Close Readings

• Megan Quigley on T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")

  "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" I've been waiting to record this episode for a long time: Megan Quigley, my dear friend and colleague, joins the podcast to talk about T. S. Eliot and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."Megan Quigley is an associate professor of English at Villanova University, where she is also on the Irish Studies and Gender and Women's Studies faculties. She is the author of Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language (Cambridge UP, 2015) and the co-editor of Eliot Now (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is also the editor of two clusters of essays on #MeToo, Eliot, and modernism in Modernism/modernity Print+ (2019, 2020). Her essays have appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, Philosophy and Literature, Poetics Today, LARB, the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, nonsite, and the Cambridge Companion to European Modernism. She is a four-time lecturer and seminar leader at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School. Her current book project is called "The Love Song of Modernism" and is on modernism and fan fiction. She has two essays in progress on AI and literature and an essay forthcoming on "T. S. Eliot's Women" in A Companion to Eliot's Complete Prose.As always, make sure you're following the podcast on your platform of choice, and, if you've been enjoying it, leave a rating and review. Please also share the podcast with your friends. More soon!

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• Daniel Katz on Jack Spicer ("Psychoanalysis: An Elegy")

  How is a poem like a session of psychoanalysis? The scholar Daniel Katz joins the podcast to talk about a fascinating poem that poses that question, Jack Spicer's "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy." Daniel Katz is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and is the author of several books and articles on modernism, modern and contemporary poetry, and psychoanalysis. His work on Spicer includes a monograph, The Poetry of Jack Spicer (Edinburgh UP, 2013), and Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan UP, 2021), for which he served as editor. He is currently finishing a book called "The Big Lie of the Personal: Poetry, Politics, and the Lyric Subject."In our conversation, we refer to a few other Spicer volumes: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, and finally Spicer's book After Lorca.If you're enjoying the podcast, please share it with your friends and networks. Please also subscribe and leave us a rating and review. More soon!

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• Lindsay Turner on Alice Notley (Waltzing Matilda: "Dec. 12, 1980")

  The third in our series of conversations about the late Alice Notley. Lindsay Turner returns to the podcast to discuss a selection from Waltzing Matilda, "Dec. 12, 1980." A poet, critic, and translator, Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include books by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Stéphane Bouquet, Frédéric Neyrat, Richard Rechtman, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. Her translation of Bouquet's The Next Loves was longlisted for the National Translation Awards, shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and named a New York Times top 10 poetry collection of 2019, and she has twice received French Voices Grants for her translation work. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University. Take a look at Lindsay's Substack, "stay you are so fair."You can listen to Notley reading from Waltzing Matilda on the PennSound archive of her recordings.Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! (Post it to your social media feeds?) You can also subscribe to my Substack, which I haven't used in a while, but may again. I'm also on Bluesky, now and then.

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• Joyelle McSweeney on Alice Notley (The Descent of Alette)

  The second in a series of conversations about the poet Alice Notley, who passed away on May 19, 2025. The poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney joins the podcast to talk about selections from Notley's epic The Descent of Alette. (A brief note on audio quality: we listen to three recordings of Notley reading from her book during this episode. The volume on playback of those recordings seems somewhat low to me—sorry!—but hopefully listeners will be able to adjust the volume on their devices so as to hear Notley well enough.)Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's latest book, Death Styles, appeared from Nightboat Books in Spring 2024; her previous title, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. Her debut poetry volume, The Red Bird, inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books, which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.You can see Alice Notley read the entirety of The Descent of Alette in a series of recordings made over two nights at The Poetry Center at SFSU. Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! (Post it to your social media feeds?) You can also subscribe to my Substack, which I haven't used in a while, but may again. I'm also on Bluesky, now and then.

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• Nick Sturm on Alice Notley ("At Night the States")

  After a long break, the podcast returns with an episode on the late Alice Notley, who passed away on May 19, 2025. Nick Sturm joins us to discuss Notley's elegy for her husband Ted Berrigan, "At Night the States." Nick Sturm teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His book on small press print culture, publishing communities, and the New York School is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is also the editor of Early Works by Alice Notley (Fonograf Editions) and co-editor, with Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan, of Get the Money!: Collected Prose, 1961-1983 by Ted Berrigan (City Lights). His articles and editorial projects have been published at Poetry Foundation, Jacket2, Paideuma, College Literature, Chicago Review, ASAP/J, Women’s Studies, Post45, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. You can follow Nick on Bluesky.In the episode, we listen (twice) to a recording of Notley reading the poem in Buffalo, in 1987. That recording, along with many others, can be found on Notley's page in the marvelous PennSound digital archive.Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! (Post it to your social media feeds?) You can also subscribe to my Substack, which I haven't used in an even longer while, but who knows what the future holds. I'm also on Bluesky, now and then.

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