PoemTalk at the Writers House

The group convenes for a special live session on the late Tyrone Williams's "Charon on the Potomac."

The group gathers in the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss Rae Armantrout's "Further Thought" and "Here I Go."

The group gathers in the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss Lewis Warsh's "Polar Night."

The group gathers in the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss June Jordan's "Financial Planning" and "Song of the Law Abiding Citizen."

The group gathers in the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two versions of Callie Gardener's "Culture Warrior."

The group gathers in the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss a six-page section from Harryette Mullen's Open Leaves, called "Chasing Dirt."

The group gathers in the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two poems from Trish Salah's Lyric Sexology Volume 1.

The group gathers in the Writers House's Arts Cafe for a special live taping to discuss two poems by Evie Shockley.

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two poems by Edward Denby: "Subway" and "Ciampino envoi."

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss three poems from Larry Price's 1/0.

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss four of Marjorie Welish's "Textiles."

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss Hart Crane's "The Harbor Dawn," as performed by Tennessee Williams.

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss "The Austrian Maiden" and "Joe Brainard's Painting Bingo" by Richard Padgett.

The PoemTalk team travels to Scotland for a discussion at the Fruitmarket Arts Center in Edinburgh on two poems by Veronica Forrest-Thomson.

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss Ariana Raines's "To the Reader," from A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019).

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two poems by Owen Dodson: "For Billie Holiday" and "Sorrow Is The Only Faithful One."

The group gathers in the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss Horace Gregory's "Chorus for Survival" nos. 5 and 11.

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two Kenward Elmslie pieces, "Core Bonus" and "One Night Stand."

The group gathers for a live session in the Kelly Writers House's Arts Cafe to discuss the eponymous piece from Aldon Nielson's book Tray (Make Now Press, 2017).

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss Gregory Corso's 1969 performance of "Vision of Rotterdam."

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss Ted Pearson's 1987 book-length poem, Catenary Odes.

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two "Love Poems" by Mina Loy, from a recording and interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Von Dias in 1965.

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss a version of Tina Darragh's "Wire Boxes" performed at the Line Reading Series in New York in February of 2001.

The team hits the road and lands in Los Angeles at the home of Marjorie Perloff, where the group gathers to discuss two well-known poems by Frank O'Hara: "Poem" or "Lana Turner Has Collapsed!" and "Song (Is it Dirty)."

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss John Giorno's 1977 poem, "Everyone is a complete disappointment."

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss an excerpt from Dodie Bellamy's Vomit Journal.

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two poems from Douglas Kearney's SHO (Wave Books, 2021): "Welter" and "Static."

The group gathers at the Writers House to discuss Hoa Nguyen's "Long Light," collected in Red Juice: Poems, 1998-2008 (Wave Books, 2014).

The group travels to the Poetry Foundation in Chicago to discuss seven short poems from Lisa Fishman's Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020).

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two poems by Armand Schwarner: "Tablet XXV" and "'daddy, can you staple these two stars together to make an airplane?'"

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss Matvei Yankelevich's book of poems (or book-length poem), Dead Winter (Fonograph, 2022).

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio to discuss two poems by Maggie O'Sullivan, "To our Own Day" and "Hill Figures," from In the House of the Shaman (Reality Street, 1993).

The group gathers at the Writers House's Wexler Studio for a fresh take on John Ashbery's iconic "Some Trees."

The group travels to Bard College in the Hudson Valley to discuss the two opening paragraph's from Joan Retallack's essay "The Poethical Wager."

The group gathers at the Kelly Writers House to discuss four poems from Sawako Nakayasu's Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020).

In this episode, the group gathers to discuss a selection of poems from Divya Victor's book Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021): three poems from the titular "Curb" series in the middle of the book ("Curb" 3, 4, and 5) and another poem, "Frequency (Alka's Testimony)."

In this episode, we talk about two prose poems in Harryette Mullen's collection Sleeping with the Dictionary, published by California in 2002. The poems are “Dim Lady” and the title poem, “Sleeping with the Dictionary.”

In this episode, our discussion takes us to the great Ostashevskyan topics — knowledge otherwise somehow alienated; language that embodies or transliterates a kind of violence; the (sound) differences between knowing and saying no (and similarities); his sincere (and doubtless Russian Absurdist-influenced) plea to “teach us love / teach us love / teach us love / teach us love” even though “We are wholly unfamiliar with it.” Because the episode was recorded before the February 24, 2022, Russian military invasion into Ukraine, listeners will have to reckon for themselves the many places in our conversation when we would no doubt have commented on the war (continuing at the time of the podcast's release) and on the role of the avant-garde Russian American poet in relation to Russian cultures historical and contemporary.

