Laze, Laze, Ignore the Pressure Not to Shirk

We reclaim poetry as a yearlong affair, in opposition to those who would have us cram it all into the month of April. Today's show includes conversations with London dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, 84- year-old New York poet Marie Ponsot, and Tatiana Marquardt, a woman who memorizes poems (and other things). We've also got fiction about poetry from John Haskell, sounds based on poetry from sound artist Sherre DeLys, and new lyrics from Stephin Merritt.

After You Left, I...
A poem created by The Next Big Thing's Pejk Malinovski, with help from Google.

Poet Appreciates
84-year-old poet Marie Ponsot is culling plenty of praise these days. Her 2002 collection, The Bird Catcher, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and last week she received the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal. It wasn't always like that; for years her work went unpublished. She talks to Dean Olsher about what's kept her writing poetry all these years. Produced by Julie Subrin.

Let's Give It Up for Gershwin
As Marie Ponsot noted, songwriters like Ira Gershwin rarely get the poetry credit they deserve. As a corrective, we offer Gershwin's "Nice Work If You Can Get It," sung by Mel Torme.

Use It Or Lose It, Part II
Stephin Merritt of the band The Magnetic Fields reports back to Erin McKean with the fruit of his labors. The assignment: to use "drury," "amorado," and "Capgras Syndrome" in his lyrics. Produced by Julie Subrin.

Memory Tricks
For as long as we've had experience, it seems, humans have looked for ways to preserve that experience in memory. Dean Olsher compares ancient techniques to those of Tatiana Marquardt, three-time winner of the U.S. Memory Championships. Produced by Amanda Freeman. Shelf Life of Poet The Next Big Thing's Pejk Malinovski accompanies London-based dub poet and musician Linton Kwesi Johnson on a trip to the poetry section of St. Mark's Books in New York's East Village.

Holy Tango (or, Anthology)
Francis Heaney is a humor writer and puzzle constructor. He's created an "anthology of literature" in which he rearranges the letters of an author's name, and then uses that anagram as the title of a new work he writes in the style of that author. We offer three poems, including an Emily Dickinson knock-off titled "Skinny Domicile." Produced by Pejk Malinovski.

Marguerite's Cat
In his short stories, fiction writer John Haskell routinely mines the apocrypha of famous people's lives, elaborating upon or inventing details as he sees fit. In the process, he usually comes up with something more telling, if less true, than what we already know. Past subjects have included Jackson Pollock, Glenn Gould and Cole Porter. Here, he imagines what it's like to be the American poet William Carlos Williams. Produced by Emily Botein.

Music for Poems about Frogs
Poetry in translation often leaves you with a sneaking suspicion that you're missing out on the best part — the sounds and rhythms of the original. Sound artist Sherre DeLys avoids that problem by translating Japanese poet Shimpei Kusano's work into sound and music. Here's what she did with his poems about frogs. Keyboards by Chris Abrahams.

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