Ode & Psyche Podcast

An incredible and in-depth conversation with Classical scholar, Stephanie McCarter about Ovid, Horace, greco Roman poetry, the tradition of translation, retelling of myth, and the movements of poetry across the ages. Ovid’s Metamorphoses continues to speak to our fundamental issues, but how, and why? What can this new translation tell us about not only Ovid’s […]

Talking today about the work of creating a book from our private work on the self, reckoning with the most unbearable past; as it overlaps and interacts with the art in our lives, which in turn connects to the history of our relationship with art and others: Ed Steck, who spent much of his childhood […]

What is the private space of a diary, what is the public space of a poem, and what does the psyche do in each? What is confession and what is memory in the poem, if it plays with the mechanism, or tone of Diary? How to explore and play the the personal expectations of those […]

Dorothea Lasky and I discuss her newest collection of poetry The Shining, the deceptive nature of the “I” in poetry; the undiscovered language that haunts our very psyche–and of course a lot about Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining. Mactaggart Jewelry: use the code Psyche20 for 20% off! Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris Jung’s The […]

Talking with the incredible poet and artist, Mathias Svalina, about language and space of dreams, as it mirrors and informs the poem. Working consistently within the epistolary form, and the “telling” of dream form, Svalina continues the work of looking and seeing the world through the lens of the surreal, pushing against the boundaries of […]

In Paul Hlava Ceballos’s Banana [] is a stunning debut full length collection that explored the crushing reality of the violence of “the extractive relationship the United States has with the Americas and its people through poetic portraits of migrants, family, and memory.” The title poem is part poetry and part reportage that traces the […]

Today we’re starting a new randomly occurring series on the podcast where we talk about–on top of whatever else–dreams. We start today with the poet and translator Ana Božičević, whose new book New Life came out this year from Wave Books. Ana Božičević is a poet, translator, teacher, and occasional singer. Ana grew up in […]

SOPHIE KLAHR IS THE AUTHOR OF TWO OPEN DOORS IN A FIELD (BACKWATERS PRESS), MEET ME HERE AT DAWN (YESYES BOOKS) AND THERE IS ONLY ONE GHOST IN THE WORLD (FICTION COLLECTIVE 2), WINNER OF THE RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION CONTEST, WHICH WAS CO-AUTHORED WITH COREY ZELLER. HER POEMS APPEAR IN THE NEW YORKER, AMERICAN […]

Today I’m talking with my friend and collaborator, Candace Jensen about the embodied and disembodies; poetry and inspiration; the soma and psyche; dyadic knowing and hidden; and the multifarious states of consciousness– this is what inspired us to host a week long in-person retreat this summer called The Unconscious Speaks and we wanted to include […]

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, a Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award Finalist. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, and Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Stegner […]

Today I’m talking about the various forms of nonfiction that poet, essayist and novelist Hilary Plum has found herself interacting with in her newest book Hole Studies. From listening to music, to obsessively reading journalism, podcasts, or editing and examining the conventional forms of academic publishing–Plum’s inquisitive mind investigates the structures and mechanisms of forms […]

What does it mean to make a narrative out of our thoughts and feelings. And really too, how do the people in our lives our relationships factor into our reality. When we write an ode to a lover, are we watching them in love with another person? Are we Keats watching the lovers in the […]

We’re talking today about some of the origins of the themes of this podcast, my personal interest in combining poetry and the psychoanalytical, which are of course two instances of  exploring psyche through language and the relational, searching the self through lyrical uncertainty and narrative. It’s almost frustrating to listen back to the conversation because […]

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (They/Them) is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based Poet, Writer and Translator. They were shortlisted for the 2021 Austin Clarke poetry prize and 2022’s Arc Poem of the year award and they are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Prize. They are the author of four poetry chapbooks and three translated poetry […]

Talking the poet Elisa Gabbert about her amazing new book Normal Distance. A collection of funny and thought-provoking poems inspired by surprising facts that will appeal to poetry lovers and poetry haters alike, from the author of the essay collection The Unreality of Memory, “a work of sheer brilliance, beauty, and bravery” (Andrew Sean Greer) Known […]

Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier) is the author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022). Other titles include In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017), You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2014), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005), Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001).  She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, […]

Talking with the poet and artist, Sommer Browning about her new book GOOD ACTORS, from Birds LLC. Sommer Browning is an author, curator, and artist living in Denver. Her books include two collections of poetry Backup Singers and Either Way I’m Celebrating (both with Birds, LLC), as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book You’re On My […]

