Show Notes
In this episode, Alec Soth reads “Of Modern Poetry” by Wallace Stevens. Soth is a photographer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published over twenty-five books and has been called a “living legend” and “one of the most important photographers working today” by the Washington Post.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6U9XgyQuamdVdEDw1P9ZNm
Soth’s recent photo book, I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating, is a stunning collection of portraits and interiors from around the world. Soth has described the collection as an attempt to “strip the [photographic] medium down to it’s primary elements.” The collection takes its title from an early poem by the American modernist Wallace Stevens, whose meditations on poetry and aesthetics have helped shape Soth’s understanding of his own work.
“Of Modern Poetry” by Wallace Stevens appears in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, published by Vintage.
Keep up with Alec Soth on Instagram and at alecsoth.com. His new collaborative book with C. Fausto Cabrera is available here for preorder.
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.
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