PODCAST · society
Riantly - Poetry Readings
by Cody Stetzel
These are readings of poems with a brief note attached to them. Some of the poems are longer form, some are shorter. Sometimes the note is a personal note and others it is a scholarly or craft discussion. In this way I hope to make all poetry more accessible in what language is capable of even within this world, our world. riantly.substack.com
Episodes
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Reading Slump or Voracious Reader? Come Listen to Poems
Reading Slump? Read Some Poetry Instead. There’s a particular kind of shame that comes with a reading slump especially if you’re someone who identifies as a reader. Having to confess that, well, frankly, I haven’t been reading lately despite occupying my space in a primarily literary world; I’ve...
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Reading Poems About Life, Living, Hope, and Struggle
I came to poetry the way most people come to anything that saves them: sideways, without knowing that’s what was happening. I was young, and I didn’t think in straight lines, and the world kept asking me to. Poetry was the first place that didn’t. It met me in the associative, image-driven,...
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Reading Poems Translated into English - Relaxing
Riantly, or with Laughter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will continue to post my translated poetry index links here: * A new article on how to get started reading translated poetry * Listings for...
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Poem Home: Rest with a Poetry Reading
There was nothing practical I could do. So I read poems. That might sound indulgent. It isn’t meant to be. It’s just the most honest thing I know how to do when I don’t have control. Reading feels like a way to stay present instead of spiraling. It feels like a way to honor a place without...
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Community as Practice - Reading Poems for You
Once a week, I try to take forty-five minutes to simply read poems out loud. That might not sound radical. But for me, it is. It is a refusal of urgency. It is a small act of attention in a culture that trains us to skim, optimize, extract. Poetry has been a source of connection for me for more...
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Listening to Poetry is a Small Anti-Fascist Action
There is a particular kind of calm that comes from deciding, without justification, to read poems out loud. Not to explain them. Not to extract their meaning. Not to turn them into lessons or proofs. Just to read them, one after another, and let the room change. When I read poetry, I am not…
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Reading Poems | Midday Breather
Reading a poem silently is an act of concentration. Hearing a poem read aloud is an act of recognition. Something in the body leans forward when language is given breath. The ear catches what the eye alone often misses: rhythm before meaning, tone before argument, the subtle choreography of…
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Poetry as a Form of Resistance: Xi Chuan's Don't Deprive Me of My Complexity
You can purchase "Bloom," by Xi Chuan tr. by Lucas Klein here. Chuan is a pivotal figure in Chinese poetic and literary community. Outspoken regarding political needs and with both a reverence and disgust for literature, “Bloom” is full with poems that seem to simultaneously mock high-brow…
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Ecopoetics in Action: Ariana Benson's Love Poem in a Black Field
You can purchase "Black Pastoral," by Ariana Benson here. One of those older contemporary books at this point. In that odd three years old period where some will have forgotten about it in the quieting of its hype, and others eagerly await the next from Benson. Having only recently read through…
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Forms and Features of Poetry: Jess Yuan's Craft Talk on Pain
You may purchase "Slow Render," by Jess Yuan here. A book that I think gladly speaks in conversation with other works operating around the metaphysical concept of the photograph like Barthes, Sontag; Yuan’s “Slow Render,” operates on both a scale of the poem as a capture, as well as the capture…
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Greek and Bulgarian Poetry: Iana Boukova's Unwelt
You can purchase Notes of the Phantom Woman by Iana Boukova tr. by John O'Kane & Ekaterina Petrova here. This work was full and rampant with surprising and innovative poetry. I was interrupted in this reading by my cat, Hazelnut, and lost my focus on reading the poem which is why I ended it…
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Poetry Read Aloud: Gwen Nell Westerman's Billboard Warning
You can purchase "Songs Blood Deep," by Gwen Nell Westerman here. I loved Gwen Nell Westerman’s work, and thought the steadfast observational powers on display were the work of a poet truly interested in engaging with what is in front of her. Riantly, or with Laughter is a reader-supported...
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A Poetry of Everyday Life: Rick Barot's Moving the Bones
You can purchase Rick Barot's book "Moving the Bones," here. I love this line from Mikal Wix on Barot’s work: “But Barot’s candid poems from Moving the Bones create an intangible space where words can exalt feelings of longing or loss without losing their power to stabilize us in the…
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The Elements of Poetry: A Lyric Essay-Poem
You can find a copy of Commons by Myung Mi Kim here. Part of the necessity of translated literature, translated poetry, is the decentralization of “English,” as an omnipresence and easily-definable language. “English,” is, for lack of a better term, limp and fungible - defined through its…
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Poetry Reading: "Brute?" and "Strike [air]" by Hala Alyan
You can purchase The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan from Ecco Books here. Alyan’s work is a foray of contemporariness and of navigating. Many of the poems offer more formal explorations of what needs be conveyed — with a series of poems in the form of six columns responding to lines...
