One poem. One guest. Each episode, Kamran Javadizadeh, a poetry critic and professor of English, talks to a different leading scholar of poetry about a single short poem that the guest has loved. You'll have a chance to see the poem from the expert's perspective—and also to think about some big questions: How do poems work? What can they make happen? How might they change our lives?
Siobhan Phillips on Marianne Moore ("Armor's Undermining Modesty")
"What is more precise than precision? Illusion." I talked with my friend, the scholar Siobhan Phillips [https://www.dickinson.edu/site/custom_scripts/dc_faculty_profile_index.php?fac=phillisi], about Marianne Moore's poem "Armor's Undermining Modesty [https://poetryarchive.org/poem/armors-undermining-modesty/]."
Siobhan Phillips is a professor of English at Dickinson College, where she teaches courses on American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, food studies, and creative writing. She is the author of The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-poetics-of-the-everyday/9780231520294/] (Columbia UP, 2010) and the novel Benefit [https://www.blpress.org/books/benefit/] (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022). Her essays have appeared in such journals as Contemporary Liiterature, Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/modernity, Literary Imagination, Twentieth-Century Literature, and PMLA. Her essay on Marianne Moore and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was published on the website of the Poetry Foundation [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/92768/the-students-of-marianne-moore].
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21 Jul 2025
Megan Quigley on T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")
"Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" I've been waiting to record this episode for a long time: Megan Quigley [https://meganquigley.com/], my dear friend and colleague, joins the podcast to talk about T. S. Eliot and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock]."
Megan Quigley is an associate professor of English at Villanova University, where she is also on the Irish Studies and Gender and Women's Studies faculties. She is the author of Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language [https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/modernist-fiction-and-vagueness-philosophy-form-and-language] (Cambridge UP, 2015) and the co-editor of Eliot Now [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/eliot-now-9781350564169/] (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is also the editor of two clusters of essays on #MeToo, Eliot, and modernism in Modernism/modernity Print+ (2019 [https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/reading-waste-land-metoo], 2020 [https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/metoo-modernism]). Her essays have appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, Philosophy and Literature, Poetics Today, LARB, the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, nonsite, and the Cambridge Companion to European Modernism. She is a four-time lecturer and seminar leader at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School. Her current book project is called "The Love Song of Modernism" and is on modernism and fan fiction. She has two essays in progress on AI and literature and an essay forthcoming on "T. S. Eliot's Women" in A Companion to Eliot's Complete Prose.
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14 Jul 2025
Daniel Katz on Jack Spicer ("Psychoanalysis: An Elegy")
How is a poem like a session of psychoanalysis? The scholar Daniel Katz [https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/people/katzdrd/] joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem that poses that question, Jack Spicer's "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51396/psychoanalysis-an-elegy]."
Daniel Katz is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and is the author of several books and articles on modernism, modern and contemporary poetry, and psychoanalysis. His work on Spicer includes a monograph, The Poetry of Jack Spicer [https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-poetry-of-jack-spicer.html] (Edinburgh UP, 2013), and Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819578150/be-brave-to-things/] (Wesleyan UP, 2021), for which he served as editor. He is currently finishing a book called "The Big Lie of the Personal: Poetry, Politics, and the Lyric Subject."
In our conversation, we refer to a few other Spicer volumes: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819570901/my-vocabulary-did-this-to-me/], Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819501905/even-strange-ghosts-can-be-shared/], The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819502124/the-house-that-jack-built-new-edition/], and finally Spicer's book After Lorca [https://www.nyrb.com/products/after-lorca].
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Who has been a guest on Close Readings
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Lindsay Turner
Joyelle McSweeney
Nick Sturm
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