Fogged Clarity Podcast

Because, shit, it’s too dry to snow but it’s cold and the crocus is cold under the wind, wind the cat contemplates through the screen, geese out on the river now terrorized by swans . . . But nobody’s bored with this; it’s elegant just being alive in an age of advertising, not seeing any… More

The Austin songwriter discusses finding freedom in between playing his songs "Twins" and "Stone Age". More

I had one of those sinking spells—she was no more than an infant, blue eyes . . . I thought I could smell some reel-to-reel tape So I bought a pill halver . . . Most of the furniture sat fading in the sunshine— The child moved her tiny hand . . . My blood… More

The Colgate University Political Science professor and author of The Polarizers: “Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era” discusses the 2018 midterm elections, Bernie Sanders, and the media’s inability to save us in an exclusive discussion. TRANSCRIPTION Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be joined by… More

The poet discusses Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, Coos Bay, and the obsessions behind his latest collection of poems, Early Hour. TRANSCRIPTION Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be speaking to one of my favorite poets working today, Michael McGriff is the author of four books… More

In music but there is no music on acreage but no land remains in history but no past will do in the landscape but the orchards are dead the deeds handed over only the rotted sidewall of memory which can bear no weight where we salted the hay where the barn became char to its… More

Those who sleep, doubt, fall on their faces from lying positions while the dross of street lamps and chatter of night-shift life run on the darkness. Sleep is the ordination of senses. Let the lonely bureau preach it, confident in its bowl of change. Let the options of interpretation remain throughout the morning until in… More

Nothing has changed. Somewhere to the right of the living they still mistake independence for a virtue, a defensive indifference, an Eden of last resort, and now that the War of 8:15 has broken out in the terminal we can see dreamcatcher earrings for what they are: dangerous excess. All the while, vehicles sleeker than… More

1. Here I am—the annual physical, these days euphemized as a “well-check,” a ruse of language I like in some happy way, much better than “get on board” for “obey.” Still, in settings like this one, I confess I sometimes find myself thinking of Larkin, almost wanting to make conversation with the Larkin-id I try… More

Not even the Mexican saints can see how you unbutton your shirt tonight to show me the ghost of a zipper the sawbones left, taking back their staples. All your summer the taking out, sherd by sherd, a kind of dig, the slug he left you with, the rent-a-cop gunning for his baby mama, who… More

He faced my mother at the front door with the heat turned off. She wanted heat, like wanting water. The metals in the cellar didn’t clatter. We lived those years in borrowed rooms: his. The grates whispered when the warmth blew. I sided against my own because my body was wrought by her— heatless, stranger… More

We begin with this Rorschach of blood on thigh: first, a gravedigger shoveling earth into our bed, then the rotting barn we once undressed in. Beneath this wet duress, we beg in unison to be born.   *** What’s the word for the soft white belly after the harpoon, but before the hooks? Last month,… More

She stared at the sky in the seat beside him as they lapped the miles on cruise, then woke from her fugue at a stop sign in Bliss to see just where they were and how much gas was left, to turn from the blue and give him a kiss. Back from their drive, he… More

he still paints that rockabilly archtop baby blue Megan Denese Mealor has been featured in numerous journals, most recently The Opiate, Maudlin House, and The Metaworker. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and serves as a reader for E&GJ Press. Her debut poetry collection, Bipolar Lexicon, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in… More

A premier of the title track off Detroit bassist Betsy Soukup’s forthcoming album, This Disquiet. Betsy Soukup is a bassist active in the Detroit jazz community. She sometimes plays with drummer Cory Tripathy and bassist Ben Willis as The Betsy Soukup Trio. More

You fool, I said, to not look me in the eye. I used to wait for the serenade. Now I’m waiting for some lover who takes pictures of himself alone in his room to notice, beck and call, to thicken my milk. Some nights I go bustle my balling gown from a gray gull closet,… More

The sky is not falling it’s failing as the rainband doxes trees in a wiretap wind : seismic 7, the plastisphere swelling, 413 AR. Here’s what little I know about going about it : coldblack city streets in an outage, kinky blowdown a tape on a loop, the scuffed muscle and worn bone of a… More

