Poetry Centered

Prageeta Sharma: Clairvoyant Presence & Future

• University of Arizona Poetry Center • Episode 59

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Prageeta Sharma selects recordings by poets who shaped her as a writer, and who have also shaped the landscape of contemporary American poetry by blending a sense of intimacy with direct address. She shares Ai inhabiting a persona that mixes sass and ancient knowledge (“Twenty-Year Marriage”), Michael S. Harper offering a testament spoken to rather than about a historical figure (“Dear John, Dear Coltrane”), and C.D. Wright creating doubleness in a love poem that melds closeness and estrangement ("Floating Trees"). Sharma closes with “A One Won,” a poem from her most recent collection.

Find the full recordings of Ai, Harper, and Wright reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Ai (September 13, 1972)
Michael S. Harper (April 4, 1973)
C.D. Wright (September 14, 2000)

Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.

Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

You're listening to Poetry Centered, where we linger in the space between a poem being spoken and a poem being heard. Poetry Centered comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center. And the poets' voices you'll hear come from Voca, our collection of poetry readings given at the center between 1963 and today. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, here to welcome you. And I'm also here to welcome Aria Pahari, the other half of the Poetry Center team, who will introduce us to today's guest host.

ARIA PAHARI:

Prageeta Sharma is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Onement Won, a collection textured with firm statements such as, "This is about coming back to oneself," and gaping questions such as, "Who sees me in kindness? Who do I see back in kindness?" What I admire about Prageeta's poems is how they view the self through the lens of relation, from grieving the loss of loved ones, to meditations upon friendship, and even invocations of Hindu philosophy and queer and literary theory. Prageeta's lines are those of a capacious thinker and feeler. And her Voca selections spotlight poets that not only shaped her, but also the landscape of contemporary American poetry. Please enjoy this episode of recordings by Ai, Michael S. Harper, and C.D. Wright chosen by Prageeta Sharma.[MUSIC PLAYING]

PRAGEETA SHARMA:

I am Prageeta Sharma speaking to you from Claremont, California on January 25, 2026. It is a profound joy to return again and again to the Poetry Center Archive to spend time listening to influential poets who shaped how I think about poems, as well as those who actively mentored me. I chose the poet Ai, along with my mentors, C.D. Wright and Michael S. Harper, whom I studied with at Brown University where I completed an MFA in poetry in 1995. All three poets are no longer with us, yet their voices remain with me, held in deep affection. I chose these three in order to reflect on the ways their aesthetics and forms marked landmark interventions in contemporary poetry and poetics from the 1970s through the early aughts. Each was visionary in distinct ways, through the construction of compelling and irreproducible personae, through attentiveness to dialect, intimacy, and a language that pulls interior spaces into luster and earn truth, and through the documentation of culture and Black life, composing history as one is living it. I return to their work to study how their respective ferocities, rhythms, and cadences sustained me as I became a poet, and how they taught me the vibrancy of language as a way of living toward a more clairvoyant presence and future. The first reading I'd like to share is the poet Ai reading,"Twenty-year Marriage," recorded on September 13, 1972. It was a treat to hear Ai's Twenty-year marriage in her own voice. Ai, Florence Anthony, was, I learned, the youngest visiting poet recorded at the time. Listening, I attended to how the poem sharpens in performance, how words edged toward violence and restraint in ways that complicate the text as it appears on the page. I remember first encountering this poem in high school, likely in The Norton Anthology of Poetry or a similar collection. And the speed and cadence of her delivery returned me to that initial discovery. What surprises me now, however, is how youthful her voice sounds, brisk, curiously swift, faster than I expected, and how this velocity denies the listener the comfort of lingering sentiment. The poem's speaker narrates marital strength as a partnership shaped by endurance, the two aging alongside one another, even as physical desire continues to smolder in vivid scenes of their lovemaking. 20 years are marked by deep attachment and sustained attraction. As the speaker waits for her spouse, she urges, Hurry. I've got nothing on under my skirt tonight. That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows and the seat, one fake leather thigh, pressed close to mine is cold. The truck functions as a surrogate body of the speaker and of the marriage itself, bearing the intimate, yet brutal wear and tear of love over time. Ai's pacing racing underscores how normalized this rough, beckoning intensity has become. Yet the poem is animated by a sense of reciprocity, a charged closeness that both entices and sharpens its force. The voice does not pause to mourn. It reports with a kind of sass. That sass shifts the poem away from confession and toward invitation, as though the speaker can solicit affection and physical closeness without wasting time exploring the damage. This produces an uncanny sense of age in Ai's work. Although she sounds young in 1972, the poem speaks with what feels like an old soul already fluent in the emotional economies of power, gender, and silence. The marriage depicted is not merely personal but emblematic. And Ai's fierce control of tone, unsentimental, exacting, unsparing, and still sly, prevents endurance from being mistaken for virtue. Hearing her read, it becomes clear that the poem's authority derives not from distance or retrospection, but from proximity. A speaker so fully versed in her intimacies, affections, and prowess that she can construct the discourse without ornament. That tension between the youthful voice and the ancient knowledge it carries is what leaves the listener in awe, clarifying how Ai's early work already possessed such scrupulous ferocity. These days, I remind my students that this is why we study poems like these, for their strength and their stamina. Here is Ai reading"Twenty-year Marriage."

