This summer, Cornell poet and critic Sandeep Parmar will explore poetry as a guiding force for understanding work, technology, divorce, sex, weather, food and money through a new podcast series, “Poetry and the Turning World,” for the London Review of Books (LBR), co-hosted with the prize-winning poet Sarah Howe.
“Poetry has the ability to teach us how we relate to our past and our future,” said Parmar, professor of literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Whether that’s building national histories in the past or isolated emotional expressions in the present, I think there is something about poetry that we always turn to, inevitably, to try to understand what it is we feel.”
Launching on June 7 with the episode “Poetry and Work,” the series comprises six studio recorded episodes and the finale, “Poetry and Sex,” live from London July 8 and features some Cornell connections. A poem by Valzhyna Mort, associate professor of literatures in English, appears in the first episode and Parmar said she expects the spirit of renowned Cornell poet A. R. Ammons to help to guide the last.
Through the podcast series, Parmar and Howe want to connect urgent issues to poetry. The series title recalls T. S. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world” from his Four Quartets, Parmar said. She sees poetry as “an essential, somewhat unchangeable but also responsive space for cultural discourse.”
Parmar and Howe, who collaborated for several years directing the Ledbury Poetry Critics program for poetry critics of color, select three poems to guide each episode. For “Poetry and Work,” they talk about “Agimat” by Filipino poet Romalyn Ante, who writes in it about working in the British National Health Service as a nurse during COVID. The poem touches on migration, longing and the work of care, Parmar said.
They’re also featuring a poem from the LRB archive about a car factory closing in Scotland by Robert Crawford, and “Factory of Tears,” the title poem of a collection by Mort. “It’s a satire of a socialist factory that’s not producing a product but is producing sadness and reproducing trauma,” Parmar said. “Valzhyna recorded it for us, so we’ll hear her voice in the podcast.”
Recording the episodes is an ongoing process this summer, Parmar said. In “Poetry and Technology,” they consider what is technology, from the pen to the chatbot, and explore ways poetry can help us navigate boundaries between the human and the machine.
Planning for “Poetry and Weather” has made Parmar realize that where poetry once evoked natural events such as storms and sunshine to reflect the internal state of the writer, a discussion of poetry and weather now gravitates toward climate breakdown and the unpredictability behind weather events.
Each topic has surprised the co-hosts, as poems open more nuanced engagements than they expected, Parmar said.
For the series finale recorded live at the London Review Bookshop, Parmar and Howe have recruited poets Sophie Robinson and Oluwaseun Olayiwola to join a discussion of “Poetry and Sex.”
Parmar said the topic calls to mind a line from Cornell poet A.R. Ammons, who wrote about sex in one brief poem as “One failure on/Top of another.”
“We’ll definitely be invoking Ammons and thinking about sex as not just the act but everything that comes before and after, how looking at it is part of the wider landscape of what a poem is trying to do,” Parmar said. “I think there will be laughter.”
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