Abram: Hello, I’m Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I’m Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: We are joining you here, today, very briefly, to share a few exciting announcements. Now, as our listeners may know, we haven’t been releasing as many episodes as usual. But we have been quite busy, and we’re taking some time to work on a number of different things related to the podcast and to do a major relaunch of Poetry for All in the fall. Abram: And that relaunch is going to be made possible by a few exciting things. So first, is that we won a grant. We want a public scholar grant from the program in Public Scholarship from Washington University in St. Louis. And that’s gonna help us bring you, just, more episodes and also expand what we can do with Poetry for All starting this fall. Joanne: The second thing is that we will soon be launching a Substack column to go with Poetry for All. So, what is Substack? You might be– some people know what it is. Some people don’t. Do you wanna describe what it is, Abram? Abram: Yeah, sure! Substack is an awesome platform where you can write columns, and you can post content, and it all comes into your email. So for those, like my dear father, who don’t know how a podcast works, they can still open their email and get access to any of our recordings, plus, other writings that we wanna do about poetry, and we’ll have guest contributors and all sorts of things in that exciting new platform. So that’s going to be at poetryforall.substack.com. Joanne: Yes, that's gonna be really nice. I remember in the early years of doing this with you, I kept trying to make a newsletter on Canva. And I would spend like a half-hour moving circles and triangles around trying to fit the text in the right places. And every time I tried to make the newsletter, it’d look worse than the last time. And then I just gave up. So I have a feeling Substack will alleviate all of that tech misery for me. And it will get us to communicate with our listeners in a whole new way. So, I’m pretty excited about that. Abram: Yeah, and one thing it’s gonna allow us to do, so, one thing that’s been happening behind the scenes is that we are transcribing all of the episodes. And so, we’re gonna be able to release those on the Substack, but also, we’ll put all of those on our website. So, for anyone who wants access to the written word, behind the conversation, those are all being transcribed right now. Joanne: Yes, and, I want to give credit where credit is due. I’m not the one doing all of that. It’s actually undergraduates at Illinois Wesleyan University, they are doing the lion's share of that work, and they’re doing a beautiful job. They’re accurate, they’re thorough, and attentive, and I’m grateful to them for making the podcast accessible to everyone. Abram: That’s awesome. And that’s not the only place where the transcriptions are going appear. So Joanne, do you want to share the other exciting news? Joanne: Yes! I want to acknowledge and give thanks to Steve Halle, who is the editor of Spoon River Poetry Review. And in the upcoming issue, which will appear at the end of this summer, you will see in that issue of Spoon River Poetry Review, that we now have a Poetry for All feature, in which, we basically have a modified transcript of one episode. And so the episode that we’ve chosen for this inaugural issue, this first feature, is going to be the conversation that we had with an amazing poem, “Elegy for My Mother’s Mind” by Lauren Van Prooyen. It was one of our most popular episodes, and so we were very glad to be able to share that. And as I say, if you buy or subscribe to Spoon River Poetry Review, we hope you’ll take a look at that. Abram: Meanwhile this summer, we’re busy recording new episodes. And this fall, we’ll be launching bi-weekly, one episode every two weeks, to bring you more poetry of all kinds. Joanne: Do you think we can do it Abram? Abram: We can do it! I know we can do it! Joanne: We can and we must! And actually, we are going to be releasing a new episode, sometime in the next few days, on the incredible poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. So stay tuned for that. And in the coming year, we will feature a few live performances of the podcast as well, with some really terrific poets. We had a wonderful time doing that last January with Marilyn Nelson, and we have a couple of other public events that we’ll be recording and sharing with you all very soon. Abram: And the last news is that my new book on poetry, “Word Made Fresh,” just released, this past week! And if you wanna join me for a book launch of that, which will be happening on Zoom, you can join me on July 9 at 4 PM Eastern. And here’s where you go to register, it’s totally free: You go to bit.ly/image-vanengen. So that’s bit.ly/image-vanengen. We’ll put that address on our website as well, and you can register there and join me for a conversation about poetry. Joanne: That’s wonderful. Can you just remind our listeners what this book is all about? Abram: Yes! So this is an introduction to poetry for a general audience. Our podcast focuses on poems of all sorts for every kind of listener, and my book is specifically about faith and poetry. So it talks about my own religious past, and the way that poetry helps shape my own spiritual life today. But it’s really meant as a kind of introduction to poetry with tools and tips for reading it, and a way for all readers to experience this incredible art form. So it’s for those who are well-versed in poetry, and for those who haven’t intentionally read a poem in many years. Joanne: Would you consider reading a short excerpt from the book so that people can get a little teaser of what to look forward to when they purchase it? Abram: I would be delighted. So, this is the opening of chapter 4, which is called “Think of Poetry Like Friendship.” Joanne: Hm, what a great title. I’m