No Good Poetry

Past guest Brendan Lorber rejoins us this week to talk about ghosts and his ghost story novel he's been working. We talk about ghosts and how they relate to relics of the past in city's, lost love ones, and creativity and the subconscious.

No guest this week, so we recount what's been going on with poetry in our world the past couple weeks, talk about Steve Dalachinsky and read a couple of his poems, the intersection between jazz and poetry, music and poetry in general, about bringing the historical into poetry, and we look at a Vice article about someone faking it as an instagram poet.

This week poet and novelist Travis Nichols talks about poets writing auto-fiction, the artifice-sincerity polarity, Ashberyists vs. O'Haraists, how Twitter has changed what makes poets popular, David Berman, and how poetry can gesture towards another world. 

This week we met up on the 4th of July, read some poems about America and got philosophical about the disappointment in the promise of America's beginnings that run through literature.

This week poet/writer Tracey Anne Duncan joins us to share some poems & talk about advice columns, whether poets should date poets, personal ads, famous poets who got good poems out of their relationship.    

Musician Joseph Darensbourg joined us this week to talk about the Creole poetry of Les Cenelles, his string ensemble inspired by it, and the intersection of poetry, music, language, and the ancestral past.

The day after New Orleans Poetry Fest we sat down with poets Joseph Lease and Mark Statman and had a wonderfully sprawling conversation about poetry. Some topics include: the poetry scene in the '80s, "words you can't use in poems, Creeley. Koch, & Ginsberg, how Joseph "used to be a hard critic but he softened up," reading Beats in teh time of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Joseph and Mark read some of their incredible poems.

This week poet Lisa Pasold joins us to talk about poems that use questions. We look at poems by Catherine Barnett, Pablo Neruda, Terrrance Hayes, C.D. Wright, and Lisa herself.

It's episode 100! We have 4 guests over for a Vispo Workshop, and we talk to them about their experience making visual poetry, and we look back at our experience of the podcast so far.

This week poet Vincent Cellucci joins us to talk about his course on film and poetry, how the two mediums intersect, videopoems, and how to make interactive poetry that makes use of current technology and shares some poems from his new book Absence Like Sun.  

This week we are talking about writing poems in a persona, and what it shows us about how poetry and identity work in general. We read poems by Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, James Tate, and Andre Breton.

It's carnival time, and we are thinking about Mardi Gras poems this week. We share some of our favorite poetry about carnival and wonder why there isn't more out there, and we pontificate about how much that one Tuesday a year shapes New Orleans culture.

This week printer and poet Christ Fritton joins us to talk about visiting letterpress print shops across the country, typography's influence on poetry, the importance of constraints, and embracing the "glitch."

On January 1st, for the first time since 1998, a whole bunch of creative work entered the public domain. This week we talk about how copyrights work and if we think they really work, read some poetry that recently became public domain, and talk about how work from the 20s could be a font of inspiration for today's poets and artists.

Poet Jorge Sánchez has been contemplating how poets find the forms that they write in when the majority of poets don't use traditional forms. We talk about constraints born of choice, medium, lifestyle, chance and luck and hopefully find a way to forge some new paths through the thicket of poetic form. And the best part is Jorge shares with us a couple of his recent science-inspired poems.

This week poet Hank Lazer joins us to talk about docupoetry, his shape writing, keeping open the gateway of poetry, poetry as phonomenolgy of spiritual experience, and how we can make poetry readings less passive and more of an immersive experience.

This week poet and musician Matt Hart joined us by Skype from his basement lair, and we had a great conversation about teaching poetry writing to visual arts students, the intersection of punk and poetry, Apollinaire, translating, writing a poem every day for a year and more. Matt shares with us some of his poems and one of his obliterations of Apollinaire.

This week poet, teacher, and editor Ralph Adamo joins us to chat about teaching poetry, the editing process and how poems are language trying to tell the truth. He shares some of his own poems and poems by Frank Stanford and Everette Maddox.

