Maggie Smith: A Conversation with Our Own Minds

Maggie Smith approaches poems as a poet’s best teacher in this episode, calling poems “a conversation we have with our own minds.” Smith shares a poem by Donald Hall that shaped her early days of writing (“Gold”), a Lynn Emanuel poem that she prizes for its perfection of word choice (“Stone Soup”), and a prose poem by Jenny Boully that engages the listener through its forward momentum (“Tether”). Smith closes by reading her poem “Ohio Cento.” Listen to the full recordings of Hall, Emanuel, and Boully reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:Donald Hall (1972)Lynn Emanuel (1993)Jenny Boully (2013)Listen to a 2018 reading by Maggie Smith on Voca.

Om Podcasten

Poetry Centered features curated selections from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work during visits to the Center between 1963 and today. In each episode, a guest poet introduces three poems from Voca, sharing their insights about the remarkable performances recorded in our archive. Each episode concludes with the guest poet reading a poem of their own.