Poetry Off the Shelf producer Curtis Fox invites Sewanee Writers’ Conference alumnus Joshua Mehigan to guide listeners through Edgar Bowers’s poem “For Louis Pasteur”.

The podcast features Bowers reading his poem at the 1999 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The poem’s dry-witted epigraph (“Who is Apollo?” College student) introduces Bowers’s concern with, as Fox describes, the “ignorance of the basic historical and cultural facts of the western tradition.” He goes on to say, “For Bowers, that ignorance is a big problem if we have any hope of understanding ourselves.”

Curtis Fox explores the diverse world of contemporary American poetry with readings by poets, interviews with critics, and short poetry documentaries. Joshua Mehigan is a poet and alumnus of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (Walter E. Dakin Fellow/2005, Tennessee Williams Scholar/2000, Poetry/1999, 2001).