serious! I’ve never had someone say that to me before. I can’t wait to hear this. Okay, go ahead. Abram: In this chapter, I wanna deepen what I’ve discussed by giving an image to encapsulate it. Poetry, I want to suggest, can be usefully compared to friendship. This image is not unique to me. Carter Revard, for example, hoped to make poems that befriend readers, explaining “As humans, we need all the friends we can find, being social creatures in a world of strangers. And sometimes, the only place to find them is a solitary room with a book or two. Not every friendship comes alive at first sight, but over time, the things friends say and mean become clearer, are understood better. And if any of these poems reach friends, I hope that is how things will go for each reader and his or her significant other.” The idea has shaped many readers and writers. In fact, a whole podcast has developed that treats poetry like friendship. According to Alice Florence Orr, “The poetry exchange invites poets, actors, and many others to exchange and discuss their favorite poems, the ones they consider dear friends. In each episode, the poem becomes the soil in which the conversation grows.” We talk about the poems with which we live, and living with poems can function, sometimes, like friendship. Let me explain with a little help from CS Lewis. In “The Four Loves,” Lewis writes this: “The typical expression of opening friendship would be something like ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’” That seems to be the response that also generates a real entrance into poetry: A surprising sense of shared curiosities and concerns. Poems find readers, and readers are startled to discover their private longings, loves, and thoughts experienced and expressed by another. “A central question of friendship,” as Lewis explains it, “seems like a central question of poetry. Do you see the same truth?” Moreover, while our lives would be much poorer without friendship, friendship is not strictly required for survival. “Friendship is unnecessary,” Lewis writes, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself, for God did not need to create. It has no survival of value, rather, it is one of those things which give value to survival.” So too, we don’t exactly need poetry, but for many people, life is made much poorer without it. If we think of approaching a poem like we might approach a friend, it changes the way we read it. We will pass over many people and many poems until we find something we share, and very often, that shared ground will nourish some form of pleasure or delight, but a good friend, in the end, always brings more than we bargain for. The more we spend time together, and the more we converse, the more layers our conversation reveals. We make discoveries of one another. Sometimes, we fall out of friendship, but many times the initial encounter deepens and enriches. Still, over time, what began in pleasure might lead to challenge, and even, perhaps, a confrontation. So, to a poem and poetry more generally, can shift on you, it can become something new, even when you thought you knew it best. According to Robert Frost, and many other great poets, that process describes not just the reading of poems, but the writing of them as well. Poets explore as they write. They move from an initial pleasure to new insights and challenges and they reproduce that experience for readers. In a short essay first published in 1939, Frost explains that a good poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” For that reason, he makes the comparison between poetry and the dynamism of love. Relationships grow, and surprise us, and bring us into new perspectives, and insights, and wisdom. What started with pleasure can move toward understanding. Or, as Frost describes, “It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life.” Many poets would agree, and most describe some version of this process in their own writing. As the poet Carl Phillips explains, “I write into a space of unknowing in order to surprise myself, both by what I encountered, and what I do with that encounter, how I think about it, and around it.” As writers surprise themselves into new knowledge by their own poems, so readers also can move from pleasure to wisdom through the art of astonishment. It is a movement, I would argue, not unlike friendship, where the encounter that drew us becomes enriched by dynamic surprise. And then in the chapter I talk about a few poems that have been dear friends of mine for a very long time. Joanne: Wow, I love that excerpt! Thank you so much for reading it! Abram: Absolutely! Joanne: What a warm and inviting way to think about poetry! I haven’t heard it talked about in quite that way before! Abram: Well, thank you, and thanks for listening. And if you wanna explore this book, you can find *Word Made Fresh* wherever you buy books! Joanne: Well, and I understand that there’s another deal, too, that the readers should know about… Abram: Yes, indeed. So, I don’t know if readers know about the amazing magazine called “Image,” which is a faith and arts magazine, but they’ve partnered with this book as well. So if you buy this book, you can get a free subscription to “Image,” which is this incredible journal, and they do a lot of great interviews with poets, including some of the poets who’ve been on our podcast like Carl Phillips, and Marilyn Nelson, and Christian Wiman, and many others. Joanne: That’s wonderful. So please, check out Abram’s new book, *Word Made Fresh.* Get your copy today. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore, wherever you get your books. And don’t just buy one, buy like, you know, buy twelve for your whole reading group. I mean, why wouldn’t you? You’ll be the hero of the day! We’ll be back soon with special guest, Stephanie Kirk, talking about the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Abram: Thanks everyone.