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Poem Reading: "the meaning of winter changes" by Serhiy Zhadan
You can purchase How Fire Descends by Serhiy Zhadan tr. by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps here. These poems within How Fire Descends are at once spiritual, pleading, stark, and hopeful. They speak of literature and the state and purpose of poems alongside family alongside survival. Zhadan is a...
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Poem Reading: "11.6.12" by Friederike Mayröcker
You can purchase études by Friederike Mayröcker tr. by Donna Stonecipher here. I love an author who doesn’t care much for genre definitions. Everything I’ve read from Friederike Mayröcker seems to exude exactly this coolness - it doesn’t much matter if it’s a poem, a diary, prosody, or…
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Poem Reading: "Escapade (33)" by Marie-Noëlle Agniau translated by Jesse Hover Amar
If you wish to purchase The Escapades you may find it here. Agniau’s work here is such a treasure of connectivity. The pages tell something of a story together, and yet poem-by-poem I feel something more like the shifting of seasons — the hints toward a change, and then all at once a difference.…
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Poem Reading: "On the Margin" by Mostafa Nissabouri
You may purchase For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert here. Translated by Guy Bennett, Pierre Joris, Addie Leak, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio and published by Otis Books - Seismicity Editions. Mostafa Nissabouri seems to be a mountain of literary culture, uplifting and providing support for his...
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Poem Reading: "2:1" by Asiya Wadud
From the work Crosslight for Youngbird from Nightboat Books Asiya Wadud’s work is at once mystifying and thrilling. I could very well believe performative recitations of her lyric in the forms of borderline surreal mutterings, to the proud proclamatory verse with bravado. Here, I read just one of...
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Poem Reading: "The Capacity for Happiness Despite Visual Evidence is Great" by Nathalie Khankan
An in accompaniment, here is Hilary Plum’s review in the Cleveland Review of Books (I admit, a favorite of mine): Seeking fertility treatment, the self is in a state of profound need and transformative possibility, of desperation and choice, privileged to be subjected to medical regimes…
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Poem Reading: "Autobiography Via Revision" by Marianne Chan
And as an accompaniment, this interview from Barely South Review between Jerome Newsome and the author Marianne Chan: Poetry has a lot of forms. Sonnets. Haikus. Odes. How do you incorporate or use form in your poems? Yeah. So, form for me, is extremely generative. I often begin with form as a…
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Poem Reading: "The Words I Return To" by Magda Isanos
And I loved this accompaniment by critic Leo Zausen on Magda Isanos’ Homecoming: Life for Isanos is less a vessel but a burden, a preordained fallout at the incursion of the species. Isanos’ romanticism sediments a dwindling of the human side of any encounter by foregrounding the negative...
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Poem Reading: "Cryptic News from Darmogandul" by Afrizal Malna
And alongside this wonderful book and poem are these lines from a 2024 interview with author Afrizal Malna from Asymptote Journal: These events gave rise to an obsession, or an agitation: “Can language shake? Can meaning convulse?” It was a new challenge for the practice of writing poetry. … ……
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Poem Reading: "Dithyrams" by Elsa Cross
I think of this interview by translator, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, in Numero Cinco, speaking on Cross’s poetics: What struck me about Elsa during our conversation in London was that her poetry reflected her personality: gentle, contemplative, self-assured. It seemed that the mysteries and...
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Poem Reading: "Red Rose and a Beggar" by H.D.
In my experience and relation with H.D. - one either encounters her work in an academic setting, or rarely at all. What a shame! Perhaps in another time, one that I was less coherent for, H.D. was subject of more public and social discussion, attention. But as it stands, I do wish for you to…
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Poem Reading: "Late Gathering" by Chika Sagawa
I remember the experience of reading this book. It was Springtime in Seattle, maybe three years ago. I would read it exclusively on walks outside, roaming around the residential streets and lavishing in the late afternoon sunlight. I think it added to the experience of poems like what I’ve read...
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Poem Reading: "The Engine of Eternity that Surrounds Me," by Tseveendorjin Oidov
Working as a literary critic, oftentimes I find myself overly heady about trying to understand the poetics of something. The scholarly connections or the poetic lineage, naming the aesthetic within some canonical tradition or defining the metrical forms to understand sonic quality. In reality,...