Buying up the bad debt —an edgelands in the air—then returning   the ocean to circulation after a fresh coat of paint : circuit   bent canary song, petcoke for export, préliminaires2, jetwash out of my   aftermarket, hydrofluoro carbon mouth. At night the sky gets   snagged in the trees it goes back up… More

–Rothko’s Phalanx of the Mind Everything is a weapon the glass pane poised in the geometry of its shanks even the shadows when imposed by the brain’s peach-pit wrinkles onto what could be floor             ceiling             sky but all with the same sharp intent thin             impaled           desire like an acupuncturist’s needle a parabola of… More

–Rothko’s Street Scene Perhaps he still had crumbs on his lips, his collar, his lap when he unzipped. Perhaps he was still bound in half-sleep, looking back at his memory pressed into the mattress. Perhaps the streetlamp’s inquisition through the open window persuaded the cracker-mattress skyscraper to press its bald head flat against the frame… More

Cast to the corner like punished women, or girls relieved to be dismissed for now for five days for less for more for body’s unholy action through no willed action, far from Book, Verses left untouched, God’s Pages unsullied with our fingers unstained—why assign this fluid with morality, no morality, bearer of DNA how does… More

Nettles could replace the cabbage, the salt and saffron milk-caps halved and cut with stock, water, proportions intuited and spun wetly over flame. My infant grandmother satcheled to the left hip, warmed into consuming sleep while soup thickens kitchen air. Cities are fled: Moscow and Vyazma, my grandmother in the same satchel spirited to Bryansk,… More

What about the dew- sodden morning, eyes open to the already turning earth? Or batter blinking in the pan? Because today we have nowhere to be. These movements are true. They’re made by hands toward a deer in the whistle grass. It is somewhere within arms reach and there’s no way to know in which… More

Whitman heard the “bustle of growing wheat” [I believe him] as he loafed in the grass in Camden, one ear to the earth enormous with corpses and vascular tissue, hairy roots of cabbages, horseshit enriching the Great Experiment – the other ear heard the “orbic flex” of a tenor and the soprano and ghosts ravishing… More

A softer sound than the crude x-ray chirp of a sparrow or blue-bellied finch. Violet crowned, I can never not hunger for things less tethered to earth. It is through speed and lightness that time slows. Beyond that red-billed rhythm, I imagine your inner weather is nothing but wind, an irregular albino sighted against a… More

My guide and I first purified before the sacrifice, but can you be purified I asked her without being eliminated or erased? My guide said it’s always but with you, why can’t you just archive the whiteness or curate the liquidity of the city and play your music or whatever you do? Here, she said,… More

If I told you bagging groceries to pay for community college tuition and a gym membership made me feel some kind of glamorous it would be mostly honest and mostly, as I was then, ignorant of any real responsibility outside of anthropology text books and the push/pull full-body lift split I’d adopted from a thick… More

count the times the police appeared in my living room, barged in and bobbed like jellyfish on the tangible resentment of my mother       the sea of her        crashing on herself       my mother of get in their faces and tell them where to go assault on an officer      broke her       delicate wrist      said it caused arrest in… More

In winter, she comes to visit. Following me around the house, asking questions with your mouth. She rests your chin on my head. After I’ve said goodnight, she roots around for you, digging for lost Christmas ornaments, state fair plush toys, faded Polaroids of us at Mammoth Cave, you at Cedar Point. She ferrets out… More

after Jim Harrison There is a god of small thunder in my chest, pounding commandments: whiskey, birds, women, feed the strays. His appetite grows as I watch Manitou twins or breakers in Grand Traverse. He reminds me blood is still red without air and Escanaba is a decent drive if you’ve been drinking. I listen… More

First little reelings of knowing outer space is inner— bad sci-fi movie where humans are fleas, or motes of shadow in the amoeba’s eye(lessness).    I am fairly functional   for a spirit walking around in a body. I don’t listen to messages, merely transcribe them, as though the mind is a sphere scraping other moving… More

Sure, I want to believe a poem can block a bullet too that a poem could save me at the end of the world, my bug-out bag teeming with “Good Bones.” My friend’s husband sells guns. He’s a republican. His sales boom under a democratic president, and sometimes he feels strange-weird about making money off… More

