Having a Coke with Brian Glavey and Kamran Javadizadeh

What could be more fun than listening to two brilliant scholars having a chat about one of your favorite poems? The first installment of an exciting new podcast series hosted by the poetry scholar Kamran Javadizadeh went live yesterday, and it’s a pleasure to listen to. Each episode of the series, called “Close Readings,” will feature a guest, usually a scholar of poetry or poet, reading and discussing a single poem with Javadizadeh. You can find episodes of “Close Readings” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

The first episode features Brian Glavey, a professor at the University of South Carolina and author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde, discussing Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke With You,” the subject of a wonderful, widely-discussed essay that Glavey published in PMLA in 2020. After listening to an audio recording of O’Hara reading his poem, Glavey and Javadizadeh have a delightful conversation about the poem and its beauty and humor, its “relatability” and its philosophical complexity. (They also talk at length about the subject of the poem, and of O’Hara’s infectious ardor, the dancer Vincent Warren, who I wrote about here).

Keep an eye out for future installments of Javadizadeh’s new podcast series, and head over to wherever you listen to podcasts and check out this fun and fascinating discussion of O’Hara’s charming poem.