Poetry Unbound

Wonder and strangeness commingle with the commonplace and universal in Danielle Chapman’s “Trespassing with Tweens.” In a not-quite mirroring, a human mother and her children stand and watch together in awe as a great blue heron flaps in and feeds its two offspring. The pleasures found here are profound and multiple – the joys in seeing, in sharing an experience of seeing, in seeing with fresh eyes, and in being seen.Danielle Chapman is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her most recent collection of poetry, Boxed Juice, was published in 2024 by Unbounded Edition Press. Her previous collection of poems, Delinquent Palaces, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2015, and her memoir, Holler: A Poet Among Patriots, was released by Unbound Edition Press in 2023. For several years, Chapman served as the Director of Literary Arts and Events for the City of Chicago, and she was also an editor at Poetry Magazine. She currently teaches Shakespeare and creative writing and lives in Hamden, Connecticut, with her family.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Danielle Chapman’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

In Richard Langston’s poem “Hill walk,” he proffers a handful of things that move us over the course of a day — words said or read, notes played, the sight of halting steps taken by a sibling. We marvel at the sound of an unfamiliar bird call, but there’s a startling mystery to the human heart and what it responds to (or doesn’t) and one that we don’t always mark.Richard Langston is a veteran broadcast journalist and director. He comes from Dunedin, New Zealand, and was a driving force in the city’s music scene in the 1980s. He now lives in Wellington and is a proud member of the three-person South Wellington Poetry Society. His poetry collection, Five O’Clock Shadows, was published in 2020 by The Cuba Press.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Richard Langston’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

What sacrifices were made by your parents when you were a child? How did you think about them as they were happening? And how do you think about them now? In his poem “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden holds space for a weighted childhood memory and the regret, love, and pain it evokes.Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was the first Black American poet to be appointed the Consultant of Poetry to the Library of Congress (now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate); he held this role from 1976 to 1978. Hayden was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Hopwood Award, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, and Russell Loines Award for distinguished poetic achievement from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Robert Hayden’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books. 

When you look at people who are younger than you — particularly teenagers — does your mind ever take you back to yourself at their age? Taylor Johnson’s poem “Pennsylvania Ave. SE” performs this feat of time travel, going from a glimpse of two boys on bicycles to a haunting sense memory of what was once so yearned for: to be seen, to be wanted, to be free.Taylor Johnson is proud of being from Washington, D.C. He has received fellowships and scholarships from CALLALOO, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, VONA, Tin House, Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, Conversation Literary Festival, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference, among others. In 2017, Johnson received the Larry Neal Writers' Award from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. His poems appear in The Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and The Paris Review, among other journals and literary magazines. His first book, Inheritance, was published in November 2020 by Alice James Books.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Taylor Johnson’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.