Poetry Centered
Poetry Centered features curated selections from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work during visits to the Center between 1963 and today. In each episode, a guest poet introduces three poems from Voca, sharing their insights about the remarkable performances recorded in our archive. Each episode concludes with the guest poet reading a poem of their own.
Episodes
49 episodes
Diego Báez: Three Gabriels
Diego Báez introduces us to three Gabriels connected by themes of reclamation and new beginnings. He shares Gabriel Dozal approaching the US-Mexico border with humor (“You Look at Crossers, You Look Just...
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Episode 46
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34:39
Valerie Hsiung: Breath Mover
Valerie Hsiung selects poems that disorient as they open us to the vital, visceral present. She introduces Roberto Tejada and the poem as a breaking fever (“Kill Time Objective”), Jennifer Elise Foerster...
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Episode 45
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32:16
Geffrey Davis: The Drive to Connect
Geffrey Davis selects recordings that reveal the bold, risky, and relentless work of attention and connection that poetry undertakes. He shares Lisel Mueller pushing against the limits of human unders...
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Episode 44
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35:53
Vickie Vértiz: Path to a Future
Vickie Vértiz curates poems that chart a path to a collective future where we can survive crises, connect with others, and see life’s beauty. She introduces Khadijah Queen looking to words as weapons amid...
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Episode 43
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24:05
Eugenia Leigh: Proclaim a Rising
Eugenia Leigh introduces poems that speak from a particular moment into our own time, offering possibility amidst struggle. She shares John Murillo’s engagement with resistance and reality (“Enter the...
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Episode 42
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31:12
Mary Jo Bang: Astonishment
Mary Jo Bang brings together poems united by astonishment at the continuation of a world that seems utterly self-destructive. She shares Claudia Rankine on the illusions of American optimism (“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely”), Srikanth Reddy on mortali...
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Episode 41
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32:38
Olatunde Osinaike: Nobody Gets to Question What I Feel
Olatunde Osinaike curates poems that meld comedy, cultural scrutiny, and self-imagination. He introduces Patricia Spears Jones clearing a path for desire (“Self-Portrait as Midnight Storm”), Morga...
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Episode 40
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25:18
Sawako Nakayasu: Grief Textures
Sawako Nakayasu selects poems that confront griefs personal and national, told directly and obliquely. She introduces Timothy Liu documenting the atrocities of Japanese imperialism (“A Requiem for t...
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Episode 39
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44:05
Jake Skeets: Saad, Where We All Started
Jake Skeets curates poems by Diné poets centering on translation and the way that the Diné language orients its speakers to the world, which exists before them. He shares Rex Lee Jim’s invocation of voice a...
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Episode 38
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30:10
Sally Wen Mao: Poetic Awakening
Sally Wen Mao shares poems that trace her awakening as a poet, invoking teachers both in person and on the page. She introduces Claribel Alegría on how to express the unknowable and untraceable (“Savoi...
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Episode 37
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36:14
Lauren Camp: Our Little Perfections
Lauren Camp selects poems that each inhabit a place, a music, another person—shaping a cosmos large or small in language. She introduces Beckian Fritz Goldberg synchronizing past and present (“Black Fis...
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Episode 36
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23:13
Sophia Terazawa: Enemy, Beloved
Sophia Terazawa introduces poems that lead us to encounter both the beloved and the enemy, seeing them blurred and intertwined—seeing them as human. She shares Joy Harjo’s prayer of courage for the ...
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Episode 35
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33:58
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Bonus: Radical Reversal in Birmingham
Radical Reversal highlights the reformative abilities of the arts by bringing poetry, music, and music production workshops—along with performance and recordings spaces—to detention centers and co...
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16:11
Manuel Paul López: Small and Immense Mysteries
Manuel Paul López curates poems that draw us into the nourishing mysteries of water. He shares Ofelia Zepeda’s evocation of moisture’s deep ties to people and land ("The Place Wher...
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Episode 34
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28:02
Evie Shockley: Courage to Speak, Courage to Hear
Poet and professor Evie Shockley introduces poems woven together by a subtle thread of committed attention to place and what happens there—the places of language, self, ancestry, and tragedy. She introduces Mónica de la Torre engaging with lang...
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Episode 33
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38:59
JD Pluecker: Always Returning
Undisciplinary writer and translator JD Pluecker curates recordings that circle around themes of return, transformation, history, and the future. Pluecker introduces Joy Harjo finding what remains in the wr...
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Episode 32
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32:50
Juan Felipe Herrera: Humanity, Compassion, Action, Protest
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera shares poems that consider the questions, what exactly is poetry? What does it do? Herrera crafts an expansive answer to these questions through Marvin Bell’s reflection on poetry as philosophy (“Th...
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Episode 31
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1:04:56
Matthew Zapruder: Poems for Passengers
Matthew Zapruder selects poems that employ the powers of song, memory, and imagination as points of reflection and comfort amidst the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He shares Adam Zagajewski conjuring a l...
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Episode 30
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25:38
Khadijah Queen: Keywords
Khadijah Queen homes in on her selections by following three keywords through the archive: disobedience, Detroit, and joy. She introduces Rachel Zucker’s lecture on the confessional mode in poetry (“W...
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Episode 29
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32:00
Sara Borjas: A Particular 'Us'
Sara Borjas introduces poems that focus on the connections between a particular, collective ‘us’—people connected by lineage or language, by place, or by the acts of writing and reading. She shares Layli...
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Episode 28
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23:31
Chet’la Sebree: Liminality
Chet’la Sebree leads us to acknowledge liminal spaces, those places that are not quite one thing or another, moments of transition and not-yet that have become so familiar to us throughout th...
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Episode 27
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17:32
Anthony Cody: Necessary Discomfort
Anthony Cody selects poems that ask hard questions about war, borders, gender, power, US history, and ourselves—questions asked in order to remind us of the discomfort necessary for change on individual an...
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Episode 26
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23:09
Wendy Xu: Why Write
Wendy Xu curates poems that underscore the necessity of attention for the writing of poems, reminding us that to write is to think, to look, and to be present. She introduces James Tate on bending reality...
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Episode 25
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25:02
