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THIS WEEK'S SHOW: August 6, 2026
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey

A "blockbuster version of Moby-Dick" with "moral qualms about the whaling industry."

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April 28, 2016, 2016
Eileen Myles’s Moment

"I remember writing a poem that went, 'O life, when do you staht?' 'S-t-a-h-h-t.'"

This week, we’re tuning into the writer Eileen Myles. Born outside Boston in 1949, Myles is just now having an all-American moment. Myles has spent the last forty years as a queer and feminist...
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, 2013
Geoff Dyer, “on whom nothing is lost…”

Geoff Dyer would tell you he found his way into writing as a way of not having a career. With ever-ready tennis racquet in his book bag, he seems pretty...
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, 2012
Tuesday in Tahrir: Field Notes, with Novelists

  CAIRO — On the way into the tumult in Tahrir Square today, we’re in conversation with the novelist Mona Prince of So You May See and My Name is...
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, 2011
Harold Bloom: On the Playing Field of Poetry

Harold Bloom, in conversation about his famous Anxiety of Influence, slips so comfortably into baseball and jazz metaphors (“tropes,” in the lingo) that I’m wondering if it’s time for the...
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, 2011
Anna West: Poetry That’s “Louder than a Bomb”

Click here to listen to Chris’ conversation with Anna West Anna West, poet and teacher, is letting us in on “Louder than a Bomb.” Before it was an inspirational film,...
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, 2011
Whose Words… (36) Alex Charalambides: “Look at Me!”

Click here to listen to Chris’ conversation with Alex Charalambides Alex Charalambides, a slam star at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem next weekend, is the child of Greek refugees...
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, 2011
Whose Words These Are: January O’Neil’s Underlife

" I like to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary, to capture a moment and elevate it."

Click here to listen to Chris’ conversation with January Gill O’Neil January Gill O’Neil personifies the very broad reach of the third Massachusetts Poetry Festival, coming to Hawthorne’s old witch-burning...
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, 2011
C. D. Wright in Triumph: One With Others

[newyorker.com image] C. D. Wright is well known for assembling her patchwork poetry from local and vernacular fragments. Even with fame and standing, she has still the one-of-a-kind comic, passionate,...
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, 2011
Whose Words These Are: Christian Wiman’s “Wound of Being”

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Christian Wiman. (41 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Christian Wiman didn’t plan it this way but his poetry is now entwined with his grave...
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, 2011
Lydia Davis: Miniatures from a Mind on Fire

Lydia Davis keeps popping up in conversation as a favorite writer of our favorite writers — Rae Armantrout, the Pulitzer poet, among them, and the novelist Robert Coover. Dan Chiasson...
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, 2010
Rainer Maria Rilke for Beginners: Whose Words These Are (31)

When Rilke was dying in 1926 — of a rare and particularly agonizing blood disease — he received a letter from the young Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva. “You are not...
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, 2010
C. K. Williams on Whitman’s Music: Whose Words These Are (30)

  C. K. Williams is giving us his luminous, really rapturous, account of a lifetime reading Walt Whitman. Something changed just a few years ago — then moreso when C....
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, 2010
Whose Words These Are (29): the Haunting of Peter Balakian

Click to listen to Peter Balakian’s reading and conversation with Chris (21 minutes, 10 mb mp3) Peter Balakian has made “the aftermath of catastrophe” his poetic terrain. He is doubtless...
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, 2010
Whose Words These Are: Helen Vendler’s Emily Dickinson

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Helen Vendler (64 minutes, 30 mb mp3) Helen Vendler, our tutor in W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, is showing us here how...
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, 2010
Whose Words These Are (27): Dan Chiasson, the Natural

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Dan Chiasson. (50 minutes, 24 mb mp3) Nancy Crampton photo Dan Chiasson has the easy charm of a natural New England oracle, in...