What Is, Is Beautiful

What Is, Is Beautiful

Poetry and Attention with Leah Naomi Green

In this episode, we sit down with Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Environmental Studies Leah Naomi Green to continue this season’s central question: What is beauty? Approaching the question through poetry, ecology, and lived experience, Green reflects on beauty as a practice of attention rather than an attribute of prettiness. Drawing from her life as a poet, teacher, and homesteader, she explores how intimacy with language, place, and responsibility shapes how we perceive the world. Throughout the conversation, Green and host James Lambert discuss poetry’s power to defamiliarize the familiar, to help us feel rather than merely think, and to reconnect us to both human and more-than-human communities. Including readings from poets like Gregory Orr and Galway Kinnell, as well as excerpts from Green’s own work, the episode invites listeners to consider beauty as something we cultivate — through care, naming, and presence — in classrooms, landscapes, and everyday life.

Recorded: February 4, 2026
Aired: February 23, 2026