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Poem Reading: "That year, that icy blackness" by Lyn Lifshin
Listen to my ice-thin argument that shipwrecking is a metaphor intrinsic to the Northeast United States. Or perhaps an aesthetic? Lyn Lifshin has so many freaking poems published that if you enjoy this poem, you’d be a fool not to go and try to find as many as you can. She’s an incredible talent,...
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Poem Reading: "Beetle" by Julia Fiedorczuk
Something I admire greatly about the field of ecopoetry is that it contains such climactic depth to it. I think of far-ranging examples like Juliana Spahr’s oeuvre, Camille Dungy, or even considering Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem — these examples aren’t too exclude, either. I know there’s a tremendous...
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"Notes for a Novel Never Written," by Bhanu Kapil
Bhanu Kapil is a hugely important author working today. Her writing is inventive and invokes a now to often critical historic moments of violence or trauma. This poem is one of many from Kapil that are startling in the examination provided. The cross-temporal boundary examination of historical...
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"Mansur" by Adeeba Shahid Talukder
There are many unfair and unjust things about COVID that have settled into unfortunate shadows on the world. One of which are all of the excellent authors whose works perhaps did not get as much attention or momentum behind them as I feel they ought have for the quality of their poetry. Adeeba...
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Krystyna Dąbrowska's Sleepless Poem tr. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Krystyna Dąbrowska's Tideline is a magnificent collection published recently by Zephyr Press. What I love about these poems is Dąbrowska and translators Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Mira Rosenthal, and Karen Kovacik attention to what must be uttered between words. The spaces offered in these poems tease...
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María Baranda - To Hell
This reading and discussion of Baranda’s poem “To Hell,” also offers my thoughts around longer poems, my attempts at deciphering the ways in which to engage a longer poem, and what type of poem this is. Thanks for reading Riantly, or with Laughter! This post is public so feel free to share it....
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20 Years of My Life by Mirta Rosenberg
There is, simply, no end to darling translations of exceptional poetry. It is, in fact, much more difficult to select a single poem for any of these works to read. Sometimes it’s a random selection, sometimes the gut leads me to a particular page, and sometimes I cheat by having a favorite poem...
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Baalbeck, I. by Etel Adnan, from Time
Etel Adnan is such a vital force of my literary and moral education. So fierce and creative, unflinching and funny at times, she detailed life in all of its colors. This poem is part of a longer series titled ‘Baalbeck’ out of her book Time translated by Sarah Riggs and published by Nightboat...
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XXXII by Hilda Hilst from Of Death, Minimal Odes. tr. Laura Cesarco Eglin
Unfortunately passing away in 2004, Hilst was a force of Brazilian literature. This book is a masterpiece, and I think one that any person interested in life, living, death, and dying, should consider reading once or maybe five times. If you are interested in the work, please know you can buy it...
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The wound of being by Rebecca Seiferle
You can find Seiferle’s work here through one of her publishers or ordered through your local bookstore. Thank you for reading Riantly, or with Laughter. This post is public so feel free to share it. I would recommend, if you were to start reading her, to either start with this work or with...
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If anyone is to ask, by Genevieve Kaplan
The stunning work of “Aviary,” is that the poems resist a conclusive logic in much the same way as you would imagine birds do. After all, if birds aren’t real then how can they follow reality? This poem I think toes the line between having a concrete line it wants the reader to acknowledge, to...
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Poetry Reading: Okay at the balcony, Lee Sumyeong tr. Colin Leemarshall
“I face toward the unknown and adamantly reel.” Was such a provocative line that I found myself thinking of it over and over days after reading it. Wanted to share this poem with you, my love. Get full access to Riantly, or with Laughter at riantly.substack.com/subscribe
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
These are readings of poems with a brief note attached to them. Some of the poems are longer form, some are shorter. Sometimes the note is a personal note and others it is a scholarly or craft discussion. In this way I hope to make all poetry more accessible in what language is capable of even within this world, our world.
riantly.substack.com
HOSTED BY
Cody Stetzel
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Riantly - Poetry Readings have?
Riantly - Poetry Readings currently has 40 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Riantly - Poetry Readings about?
These are readings of poems with a brief note attached to them. Some of the poems are longer form, some are shorter. Sometimes the note is a personal note and others it is a scholarly or craft discussion. In this way I hope to make all poetry more accessible in what language is capable of even...
How often does Riantly - Poetry Readings release new episodes?
Riantly - Poetry Readings has 40 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Riantly - Poetry Readings?
You can listen to Riantly - Poetry Readings on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Riantly - Poetry Readings?
Riantly - Poetry Readings is created and hosted by Cody Stetzel.
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