Listen "First Draft - James Longenbach"
Episode Synopsis
James Longenbach is a poet and critic whose most recent collection of poems, Earthling is a meditation on the ways in which human beings inhabit their knowledge of impending mortality, ranging bemusement to panic. His most recent critical work, Lyric Knowledge: How Poems Get Made is an account of how English-language poems, ranging from the 8th to the 21st century, are constructed from the most basic elements of their medium (diction, syntax, rhythm, figuration, and so on). He has also written widely about modern and postmodern poetry, sometimes emphasizing the historicity of poetic language (Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things) but also exploring the ways in which poems resist their historical location (The Resistance to Poetry).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More episodes of the podcast First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
First Draft - Benjamin Wood
12/01/2026
First Draft - Marisa Silver (Returns)
05/01/2026
First Draft - Devon O'Neil
29/12/2025
First Draft - Ruben Reyes Jr.
15/12/2025
First Draft - Megha Majumdar
08/12/2025
First Draft - Paula Saunders
01/12/2025
First Draft - Tracy K. Smith (Returns)
24/11/2025
ZARZA We are Zarza, the prestigious firm behind major projects in information technology.