[UPBEAT MUSIC] AI:

This is called"Twenty-year Marriage." You keep me waiting in a truck with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch, while you piss against the South side of a tree. Hurry. I've got nothing on under my skirt tonight. That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows and the seat, one fake leather thigh, pressed close to mine is cold. I'm the same size, shape, make as 20 years ago, but get inside me, start the engine; you'll have the strength, the will to move. I'll pull, you push, we'll tear each other in half. Come on, baby, lay me down on my back. Pretend you don't owe me a thing and maybe we'll roll out of here, leaving the past stacked up behind us; old newspapers nobody's ever got to read again.[UPBEAT MUSIC]

PRAGEETA SHARMA:

The second recording I'd like to share is the poet Michael S. Harper reading, "Dear John, Dear Coltrane," on April 4, 1973. I studied with the late Michael S. Harper at Brown. And returning to the Archive brought me back into the richness of his storytelling. Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" is a seminal poem, one that shaped a decade of thinking about poetry in its time. The Black Arts Movement, blues, and jazz poetics, and the interwoven literary kinships, Harper cultivated with figures, such as Ralph Ellison and Robert Hayden. From Harper's own stories and from what I learned during my brief time as his research assistant, I came to understand how deeply he grasped the intersectional tradition of storytelling to which he belonged. A tradition shaped by artmaking inheritance and collective legacy. The poem unfolds as both elegy and invocation, a mode that defines much of Harper's work, a historical testament spoken to rather than about its subject. That direct address to saxophonist and bandleader John Coltrane is the source of the poem's intimacy and power. Reading the poem while missing Michael Harper's stories, his way of speaking about music as lived history, sharpens the sense that the poem itself is a conversation, not a tribute at a distance, but an act of communion. Coltrane is summoned through breath, pulse, and rhythm. His presence carried by the poem's incantatory repetitions of the A Love Supreme refrain. The phrase, the inflated heart gestures beyond grief, or admiration toward a heart enlarged by sound, devotion, and the physical and spiritual demands of the music itself. Harper's repetition of a love supreme echoing Coltrane's own, functions like a jazz refrain, returning altered, deepened, and insistent. Each invocation presses the poem closer to the body, where music is felt before it is understood. That is why the address feels so personal. Harper writes as someone who has listened hard enough to be changed. The poem collapses the distance between poet and musician, between word and sound, drawing the reader into the same intimacy. Every time I read the poem, I see Harper's face. In this convergence, seeing Coltrane through Harper and Harper through the poem, the act of reading becomes an act of remembrance. The poem holds not only Coltrane's legacy, but Harper's presence as well, reminding us that art is a lineage of faces, voices, and love passed hand-to-hand, breath-to-breath. Here's Michael S. Harper reading"Dear John, Dear Coltrane."[UPBEAT MUSIC]

MICHAEL S. HARPER:

