John Green Reads Poetry

So many poems to listen to!

Hey, there’s a missing poem!

Hi! This website is an ongoing labor of love inspired by John’s self-proclaimed love of poetry ¹ and the mission of Ours Poetica.²

We’re working very hard combing through the vast amounts of online content John and Hank have created ³ — and continue to create! — to find every instance of John reading poetry.⁴ Most of these were short poems that used to appear as an opening segment in the Dear Hank & John pod.⁵

Check out our growing list of missing or lost poetry-related John Green media:

Lost Media (help us out)!

We have a long way to go, and are using the posts’ dates as a way to organize everything chronologically with relevant tags to make everything extra useable!

So if you have a suggestion of something we missed or would like to share a piece of poetry-related media you’ve found…

Let us know!

—

This is also a recurring riff in many of the opening segments of Dear Hank & John
A lovely play on the Latin phrase Ars Poetica (“The Art of Poetry”)
Examples: 1 | 2
And, occasionally, someone else, such as his wife, his brother, or a poem inspired by one of Hank’s rants. Admittedly, some things are qualified as ‘poems’ rather loosely — John has read lyrics, and other nontraditional items as poetry, and that’s a wonderful thing!
Because poetry is, always, what we make it.
And are still missed by Nerdfighters everywhere!

ALL POEMS

Related Resources

Dear Hank & John

Or as he likes to call it: “Dear John & Hank”

Transcripts*
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“The Last Will and Testament of John Keats” by John Keats

November 9, 2015

The brothers’ related banter…

J: Hank, would you like a short poem for today?

H: Oh thanks, yeah, give me a short poem John.

J: I’ve been holding on to this one, Hank. It’s a single line of perfect iambic pentameter, the last will and testament of John Keats, the great British Romantic poet.

(Reads poem)

H: Are we done? Was that that?

J: That’s the poem. That is his entire last will and testament. “My chest of books divide among my friends.”

H: Yeah. Well, at least we got to the death quick.

J: Yes, he knew he was dying when he wrote that. Another great line of iambic pentameter that Keats wrote in his diaries, he’d been taking care of his brother who had tuberculosis and Keats began coughing and he coughed up some blood and near the drop of blood in his diary he wrote, “This drop of blood, it spells my death.”

H: Wow.

J: I guess that’s actually a line of iambic quadrameter, but you know.

H: (laughs) Oh, man.

J: Still pretty dark.

H: Yeah, I’m glad that we don’t have so much tuberculosis in the world but you know, much at all here in America. That’s actually, I guess there is–

J: But we still have way too much tuberculosis. It’s ridiculous how much tuberculosis we have.

H: True. But now we have the tuberculosis that is very difficult to treat as well.

J: Yeah, there’s multi-drug resistant tuberculosis but also just the treatment regiments– When I was in Ethiopia, I spent a lot of time or at least, you know, few hours not a lot of time, with some tuberculosis patients who, you know have to come into these primary health care centers pretty much every week to get the right medication and to get their lobes checked to find out how much tuberculosis they have and everything. What was really interesting to me was that before those primary health care centers they just… there was no way to get the medication that you needed, which is part of the reason that we have so much drug-resistant tuberculosis because we had very poorly controlled ways of dispensing antibiotics and often the wrong ones would get dispensed because it would be, you know, an unlicensed or untrained person or a family member trying to buy medicine for someone. And it was really interesting and like an illustration of how badly we need this relatively inexpensive but sort of difficult to maintain, difficult to invest in primary healthcare systems in the developing world. Like once we have those places, once you build that infrastructure, it completely transforms those communities.

What were we talking about? What is this podcast devoted to? Is it about John Keats, death, and global health? Or is it about answering viewers’ questions?