Show Notes
In this episode, Alissa Rubin reads an excerpt from the ancient Greek epic The Iliad. Rubin is a Senior International Correspondent for The New York Times. She worked previously as the Bureau Chief in Baghdad, Paris, and Kabul. In 2016, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for “thoroughly reported and movingly written accounts giving voice to Afghan women who were forced to endure unspeakable cruelties.”
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7obE0bUZiGyAzOr7e6iI5x
The passage that Rubin selected is from the very last book of The Iliad, and portrays an encounter between the Trojan King Priam and the Greek warrior Achilles. If you’re unfamiliar with the story, all you really need to know — for our purposes — is that Priam’s son killed Achilles’ best friend in combat, and Achilles then killed Priam’s son in retribution. At the point where we meet them, Achilles has been dragging the body of his slain enemy behind his chariot for twelve days, and Priam has come in person to his enemy’s encampment to plead for the return of his son’s body.
The Iliad by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, is published by Penguin Random House.
Alissa Rubin’s reporting – including her recent must-read coverage on climate change in the Middle East – is available to subscribers of The New York Times.
We feature one short listener poem at the end of every episode. To submit, call the Haiku Hotline at 612-440-0643 and read your poem after the beep. For the occasional prompt, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
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.
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.”
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.