A bank’s clean limestone façade, and inside, just past the marble columns, beneath the perfect glass dome, the carnival frenzies. Everyone he’s known or lost or longed for forced to wear feathery masks. He loves excess, but only in the way a flood loves excess—the destructive miracle of it, so much of what permits a… More

I will take joy from wherever it comes. I will wring it out of my grief. I will seize it from my enemies. Joy has no identity, no politics, no beliefs. It is not deterred by my righteous indignation. I will find hope is in its presence, not some bird in my future. God gives… More

Dreams refuse to wake with us. They prefer the easy rewrites of sleep to the alarms and showers of daily routine. And who can blame them? The noise of this daylight, its empty oaths, grind so hard into the skull, the persistent weight of my own head against the pillow makes that weightless world a… More

As beautiful as it is relevant, here’s Will Oldham performing his new song, “In Good Faith”. LYRICS In good faith: Rocks are buried beneath tons of earth to become diamonds With the gift of the sunlight the kudzu vine goes climbing I open my heart to a world not of my making We open our… More

Author Rick Ewing discusses his 5 years spent as a homeless alcoholic on the streets of New Jersey, and how they inspired his first novella. More

And then it turns cold, fall, the sky full of upside-down ships, and wind, the grass turning a bright but pale shade of green, sunlight between stark clouds, no more yellow of daffodils, some window plastic flutters, it’s coming, the wonderful specter of pothole-filled roads, a warm car, gloved hands on a steering wheel, tires… More

My guts gurgle under my hand; yes, a place to hide, yes . . . When the sun sets in the west, the river shines all the way across. News travels: a clown, a man whose job was kids’ parties, shoots himself at his ex-wife’s house. It’s summer, too hot, all the parking lots and… More

The camp counselor’s voice was sun-shot molasses—invite the light, she said, so I let it ebb up my knuckles and elbows until warmth washed over my entire torso like sunset on a pocked brick wall, and I became that light—sort of—face up and afloat on the chapel floor. Gong rung, I was the last camper… More

From there you could see the whole town: tear it down. Tear it down. -Mike McGriff To preserve the town, first turn your back on the world. Lose yourself completely. Then begin to undress in a creaking hotel where the floorboards each speak resonances to you, & their shifting makes clear your small town tectonics.… More

I was doing something wrong with my life. In the highlands sunlight outlined the lodgepole pine Making a black absence in the blue sky The exact shape of a pine. Let me sketch for you The red cedar alone in the lower dark With its sash of moss woven from pure-green Filaments of age, or… More

Musée de Préhistoire des Gorges Verdon The good cave. Tucked up in the cliffs of Verdon, Prehistory, where-we-come-from. That’s you Shucking snails with a stick. That’s me learning To hide under a hide, naked. The progressive Abandonment of relative chronologies. The slow Sedimentary drip of turquoise minerals, ancestry. Thus each excavation phase is a reflection… More

Canadian poet & author Matt Rader sits down with Tarn Painter-MacArthur to discuss weaving temporalities, his childhood caretaker, and his forthcoming collection, Desecrations. TRANSCRIPTION Tarn MacArthur: Hello and welcome to another Fogged Clarity interview, I’m Tarn MacArthur, and we’re lucky to have the poet and author Matt Rader with us today. Matt, good to see… More

An interview with poet and author Paisley Rekdal appearing in the Spring 2016 issue of Fogged Clarity. More

I can almost touch her cheek in this London train that jostles us together, as time jostles back and forth between us on her phone, the videos she plays as if only she can see them. Here is a nightclub, here a pool, a cluster of girls in a mosque’s courtyard, now they’re clutching each… More

There will be sweat at the back of your neck seven months out of the year. That’s true, that and an ugly history too. At least, in the South, the Ice Age never quite passed through. I can say that while glaciers scraped the North clean, here there was only a little winter. From the… More

We should admire Rambler roses, so resilient their vines green what was bare ground in a single season, then scale up and overtake trees, strangle whole canopies, if we can stand our own sort. And prize Redbreast sunfish, that flash a brilliant blood color. They breed in streams native trout cannot survive now because the… More

Award-winning poet James Kimbrell discusses form and disorder, bait shrimp, and how Florida's Marianna Caves helped shaped his conception of time in this exclusive audio interview. More

Hear two songs from songwriter Samantha Farrell's new album "September Sun" amid a conversation on black holes & beauty. More