Poetry and Politics with A.M. Juster

Michael J. Astrue has earned degrees from Yale and Harvard. He had a long and distinguished legal career and held several government positions as well as leadership posts in biotech companies. From…

Michael J. Astrue has earned degrees from Yale and Harvard. He had a long and distinguished legal career and held several government positions as well as leadership posts in biotech companies. From 2007-2013, he served as the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. 

A.M. Juster has published something like ten books of original and translated poetry and has served as the poetry editor at First Things and now Plough Quarterly

These two men might sound pretty different, but they are in fact the same person. Over the course of his conversation with Jeff Bilbro, they discuss his tangles with Anthony Fauci, whether poets or civil servants are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” what makes good political verse, the role of humor in poetry, translating Petrarch, and more.

Resources

A.M. Juster’s website

His recommendation of a Richard Wilbur poem

A video recording of this conversation

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A stack of three Local Culture journals and the book 'Localism in the Mass Age'
John Murdock

John Murdock

John Murdock is an attorney and globetrotting localist who worked for over a decade in Washington, D.C.; left the Capital Beltway to write from a family farmhouse deep in the heart of the Lone Star state; taught law in South Korea; and then rode the housing waves of Boise. In 2023, John left the crisp dry air of Idaho and returned to the stifling humidity of his native east Texas. His writing is catalogued at johnmurdock.org.