Description

Words That Burn is a poetry podcast about how poems actually work.

Each episode takes a single poem and reads it closely, usually in about 20 minutes. That means the lines themselves first: the sound, the shape on the page, the images, the things left out. Then the life behind the poem, the historical moment it came from, and the technical choices that give the work its charge.

The aim is never to settle a poem's meaning but to show what it is doing, clearly enough that you can go back to the page and see it for yourself.

Poets covered include:

Audre Lorde, Raymond Carver, Mary Ruefle, Kaveh Akbar, Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Annemarie Ní Churreáin, alongside contemporary Irish collections as they appear.

Host Ben Collopy also talks to poets about their new books and their craft, including Mark Ward on Real Estate and Shannon Kuta Kelly. How a collection takes shape, what gets cut, and the decisions that never show up in the finished poem.

No homework required. You do not need to have read the poet, know the form, or have liked poetry at school. Everything a poem assumes you know, the episode explains. The interpretation is one reader's, offered up for argument rather than settled.

Full scripts with citations at wordsthatburn.substack.com.

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