I’m writing today with the great pleasure of announcing the debut of Lyric Nation, an audio dossier featuring a poet who has been published in The Nation reading selections of his or her work. You can find Lyric Nation here: www.thenation.com/lyric-nation.

For our debut, we have posted dossiers by three poets: Nathaniel Mackey, Jennifer Moxley and Peter Gizzi (a former poetry editor of The Nation), which you can find here:

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A new installment of Lyric Nation will be posted on the last Monday of each month; poets you’ll be hearing soon include Jeffrey Yang, Ange Mlinko and Devin Johnston.

The history of poetry in the United States is not that much older than the history of The Nation, which was founded in 1865, a few decades after Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph and awakened ears to the patter of clatter. Our hope is that the scope of Lyric Nation will gradually expand to include poets who have appeared in our pages not just recently but also in the distant past. The sound quality of old recordings might not compare with that of the digital files to which we’ve grown accustomed. But regardless of any stray hiss or pop, you can count on Lyric Nation to offer poems that would be music to Caliban’s ears—“Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”

Thanks for reading, and listening.