Professor Kamran Javadizadeh will soon be releasing a new podcast, "Close Readings." He spoke with us about the podcast's origins, his process, and what we can expect when we listen.
What inspired you to make a podcast? Are there literary or poetry podcasts that you enjoy listening to?
I think that for me (as, apparently, for so many!) this is partly a pandemic story. During the early days of the pandemic I found myself listening to podcasts more than had previously been my custom (I wrote a bit about that experience here), usually while walking my dog, and I found that I enjoyed the company that they provided, the peculiar feeling of having a friendly voice or two in your ear while you went about your daily chores. And then also during that time I was able to convince a few of my friends, both scholars and poets, to visit my classes at Villanova. That experience taught me that I quite enjoyed talking to experts for the benefit of curious audiences; I felt like I had a knack for playing the straight man. So then a couple of those strands came together in my mind, and I found myself wondering if I might host my own podcast, where I would talk with a guest about a single poem. That felt like something I could do well (we shall see!) and also like the kind of thing I’d want to listen to, if it existed. Life got very busy and I didn’t return to the idea until recently, when an additional impetus was my sense that the community I’d cultivated on “poetry Twitter” might be in danger of vanishing, or diminishing, or something. And so I thought, better get those conversations going while you can.
And yes, there are lots of good literary/poetry podcasts out there. One that I particularly enjoy is David Naimon’s “Between the Covers.” One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that a lot of literary podcasts, perhaps especially poetry podcasts, tend to focus on having poets as guests and contemporary poetry as the topic. I thought there might be space for something more like poetry studies, where my guests, mainly, were scholars and critics, and where we could talk about poems from a whole variety of periods and places. Maybe I’ll have poets on from time to time, but I think of this really as a podcast more about reading poetry than it is about writing it.
Can you describe what sort of podcast yours will be? What kind of topics will you cover, and what kind of approach will you take to looking at poems?
It will be pretty simple: me and a guest, talking about a single poem of their choosing, for maybe 30-45 minutes each episode. I’m hoping to have conversations where the poem is centered, but where we feel free to digress into things like biography, literary history, literary criticism, theory, etc—but also personal experiences, where they feel relevant. The approach to the poems, beyond that, will depend on the guest and how they tend to read. But what’s especially important to me is that the guests and I have conversations that feel close in the sense of proximate or intimate. “Close Readings” is a bit of a pun for me: both an exegetical reading practice and a kind of friendliness or sociality.
How do you go about choosing guests for your podcast?
I’ve begun just by thinking about who the poetry scholars are out there whom I already have some relationship with—not because I mean to restrict this to friends, but more so because I want to get the thing established, figure out what I’m doing, and so on, before I go pitching strangers—and whose work I’ve admired and feel as though I might be good at engaging with for a general audience. I’ve also got somewhere in the back of my mind the desire to introduce variety into the series right from the beginning, which means things like asking people who cover very different periods, or who have very different approaches to poetry, or who have had different kinds of life experiences and careers. But really I want mostly to be guided by a simpler question: who would I be excited to talk to?
Has anything struck you about discussing poetry in an audio versus a print medium?
Not yet, since I haven’t really yet begun! But I’m anticipating/hoping that the conversations will feel easy and casual, not overly scripted at all or really even produced or edited much. In those ways, I’m hoping this will feel much freer for me and easy than writing does. I love to write, but I’m one of those writers who is almost always editing myself as I go, which means that the work of writing can really feel to me like work. I hope this feels more like play.
When and how can we listen to Close Readings?
I have a teaser episode up already, which people can get on Apple Podcasts here and Spotify here. I also just started a Substack newsletter where I’ll be posting some text to go with each episode. People can find that here. I hope everyone subscribes to the podcast and to the newsletter. I’m recording my first proper episodes with guests (very exciting ones!) in the next few days, and I’m going to try to start posting them on something like a weekly basis before the holidays, even, and then certainly on into the new year.
