Margaret Ronda on Walt Whitman ("This Compost")

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How does life grow from death? When we taste a fruit, are we, in some sense, ingesting everything the soil contains? Margaret Ronda joins the podcast to discuss a poem that poses these questions in harrowing ways, Walt Whitman's "This Compost."

[A note on the recording: from 01:10:11 - 01:12:59, Margaret briefly loses her internet connection and I awkwardly vamp. Apologies! Rest assured the remainder of the episode goes off without a hitch!]

Margaret Ronda is an associate professor of English at UC-Davis, where she specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (Post*45 Series, Stanford UP, 2018), and her articles have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, Post45 Contemporaries, and PMLA (for which she won the William Riley Parker Prize). She is also the author of two books of poetry, both published by Saturnalia Books: For Hunger (2018) and Personification (2010). You can follow Margaret on Twitter.

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