken Boat” by A ..read more

In this episode, Hrishikesh Hirway reads “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats. Hirway is the creator and host of several acclaimed podcasts, including Home Cooking (with Samin Nosrat), The West Wing Weekly (with Joshua Malina), and Song Exploder (which is now also a Netflix original series). On top of all that, Hirway manages a career as a composer and recording artist. We’ll play a short clip from his new single, “Between There and Here (feat. Yo-Yo Ma),” at the beginning of this interview. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats was written in 1888 and included i ..read more

In this episode, Bon Appétit Editor-in-Chief Dawn Davis reads “Sonnet 171” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Davis joined Bon Appétit in November 2020 following a long career in book publishing. Through her visionary work at Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, Davis oversaw the publication of numerous influential best sellers — from “The Pursuit of Happyness” by Chris Gardner to “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones.  Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet born in 1892. She became wildly popular during her lifetime — known for her passionate readings and bold social views — and achieve ..read more

In this episode, Grian Chatten reads “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Chatten is the frontman of the Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C., recently described by NME as “the new heroes of the rock resurrection.” The members of the group met while attending music college in Dublin and initially bonded over a shared love for Irish literature. Their second album, A Hero’s Death, has been nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award for Best Rock Album. Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest who spent the last years of his life as a professor of Greek and Latin at University Colle ..read more