But right now I better read this poem on Coltrane. Because I wouldn't want to read it later. Most of you know who John Coltrane is, was, is. He's a great man. He was a friend of mine. I wrote the poem before he died and was very frightened by it. And I had been listening to him play all night, 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning at the Half Note in New York City. Well, Trane died in 1967 in July. And I was out of the country. I was in Mexico. When I came back from Mexico, I landed in San Antonio. And he had to get off the plane because he had to clear customs. And I walked through this door in about 120-degree heat carrying my boy. And I saw a picture of Lyndon Johnson, and a Confederate flag, and a flag of Texas. And I said, I'm home.[LAUGHTER] And the plane, which was a brand of airline plane with all those technicolor suits that girls put on, went to Dallas, I got off the plane again because it was too hot to stay in it. And I walked around in the airport. And I saw these guys with shotguns on their shoulders, about eight of them. And I got in the plane again. Next stop, Kansas City. Stopped in Kansas City and when this plane was landing, one of the tires blew. Bang! The guy came on the intercom and said, no problem, we'll have it fixed a few minutes. We waited a while. We got in the plane, went to Minneapolis, which was my destination. I got out of the plane, having had this arduous trip, there was a great big poster of Wallace.[LAUGHTER] And I said to myself, man, I just couldn't do it any better if I tried.[LAUGHTER] And I said, I'm home.[LAUGHTER] And I was deeply moved when I was in Mexico because I went to the anthropological museum on a Sunday. And many of the tourists who were there warned me about bringing my son to this place where all the peasants were, in this park is. It was What they call, I think, 1 pose day, or maybe it was 2 peso day. And of course, I felt very comfortable. Women came up and meet a little boy, and played with him, and talked to him. And I thought it was very natural. And I was also struck in looking at these paintings as many of the things which were represented on the wall looked very much like some of my ancestors. So I felt very much at home. Then I came back to where I was born and didn't feel at home at all. Well, Coltrane was a great man. And he gave a great deal of his life. If you've heard his music, you know. He played an album called A Love Supreme. And this poem recalls Coltrane."Dear John, Dear Coltrane." a love supreme, a love supreme a love supreme, a love supreme a love supreme, a love supreme a love supreme, a love supreme Sex fingers toes In the marketplace Near your father's church In Hamlet, North Carolina, Witness to this love In this calm fallow Of these minds, There is no substitute for pain, genitals gone or going, Seed burned out, you tuck the roots in the earth, turn back, and move by river through the swamps, singing, a love supreme, a love supreme; what does it all mean? Loss, so great each black woman expects your failure in mute change, the seed gone. You plod up into the electric city, your song now crystal and the blues. You pick up the horn with some will and blow into the freezing night, a love supreme, a love supreme, Dawn comes and you cook up the thick sin 'tween impotence and death, fuel the tenor sax cannibal heart, genitals, and sweat that makes you clean, a love supreme, a love supreme, Why you so black?'Cause I am why you so funky?'Cause I am why you so black?'Cause I am why you so sweet?'Cause I am why you so black?'Cause I am a love supreme, a love supreme, So sick you couldn't play Naima, so flat we ached for song you'd concealed with your own blood, your diseased liver gave out its purity, the inflated heart pumps out, the tenor kiss, tenor love, A love supreme, a love supreme, A love supreme, a love supreme[UPBEAT MUSIC]

PRAGEETA SHARMA:

