Horace Gregory, "Chorus for Survival"
Horace Gregory
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Al Filreis convened Cristos Kalli, Jon Hoel, and Henry Steinberg to talk about two poems about the once hugely famous and now mostly forgotten communist and communist-affiliated poet who thrived for decades but most notably in the 1930s. In the middle of the Depression decade — in the momentous year of 1935 — he published the book Chorus for Survival with Covici-Friede. Our group discussed two poems in the Chorus for Survival series — numbers 5 and 11. In 1944, Gregory traveled to Cambridge, Mass., to record some poems for the Harvard Vocarium, performing six poems include the two we discuss. Jon and Al had met up nearly a year before, discovered a common interest in Gregory, and have co-curated this episode.
January 27, 2025
"Exquisitely marginal, folded into place, and revelatory"
Introductory note to a resurgent ecopoetics post-conference ‘Plenary’
“The feral lives among us almost as if it belongs” (331), writes ecocritic Anne Milne in the course of arguing for the value of a feral bioregionalism.