A central duality appears in the work of Henri Cole: the revelation of emotional truths in concert with a “symphony of language” — often accompanied by arresting similes. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Henri, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they discuss the role of animals in Henri’s work, the pleasure of aesthetics in poetry, and writing as a form of revenge against forgetting.
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan and raised in Virginia. He has published many collections of poetry and received numerous awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent books are a memoir, Orphic Paris (New York Review Books, 2018), Blizzard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), and Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). From 2010 to 2014, he was poetry editor of The New Republic. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
Thomas Lux — Refrigerator, 1957
Rita Wong — flush
Maria Dahvana Headley — Beowulf
Michael Klein — Swale
Ray Young Bear — Our Bird Aegis
Suji Kwock Kim — Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border
Amber McBride — ROLL CALL: NEW TAROT NAMES FOR BLACK GIRLS
Carl Dennis — Breath
Elisa Gonzalez — To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self
Ofelia Zepeda — Deer Dance Exhibition
Sandra Cisneros — When in Doubt
Kandace Siobhan Walker — Three Mangoes, £1
Francisco Aragón — Asleep You Become a Continent
Conor Kerr — Winter Songs
Valencia Robin — The Coup
Eugenia Leigh — How the Dung Beetle Finds Its Way Home
Poetry Unbound — Season 8 Trailer
Clint Smith with Krista Tippett — What We Know in the "Marrow of Our Bones"
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