The third recording I'd like to share is the poet C.D. Wright reading "Floating Trees," recorded on September 14, 2000. C.D. Wright's reading of "Floating Trees" offers a love poem that resists beginning in the first-person singular. No I, but rather objects that speak their intimacies. The bed and its charged presence. The lights, fingers, with personification doing the gesturing that grounds the poem in a physical site before any movement towards human coupling occurs. Yet even here, intimacy is held at a remove. The bed is not immediately eroticized. It is an object that bears witness. This distance persists as Wright animates the inanimate. Hangers clinging to a coat, a phrase that grants the objects a quiet, almost desperate agency. In her voice, these details do not merely decorate the scene, they register feeling indirectly, as though emotion has displaced itself onto the room. When she says,"I didn't mean to wake you angel brains," the address is startingly private, a term of endearment that feels improvised and deeply personal. Yet it does not collapse the distance between speaker and beloved. Instead, it heightens it. Wright's private language nears us, drawing the listener close even as the poem maintains an observational stance. Intimate but never confessional in the conventional sense. Her reading holds the tension between closeness and estrangement, allowing the listener to feel both inside the moment and slightly outside it, watching. This doubleness is what makes the poem feel so alive. We are permitted proximity without possession. It is a gift to be inside a poem like "Floating Trees," where attention itself becomes the deepest form of intimacy. With all of C.D.'s poems, I cannot help but be immersed in how language gives itself over to its subject. As her student, I will always study her poems for what they hold up to float among the trees and to our hearts in reverie. Hers was the truest angel brain there ever was. Here's C. D. Wright Reading "Floating Trees."[UPBEAT MUSIC] C.D. WRIGHT I thought I'd read the first poem in Tremble. It's called "Floating Trees." a bed is left open to a mirror a mirror gazes long and hard at a bed light fingers the house with its own acoustics one of them writes this down one has paper bed of swollen creeks and theories and coils bed of eyes and leaky pens much of the night the air touches arms arms extend themselves to air their torsos turning toward a roll of sound, thunder night of coon scat and vandalized headstones night of deep kisses and catamenia his face by this light, saurian hers, ash like the tissue of a hornets' nest one scans the aisle of furs the faint blue line of them one looks out, sans serif"Didn't I hear you tell them you were born on a train" what begins with a sough and ends with a groan groan in which the tongue's true color is revealed the comb's sough and the denim's undeniable rub the chair's stripped back and muddied rung color of stone soup and garden gloves color of meal and treacle and sphagnum hangers clinging to their coat a soft white bulb to its string the footprints inside us iterate the footprints outside the scratched words returned to their sleeves the dresses of monday through friday swallow the long hips of weekends a face is studied like a key for the mystery of what it once opened"I didn't mean to wake you angel brains" the ink of eyes and veins and phonemes the ink completes the feeling a mirror silently facing a door door with no lock no lock the room he brings into you the room befalls you like the fir trees he trues her she nears him like the firs if one vanishes one stays if one stays the other will or will not vanish otherwise my beautiful green fly otherwise not a leaf stirs[UPBEAT MUSIC] This is Prageeta Sharma. I am reading from my new collection Onement Won. This poem is titled "A One Won." In it I found that the political discourse would love its ethical moon A wonderment. A one sum. Bewitching affinities built upon antinomies. Abstract, an expression, a wool cap of ornament for the sake of weather. Loving him helpless anew helped. Loving her helplessly anew helped. Leaving it all behind helplessly helped. Building around the moribund became a kind of blessing. I left constituents around the number one, and I won, and I felt simple or glad, Or finally, incandescent, and comfortably large in my honesty, a kind of hanging of the rituals, the clothes, the sense of living in them upright. I felt trouble pinging from my thumb muscles but I ignored the throb. I looked out and out into a dense and driven fog and said goodbye to its flavor. Goodbye to more than 10 years of saying Will you please love me? I wanted to birth a kind of abstract expressionism of the merely objective and the racialized lover of things Onement or ornament or I won an ornament or I loved an ornament And the onement of myself resolved. I resolved and thus I became into myself a one That I thought would never be allowed. I moved outside of the fog and into a place that signified art.[UPBEAT MUSIC]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

You've been listening to Prageeta Sharma. And this is Poetry Centered. Prageeta, I so enjoyed following the thread of intimacy and direct address that you pull out of these poems. Thank you so much. Listeners, thank you for being here with us, as always. We hope you've been enjoying this new set of episodes. And we also hope the new approach to our host introductions has been a good change. This wraps up our current set of episodes. We'll be back again in the summer with new guest hosts and new readings from Voca to enjoy. Until then, check out our back catalog of episodes, and you guessed it, go explore Voca. You can listen to more than a thousand hours of recorded poetry by visiting voca.arizona.edu. Thank you for listening. And we'll see you next time.

ARIA PAHARI:

Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world-class library of more than 135,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center Library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audiovisual archive, online at voca.arizona.edu.