This week poet Shafer Hall joins us to talk about his long time collaboration with poet John Cotter and their new project: writing poetry about pieces of visual art. We talk about how it creates depth to add collaborators into your writing process, how running a bar intersects with poetry, avocado plants, and Shafer reads 2 of their ekphrastic poems.

This week we're talking about allusions in poetry. Why and how do poets use them and what does it say about who we are as humans? We read poems by Keats, Emily Dickinson, Gregory Corso, and Dean Young.

This week poet Laura Goldstein joins us to tell us about the workshop she held this week at The Dragonfly: "Collective Experiment in Audience," and she reads us a solstice poem that she wrote. We also chat about coaching poets, the difference between writing poetry for self-exploration and writing for an external audience, and how the current political situation is making its way into poetry.

This week we start off talking about how we taught a visual poetry workshop at NOCCA and how that went, but as we talk about teaching, what we learned, and how best to present poetry, we spiral off into some interesting linguistic features of speech and how that relates to poetry and visual poetry.

This week we look at the story of John Whitcomb Riley and how his pursuit of fame as a poet led him to forge a posthumous Edgar Allen Poe poem that briefly took the literary world by storm. 

This week we talk about our trip to Uruguay, our great time at the Mundial Poético de Montevideo, and the visual workshop we put on there. We also discuss how impressed we were by the wide range of poetry going on in South America and how there seems to be a greater embrace of exploring sound and visual techniques. we also go through a brief survey of some Uruguayan visual poets that you probably haven't heard of.

While we were in Montevideo, we sat down and had a chat with 3 great Brazilian poets, Amora Pêra, Pedro Lago, & Pedro Rocha. We talk about typewriters, poetry in Brazil, listening to poems in different languages, printing, and they share some poems with us.

We're at Mundial Poetico in Montevideo right now, but here are a couple of poems from our Uruguayan compatriots to hold you over until the full episode next week.   

Poet Rodrigo Toscano joins us this week, and though we don't have much of a plan in mind, we have a pretty nice chat about how the New Orleans poetry scene is different from the scene in other places, writing poetry for a non-poet audience, monetizing poetry, poets looking for fame, hapenings, neo-happenings, interactive readings, poetry schools and factions...and Rodrigo reads us some of his new poetry!

Anaphora for days! Poet Raina Zelinski joins me this week to talk about list poems. How can a poem create repetition? Is there a difference, between litany, catalogues, and list poems? We look at list poems by John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  

No guest this week as we talk about the possibilities for computer generated poetry. We discuss Makkos' poetry chatbot, and look at some poetry Bienvenu created using the textgenrnn recurring neural network.

Lee Tiger joins us this week to talk about his recent travels to Bulgaria, playing the Blues while trapped in Paris, and how travel and foreign languages affect writing. 

This week poet and editor Brendan Lorber joins us to talk about the poetic space of train travel and torturing a neighbor by reading Rimbaud's Drunken Boat, but the conversation really gets going when we discuss what white space can add to poetry, exploring different ways of using the page, and why more poets don't make use of it.  

There's no guest this week as we explore the concept of abstraction in poetry. Writers often make a distinction between abstract and concrete language, and imply that concrete is best, but we look at how the distinction between concrete and abstract is actually much more complex and interesting than we usually think about. We talk about Dame Edith Sitwell, medium & content, Dada, Abstract Art, visual poetry, Emily Dickinson, techonology & physical media, Christian Dotremont.

Dr. Jeffery U. Darensbourg joins us to talk about the new zine Bulbancha is Still A Place: Indigenous Culture from New Orleans, share with us some poems by  Native writers from the first issue, and talk about the too often forgotten and ignored contributions of indigenous culture to Louisiana culture.

This week we talk about giving poems titles. What strategies are there to titling poems? Why might a poet decide not to title their poems? How do titles set reader expectations?

Poet Zena Smith joins us to talk about 6 poets that are lesser known, and we read some of their poetry: Frank Stanford, Kate Sopko, David Schubert, Mike Lala, Matthew Timmons, and Corrado Costa.