Talking in this episode with the poet and writer, Ben Purkert, about the manuscript editing process, teaching, self-imposed identities as a poet, and reading a lot of poems from his debut poetry collection For the Love of Endings! Ben Purkert is the author of the forthcoming novel The Men Can’t Be Saved (Overlook, 2023). His […]

Talking with the poet and therapist Emily Kendal Frey, about her most recent book, Loveability, and how In poems we’re not only making space to explore risky ideas of self, but space for a reader to do the same. It’s a relationship with narrative that leaves space for the reader to see and being seen. But also […]

Ben Pease and I talk with the poet and psychotherapist, Matt L. Rohrer (now publishing under “Roar”), (who also used to play on an all-poets basketball team in NYC with Ben) about his evolution from being a poet and working with kids to being an independent clinical social worker. Fascinatingly, Matt’s work with young men […]

Ben Pease and I talked with the amazing Vermont poet, writer and artist Shanta Lee Gander who gives lectures on the life of Lucy Terry Prince as a member of the Vermont Humanities Council Speakers Bureau. As we are the end of Black History Month, we wanted to take a moment to really honor the […]

This episode is part-un-planned-conversation, part-mutual-interview–poets Bianca Stone and Mark Leidner discuss how the self functions in and outside of the poem, what it might say about the anxiety of the poet, how the speaker functions in the poem, the ecosystem of poetry and desire desire desire. What happens when poets sit down without much of […]

Bianca Stone talking with the acclaimed Serbian American poet and former co-poetry editor of the Paris Review, about what life and in Covid, marital squabbles of crows, the dullness of growing up between his grandfather’s farm in rural Serbia, and the excitement of Belgrade; how nature and city works in his poems, and the wandering […]

Talking today with acclaimed poet, Natalie Shapero about her most recent collection of poetry about the poetry that deal with the human being against an array of neoliberal and capitalistic systems; against the dynamics of people in proximity to one another; what it might look like to write towards oblivion; the wry truth of sadness; […]

In this podcast I’m talking with the poet Chariot Wish and their editor, the poet Ben Fama, about Chariot’s new chapbook called: a new heaven and a new earth, from Wonder. The poems in the book are intensely intimate, exploring sexuality, spirituality and the place of the self in a patchwork whirlwind of culture, society […]

like a spree of free association that comes to make meaning Talking with the acclaimed poet, Sarah Arvio about her beautiful new book. Cry Back My Sea, a book meditating on love and anger in the domestic relationship. Here, we discuss the musicality of words, their long associations and allusions; and writing the poems we […]

Talking with the New York City based poet, Anselm Berrigan about his amazing new collection of poetry, Pregrets–our relationships to visual arts, interacting with it in poetry, the uses of narrative in art and the assembly of a line of poetry. We go deep, we go far. Poetry entails:::::: “It’s…figuring out when specific conditions of […]

Riding Bareback on a Good Associative Leap! “But as soon as I notice how happy I am. how close to the sun, there I go plummeting into the background of the same same painting as ever.” Talking with the poet, Craig Morgan Teicher about his most recent collection of poetry from BOA, Welcome to Sonnetsville, […]

Well, this ongoing saga continues. I’m talking with the psychotherapist, Nathan Rice, who I connected with on Twitter this past year. What caught my eye on his feed was a clear appreciation for good poetry, and an eye for the overlaps in how poetry works, and how therapy works. We talk about these things in […]

This a recording that happened after the poetry reading at Next Galaxy writers retreat, between Bianca Stone and Arisa White. Here we talk about what it means to be in a community of writers, to teach poetry, the containment of poetry and the classroom, and how we keep learning as teachers. Thanks to Leanne Ruell […]

Many exciting things happen in this conversation with Matthew Zapruder (forgive the audio!) starting with discussing self-inquiry in poetry, poetry as a reaction against power, providing a space for the self, but also others within the poem. What does it mean to be flat and logical in your language? What impulses in poetry and come […]

I’m always lucky to be with my dear friend and mentor, the poet Sharon Olds. I sat down with her during a visit to New York City, in her apartment on Washington Square, with my 4yo daughter, Odette in tow, and we discussed the complexities of thought and identity during the isolation of the pandemic, […]

I’m thrilled to have had a conversation with two incredible minds, at different stages of their career, Mark Wunderlich and Shanta Lee Gander. Mark talks how he almost became CIA, but thanks to “early luck” in having some amazing creative writing teachers (“This creature comes into the room–she was wearing all purple. Her winter coat […]

“Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, and the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region–the register–between speech and song.” –Edward Hirsch “I made it out of a mouthful of air,” –W.B. Yeats I”m very excited for this new series on the Podcast, where I will be reading you a poems out loud! It is […]

It was really a pleasure to talk with Justin Marks about his new poetry book THE COMEDOWN from Publishing Genius. We discuss the complexities of memoir/poetry, sobriety, politics and most of all the huge unease of the self and how to explore that in a book of poetry. What I love about this book is […]

Bianca Stone sitting on a creaky floor with a very good, sensitive mic, talking with the poets Emily Brandt & Julia Guez about constructing their first books of poetry, published in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Rambling about poems to the lull of traffic. Emily Brandt is a Brooklyn-based poet of Sicilian, Polish & Ukrainian descent. […]

In this podcast, Bianca Stone talks with VT writer and multi-faceted artist, Shanta Lee Gander, about her new book GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, from Diode Editions June 2021 * ORDER HERE “What does it mean to move away from the shadow of one’s mother, parents, or family […]

Bianca Stone talks with the poet Zoe Ryder White about her new chapbook, HYPERSPACE, out now from Factory Hollow Books! ORDER HERE! The poems in Hyperspace inhabit an invented liminal space into which the psyche is projected. The psyche drifts around there, wondering things. At first, I thought I was writing poems about solitude and […]

“I am a spelunking, trekking, foraging, veteranmyco-mountaineer equipped with all-terrain-positioned outer textiles, skin-wrapping bodywarmers, o-hiking tools and gear, a fine hat. “ Ed Steck, From, “MycoMountaineer from At The Mountains of the Mycoverse“ Read the whole poem HERE: ASPHALTE MAGAZINE In this episode we’re very excited to be talking with the poet, Ed Steck about his […]

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” ― Donald Woods Winnicott, Playing and Reality Bianca Stone & Leanne Ruell talk with the psychotherapist James […]

Bianca Stone talking with poet Diana Whitney about her new anthology “You Don’t Have To Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves” (Trigger warning, discussions of sexual assault) Stone and Whitney discuss the complexities of teenage trauma, love, friendship, sexuality, independence, the necessity of poetry and self-expression, and look closely at a few poems from […]

The poet John James talks with RSH Letterpress Director Candace Jensen, and Bianca Stone, about his latest book MILK HOURS, reads new poems, getting into the anxiety of art’s capacity to effect social justice, or even the questions art and artist can ask in those emotions. About the Guests: John James is the author of […]

Bianca Stone and Ben Pease sit down with the poet, Ted Dodson, to discuss his new collection of poetry “An Orange” from Pioneer Works / Wonder Books BUY HERE!!! About “An Orange”“It would be too easy to say love vanished from the earth…” begins Ted Dodson’s An Orange, his thoughtful, experiential second collection of poems. It’s a provocation […]

Bianca Stone & Leanne Ruell talk about their experiences working on a poetry manuscript, helpful practices and mindset tools, the mechanics of editing poetry, and provide fire for that dead-inside feeling about your own! If you’re working on your first book, second book, thesis, or chapbook, or simply interested in the idea you might have […]

Bianca Stone talking with James Barnes This conversation is ongoing and sprawling. There is a huge amount in common between modern psychoanalytic theory and poetry theory, particularly in the importance of negative capability, and the mutual experience needed between therapist and patient, poet and poem. In this episode I’m talking with James Barnes, a psychotherapist […]

Bianca Stone sits down and talks with the poet and essayist, Julia Cohen, about her newest chapbook, Good Timing & Gertrude Stein, and the intensity of the unsaid sentences in us. About the Collection Out of invisible gauze or membrane, some sentences construct a wall within you. A black plum riding on the tongue. These […]

Leanne Ruell (poet, Iterant Editorial Assistant and RSH Grant Writer) talks with Bianca Stone about her new essay on why she writes poetry comics. Sort of. At first I thought I should make this into two shorter digestible episodes out of this interview…but then I realized that if you’re going to listen to 30 minutes […]

Bianca Stone & Ben Pease talk with the acclaimed poet, Major Jackson, about his new book The Absurd Man, the complexities of self, the importance of readings and constructing communities in poems. *** Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020). His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for […]

Our new series meeting poets living in Vermont right now. Bianca Stone sits down and talks with Ben Aleshire about what he’s been up to and where he’s been. Ben Aleshire, (who is currently quarantining in Burlington), a first generation college student, lived over a decade on streets around the world making a living writing […]