Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

For the past year and a half, Amanda Holmes has been delighting readers around the world with The American Scholar ’s podcast Read Me A Poem. She has recited poems ranging from English classics by W. B. Yeats and Maya Angelou to works in translation by Kamala Das and Wislawa Szymborska to mournful sonnets by Rupert Brooke and lighthearted romps by Kenneth Patchen and Laura Riding. Holmes’s gift lies in treating each poem with equal attention, whether it’s by a new poet she’s just encountered or a canonical master. These days, with listener requests flooding in during the pandemic, the show’s tagline seems truer than ever: we all need more poetry in our lives. So this week, we peer behind the curtain of our sister show, speaking with that voice that has been brightening all our lives with weekly poems.Go beyond the episode:View the Read Me A Poem archives on our websiteSubscribe to Read Me A Poem: iTunes • Feedburner • Google Play • AcastRead Amanda Holmes’s book reviews and feature column at the&nb