On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the poets Carl Phillips and Aditi Machado, who met through the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis when Aditi began as a student almost fifteen years ago.
Growing up in India, Aditi wasn’t exposed to much American poetry. Carl could tell, reading her work, that this was a singular voice—he even remembers thinking to himself that Aditi’s style made him want to reconsider his own approach.
In the first half of the episode, we discuss what surprised Carl about Aditi’s work, how Carl’s experience as a high school Latin teacher informed his pedagogy, and what Aditi remembers from her time as Carl’s student (and has borrowed, now that she’s a professor herself). We also discuss what Carl prioritized as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the oldest annual literary award in the U.S. And as a bonus, Aditi shares an excerpt from a hilarious and enthusiastic journal entry she wrote after one of her early meetings with Carl to discuss her work.
In the second half of the episode, we hear poems from their newest books, Aditi’s “Concerning Matters Culinary” from Material Witness and Carl’s “Fist and Palm” from Scattered Snows, to the North. We discuss their radically different approaches to form and process, what it means to get “personal” in their poetry, and their shared interest in the agency of the natural world, a subtle materialism that thrums through both collections. (In other words: Lena makes the argument that their work isn’t as different as it seems.)
Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her publications include three poetry collections from Nightboat, Material Witness (2024), Emporium (2020), and Some Beheadings (2017); two book-length translations from the French, Baptiste Gaillard’s In the Realm of Motes (Roof, 2025) and Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016); and several chapbooks. Her work appears or is forthcoming in journals like BOMB, Chicago Review, Fence, jubilat, Lana Turner, Volt, and Western Humanities Review, among others. A recipient of the James Laughlin and The Believer Poetry Awards, she serves as an advisory poetry editor for The Paris Review and teaches at the University of Cincinnati.
Carl Phillips is the author of many books of poetry, including Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
More Aditi: aditimachado.com
More Carl: https://www.carlphillipspoet.com/
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.
Read Carl’s poem “Fist and Palm”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158812/fist-and-palm
Mentioned in the episode:
Martín Espada
Alan Dugan
Mary Jo Bang
Jorie Graham
John Ashbery
Johannes Jorgensen, Transgressive Circulation
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Rosemary Walddrop, The Reproduction of Profiles
Gerard Manley Hopkins