In this episode, the group discusses three poems from Diane di Prima's 'Revolutionary Letters' project: #16 (“We are eating up the planet”), #19 (“If what you want is jobs”), and #27 (“How much can we afford to lose before we win”). The project's goals and modes of address shifted over time. Any single letter-poem, read separately from the others, might seem definitive — tonally evincing ideological as well as poetic choices having been made with apparent finality. Our decision to read and listen to three poems, forming a small sampler of the Letters, helped us understand and, through this hour-long chat, to convey the project's quality as overall a series of variations; each thus is an instance of ways of thinking about poems' social efficacy.

Al Filreis convenes Charles Bernstein, Anthony Elms, and Laynie Browne to talk about two poems by George Quasha. The book, published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2020, titled Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole, consists of eight gatherings of preverbs; our two poems, coming from the final section — which bears the name of the book — are “self fast” (numbered 12) and “that music razors through” (numbered 13). The recordings we use in this episode can be found on PennSound's extensive Quasha author page. These preverbs were recorded by Chris Funkhouser on December 27, 2017.

Today we are releasing episode #168 of PoemTalk, in which Amber Rose Johnson, Daniel Bergmann, and Yolanda Wisher meet up at the Kelly Writers House to talk with Al Filreis about Jayne Cortez's "She Got He Got". This poem/performance piece is comprised of a “She” half and an “He” half, she giving variations of hot, while he instantiates variations of cold.

Today we are releasing episode #167 of PoemTalk, in which Jack Giesking, Jonathan Dick, and erica kaufman meet up at the Kelly Writers House to talk with Al Filreis about Myung Mi Kim's "And Sing We" from Under Flag.

Today's episode dives into Cecilia Vicuña's 'Colliding and not colliding at the same time'. The performance begins as the audience, having been encouraged to ask questions about an art video that had just been screened, went momentarily silent. No questions were being asked, so Vicuña began improvisationally to fill the room with words and sounds, exploring a convergence or collision of topics: the then-recent election of Donald Trump, the “millionaires' coup” in Brazil, the “mystery of what is happening at this moment in the earth,” the collective thought of the people in the room, and the room itself. Edwin Torres, Huda Fakhreddine, and Jena Osman joined Al Filreis in the Arts Café at the Kelly Writers House to record this episode.

Today, we talk about a poem by Stephen Collis that appeared in his book, A History of the Theories of Rain, published by Talonbooks in Vancouver in 2021. The poem is titled “Yes I Do Want to Punch” — and perhaps should be called “Yes I Do Want to Punch / fascists in the face,” proceeding to its key first line. The eco-poetic turn — an urgent one, although it can also be read as casual, even patient — from the power of a counter-violent radical reaction to a sweet comic catalogue of warblers occurs right at the beginning of the poem. One has no time to get one's readerly bearings.

This episode discusses a three-page section of Leslie Scalapino's “‘Can't' is ‘Night'” — the passage having been chosen by the poet for It's Go in Horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006. Close listening and close reading: surely some manner of these, both, are required by every Leslie Scalapino work. The PoemTalk group sought to respect this in the very way in which they moved through the poem's nonsequential parts and themes and offering of language problems. The poem is utterly political and supremely theoretical at once. No orderly proceeding through the poem beginning to end, nor any confident sense of the poem's tone (about its borrowing of words and phrases), would disclose those remarkable qualiies. So, called upon by the poem's “dis-placing” of its own parts, the group ventures toward its front lines, and then back again behind them. What “can't” this poet do?

This episode features a poem by Daphne Marlatt called “Steveston, B.C.” We were joined by Davy Knittle, Jane Robbins Mize, and Karis Shearer. The poem is in a sense — although not quite exactly — the title poem in a much-admired book published in 1974.

This episode presents a remarkable — freewheeling, energetic, yet comprehensive — discussion of a remarkable artist, Tuli Kupferberg. We considered two works by Tuli: “Morning, Morning,” among the most famous songs performed by The Fugs; and one of Tuli's spoken-word pieces or “pop poems,” titled “No Deposit, No Return.”

The group convenes over Zoom to discuss Sarah Dowling's Entering Sappho (Coach House, 2020).

The group convenes over Zoom to discuss two well-known sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, "I Shall Forget You Presently" and "Love Is Not All." (Coach House, 2020).

Stephen Ratcliffe, Joanne Kyger and Julia Bloch join Al Filreis in Bolinas, California to discuss Philip Whalen's "Life at Bolinas. The Last of California".

Siobhan Phillips, Emily Harnett, and Joseph Massey join Al Filreis to discuss Kate Colby's "I Mean"