Conversations about Poetry & Creative Influence
Season 2 Debuts April 20, 2026!
Follow @melodyorwitchcraft on IG for all the latest.
Season 2 Trailer:
The Melody or Witchcraft Podcast is based on the idea that poetry can be a launchpoint to discuss the pressing issues of today. Poetry deserves a place in our everyday lives—indeed it already occupies our days and increasing our awareness of where it lives, stimulates joy and reflection.
On the podcast we hear a poet read a work of their own and an Emily Dickinson poem of their choosing that contributed to their work. The conversations delve into questions like where creative influence arrives from, how the past lives in the creative present, and why literary ancestors matter. Along the way, I try to dip into my history as a former guide at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts to unpack just a wee bit about some of the reasons one particular 19th Century poet has had the lasting, international impact that she has. These are conversations that start within the frame of Emily Dickinson and bust out of that frame to talk more broadly about creative influence.
“The Past is such a curious Creature,” Dickinson wrote. (J1203). What if Then and Now is just one more binary that doesn’t serve us anymore? Join us to find out how it can teach us about our now.
The name “Melody or Witchcraft” comes from an April 25, 1862 letter Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, where she asked a question of this man who would become one of her lifelong correspondents and an editor of her posthumously-collected works. In her letter, she says, “I would like to learn – Can you tell me how to grow – or is it unconveyed – like Melody or Witchcraft?” (L 261)
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Contact: melodyorwitchcraftATgmailDOTcom
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(Find Season 1 HERE.)
Available April 20: “poetry as an endurance technology”
My talk with Dana includes conversation about psychological states of being, our society’s allowance (or not) for the range of them, chosen solitude, marrying the Muse…
Dana Levin is the author of five books poetry. Her latest is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon), a 2022 New York Times Notable Book and NPR “Book We Love.” Levin teaches for the Bennington Writing Seminars, the MFA program at Bennington College, and serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. Her first book of prose, House of Feels, comes out from Graywolf Press in 2027.
April 27: “the sensitive heart”
Victoria goes deep into how to navigate the world as mostly nervous system, what poetry can hold safe for us, and the joys and pitfalls of new love…
Dr. Victoria Kennefick is a writer, poet, editor and teacher who lives in Tralee, Co. Kerry (Ireland). She completed a PhD in Irish and American Literature at University College Cork and was a Fulbright Scholar at Emory University. Her debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the Butler Literary Prize. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024 and won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Prize 2025. She was the 2025 Arts Council of Ireland/Trinity College Dublin Writer Fellow.
May 4: “led by the dead”
Kelli and I kick up our heels to chat about loved ones on the other side, Emily and Susan, the encroachment of technology in our everyday, refusing to check a box…
Kelli Russell Agodon‘s next book Accidental Devotions will be published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2026. Her previous collection, Dialogues with Rising Tides, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. Kelli is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is also the cohost of the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard.
May 11: “filling in the gaps”
Matt shares amazing stories about what came out of his collaborative art installment at the Dickinson Museum, the strangeness of wanting to know another, and how we build stories and lives from small but significant artifacts…
Matt Donovan is the author most recently of We Are Not Where We Are (Bull City Press, 2025) which was co-authored with Jenny George, and The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA 2022). He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as the director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
May 18: “a velocity in the language”
Camille gets into the moment she went from rolling her eyes at the idea of Dickinson to being a lifelong devotee, scientific language and paths not taken, what happens when reading the past is problematic…
Camille T. Dungy is the author of America, A Love Story, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, and five other books of poetry and prose. She has edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Dungy is currently a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
May 25: “keeping it wild”
Gaby has lots to say about bees and trains and trains and bees, Emily as the perfect figure for the (changing) moment in time she lived in, why stages aren’t that cool, who we need to read right now that can teach us not to look away…
Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s new collection of poetry, The New Economy, was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry. Other collections include The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing, and Rocket Fantastic, which is the winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. They serve on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and live in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.