9 min listen
Charif Shanahan — Present Moment
FromPoetry Unbound
ratings:
Length:
15 minutes
Released:
Jun 30, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
On one particular day, a poem places events alongside each other, the ordinariness of each event casting the other events into light and shade.Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: Poems (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. His work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We’re pleased to offer Charif Shanahan’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
Released:
Jun 30, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Ross Gay — Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt: Ross Gay’s poem “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt” uses an everyday task to examine what is made and unmade in small moments. He imagines his fingers opening and closing things, like buttons, the eyes of a dead person, relationships. In doing so, the poem asks us to simply pay attention, today, to what we’re doing with our hands — to understand them as intimate pathways into the stories of our bodies and the stories of our lives. A question to reflect on after you listen: What have you done with your hands today? What are you opening? What are you closing? by Poetry Unbound