This week is all about sonnets, both traditional and modern. We read and talk about sonnets by John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, John Berryman, e.e. cummings, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, and Terrance Hayes.

Rapper #FFFFFF of Sex Party joins us this week to talk about how performing rap and poetry intersect, we read a couple poems from the used copy Of Jim Tate's Viper Jazz that I just got in the mail, and Makkos shares a collaborative poem that he and Xena Smith wrote.

Aime'SansSavant and Shadow Angelina, hosts of the Esoterotica Reading Series, join us this week to talk about their reading series and erotic poetry.

In this episode we are joined by special guests Sidney Manuel and David Moss of the Parking Lot Movie Podcast to review another poetry flick: Alejandro Jodorowsky's Endless Poetry. Spoilers abound, so if you plan on watching the movie, watch it before you listen.  

Caroline Zimmer, poet and bartender, joins us to talk about 6 poets that are lesser known, and we read some of their poetry: Hannah Weiner, Paul Klee, Henri Michaux, Richard Hugo, Bernard Heidsieck, and Albert Goldbarth.

This week Todd Cirillo joins us to talk about his belief that poetry should be fun and accessible and that poets should be at home in barrooms, bowling alleys and truck stops. We discuss what accessibility in poetry might mean, what could be different about poetry readings, and how to expand poetry's audience, and Todd shares some of his own poems and some poems by other poets that he loves.  

This week poet Lauren Burgess joins us to talk about her experience of making a videopoem, what videopoetry is, and all the aesthetic opportunities videopoetry offers as a medium.

This week we are back in the studio and talking about how to revise poetry, why revision is important, and what revision really means. 

In Episode 66, we share with you some poetry recordings from earlier in July at the monthly Poetry Buffet, held on the first Saturday of every month and hosted by past guest and poet Gina Ferrara.

For episode 65, we share recordings from a poetry extravaganza at Siberia in New Orleans earlier this month organized by past guest Bernard Pearce, including poetry by Bernard and Laura Mattingly and music by Jim Trainer, Jerry Linder, and Lee Tiger & the broken blues band.

Rosalyn Spencer, writer and editor of Rigorous Magazine, joins us to talk about 6 poets that are lesser known, and we read some of their poetry: William Corbett, Pat Parker, Joan Murray, Carlyle Reedy, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Adam Cornford.

In this episode we look at the psychological research into higher rates of suicide among those in  creative professions, especially poets, and why that might be. We look at the "Sylvia Plath effect," Janusian thinking, and the problematic romanticization of suicide among writers. We also celebrate and share the poetry of some poets who killed themselves, including Hart Crane, Lew Welch, Sylvia Plath, Elise Cowen, Richard Brautigan. The outro music for this episode is Songs for Sylvia Plath Volume 1 by Jeff Pagano Finding A Mental Health ProfessionalNational Alliance on Mental Health New Orleans

In Episode 62 poet and editor Jonathan Penton joins us to talk about online literary magazines, publishing, and the 2oth anniversary of Unlikely Stories, then shares a couple of poems about his time in a nunnery in Toledo and how he found America in Juarez.  

While in Cleveland, Joseph Makkos visited R.A. 'Rafiq' Washington at "Guide to Kulcher" and conversed about DIY publishing, the current state of Cleveland, poetry's place in the shifting culture, and his forthcoming book of poetry from Outlandish Press, Black Eunuch.

Joseph M. is in his hometown of Cleveland this week, and he sits down at a Greek diner with  Zena Smith and Kyle J. Osborne of Outlandish Press, to talk about printing, making books, and Zena shares some poetry from her new chapbook.

A lot of people think poets read in an unnatural voice dubbed "Poet Voice." We talk about a new study that claims to have figured out what "Poet Voice" is by analyzing recordings of 100 poets. We talk about the study, what it means, and what it really says about the way poetry is performed.