Show Notes
In this episode, novelist Lisa Ko reads “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” by Tracy K. Smith. Ko’s first book, The Leavers, was a 2017 National Book Award finalist. Her most recent book, Memory Piece (Riverhead Books, 2024) was described in Electric Literature as “a poignant meditation on late-stage capitalism: what it means to exist in an age of surveillance and government tracking, what it means to create art in an era where identity itself is commodified, and what it means to find purpose.”
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7mpEGcGLhQnJBeHegGXazZ?si=f6_qq7awTrCne2k5PfCM-A
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet born in 1972. “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” was first collected in Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The poem is also included in Such Color: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2021).
Keep up with Lisa Ko at lisa-ko.com.
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Dig the music in this episode? Check out Of Modern Poetry by Andy Stermer – an album of ambient music initially composed for the podcast. All proceeds support the continued production of this show.
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More from Interesting People Reading Poetry
This special episode introduces a new ambient album by Andy Stermer, who composes all of our music. Of Modern Poetry is inspired by a selection of poetic masterpieces from the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, all of which have been featured previously on this show. The seven compositions, arranged chronologically according to the date of each poem’s first publication, offer what we hope you’ll find to be a richly textured sonic meditation on the origins and development of modern poetry.
This IPRP Poetry Playlist features a selection of archival recordings from PennSound, a project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. The PennSound website includes an extensive audio archive with free recordings of hundreds of poets reading their own work.
In this episode, Amy Dickinson reads “Say It” by Roland Flint. Dickinson wrote the beloved daily advice column “Ask Amy,” which appeared in newspapers across the country from 2003 until her retirement in June of 2024. She is also the author of two memoirs and a new Substack newsletter.
In this IPRP Poetry Playlist, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón reads three selections from the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, out now from Milkweed Editions. The collection, edited and introduced by Limón, offers “fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated contemporary writers.” Click here to learn more about the anthology, including upcoming events and how to share your own “You Are Here” nature poem.
In this episode, Roy Foster reads “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats. Foster is Emeritus Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and the author of many books, including his classic, two-volume biography of Yeats, published in 1997 and 2003. In a review of the first volume published in the New York Review of Books, the Irish novelist John Banville wrote: “W.B. Yeats: A Life is a great and important work, a triumph of scholarship, thought, and empathy such as one would hardly have thought possible in this age of disillusion. It is an achievement wholly of a scale with its heroic subject.”