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In this episode we discussed three very different poems by Oregon poet Lorna Rose, all three resulting in juicy conversation and resulting in three tie-breakers (none of them involving the same voting configurations amongst our team!). This was a big first for us. The episode was kicked off by a larger discussion (prompted by the first poem) around aspects of cultural appropriation and touched on facets of trauma and language. This wide-ranging discussion and the split in our voting pointed to the power and ambiguity of various elements in these poems. In the end, a tie-breaking editor helped deliver two of these poems into PBQ's pages! Have a listen! Note: This episode was recorded in December 2021, so there will be a bit of time travel involved. This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Alex Tunney Absentee voter for the tie-breakers: Samanatha Neugebauer Links to things we discuss you might like to check out: "Declaration" by Tracy K. Smith, an erasure poem of the Declaration of Independence https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147468/declaration-5b5a286052461 "Native Son" by Richard Wright https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/07/20/the-hammer-and-the-nail "Appropriate: A Provocation" by Paisley Rekdal https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324003588 "How-To" by Anders Carlson Wee and retraction by The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-to/ "Inside Kate Winlset's Mare of Easttown" Pennsylvania Accent, Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/04/kate-winslet-mare-of-easttown-accent Lorna is a Pacific Northwest writer and speaker. Her narrative nonfiction and poetry have been recognized by Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Oregon Poetry Association, and have appeared or are forthcoming in Scary Mommy, Jellyfish Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Writers Resist, and elsewhere. She's also a speaker and workshop leader. When not wrangling her two small children, she fantasizes about being interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air. Author website Leaving Libya I flood my lungs with the wet stench of fish and bodies and fuel. Dinghy motor whines against the night. Salt air grinds my skin ‘til it's threadbare and there's no sitting since leaving Sabratha. Body clenches tight to its bones and shrill muscles shriek and weep and lock up. Damp t-shirt clings to goosebumped flesh under a tattered orange life jacket. But what life? Next to me a shaking woman holds her boney baby and cries. She has shit herself. Behind me a man mumbles and mumbles for water. His eyes roll hollow, mouth slacks open. From his breath I smell the thick stink of rot, the gray smell of forgotten humanity. Lights of the Italian coastline appear and my heart races, vision blurs. From somewhere behind there's a jolt. Yelling. Floor tilts. And the lights of Lampedusa go black. Surviving the Rush No music plays in the general store in Circle, Alaska, which is full of mukluks and Wonder Bread. Villagers fish the Yukon, memorize river rise, bet on breakup. Long ago miners arrived from Outside to sift, chip rip fortunes from earth. Stilts were drilled into permafrost and structures were imposed and all bustle and rage. Then claims fell dry and no patience and Circle started to wither. The locals picked up pieces of buildings, tried to heal the pock-marked ground. Today a tourist's crisp dollar might mean something, except the locals would have to tolerate the perfumey tourist. Villagers fish the Yukon, memorize river rise, bet on breakup. The soil smells of fool's gold and blood.
Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of DISEASE OF KINGS, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in October 2023. He is also the author of THE LOW PASSIONS (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and DYNAMITE (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, BuzzFeed, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, and many other publications, including several issues of Rattle. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Camargo Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Napa Valley Writers' Conference, he is the winner of the Poetry International Prize. Visit Anders online at: https://www.anderscarlsonwee.com/ Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214 As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/ This Week's Prompt: Write a haibun that mentions time. Next Week's Prompt: Pick an inanimate object and trace the evolution of your relationship with it throughout your life. Title it with the name of that object. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
In which poets Edgar Kunz, the author of *Tap Out*, and Anders Carlson-Wee, the author of *The Low Passions*, consider influence and camaraderie—the ways in which their friendship has shaped their writing practices and their first books.
Today we talk (and laugh a lot) with poet Ayokunle Falomo, known to his Slam poetry friends and fans as Ayo. We chat about the inspiration for his urgent and iconic poem “Blk Boy Joy.” Ayo schools us on the question of how we as writers should appeal to young readers. *Answer: start by listening to them. And all your questions about cultural appropriation and shitty poetry will be answered, well, asked. "“My smile, like my mother’s laughter, is an act of defiance.” -- Ayonkunle Falomo, from his poem Blk Boy JoySuggested readings & also mentioneds: Ayokunle Falomo’s 2013 TedX talkReading his poem “on power“ on Houston Public Media’s “Houston Matters”Performing his poem “And what is a black body”The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin ZanderThe Invitation, The Call, & The Dance by Oriah Mountain DreamerControversy surrounding Anders Carlson-Wee’s “How To” (and The Nation’s editorial apology for publishing it) vs. Ai Ogawa persona poetry Donte Collins’ “The Autopsy”THIS IS THE THING AYO TELLS US WE NEED: Brave New Voices competition featuring Team Meta-Four and Sacramento #wordsnotwallsFollow Ayokunle on twitter @AFalomo and Instagram @MrAFalomoBuy his books Kin.dread and Thread This Wordweaver Must here and here.
In 2015, President Obama described the Nation as “more than a magazine—it’s a crucible of ideas.” If it was ever entitled to this descriptor, it isn’t anymore. Academic identity politics may be importing an obsession with phantom victimhood into the business world and the media, but The Nation’s editors are now taking aim at language itself, reducing the complexity of human communication to a primitive understanding of words. In late July, the magazine’s poetry editors issued a groveling apology for a poem they had published earlier that month. “How-To,” by Anders Carlson-Wee, was an ironic critique of social hierarchies, couched as a manual for successful panhandling: “If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,/say you’re pregnant,” the poem opened. It went on to suggest begging gambits for other presumed outsider groups, including the handicapped: “If you’re crippled don’t/flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough/Christians to notice.” The poem, in its entirety, reads as follows: If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl, say you’re pregnant—nobody gonna lower themselves to listen … The post The Death of the Author and the End of Empathy appeared first on Quillette.
Episode 1 // The Train-Hopping Poets On this first episode of "This Exonian Life," we have brothers Kai and Anders Carlson-Wee. Their documentary film, Riding the Highline, chronicles a freight-hopping trip the two took in 2015 from Minnesota to the Cascade Mountains. They sat down to talk with us in February to talk about their love of in-line skating, how they first began writing poetry, tips and tricks they shared about freight-hopping, and their disastrous first attempt at making the film! Check out the the movie and the brothers' poetry at ridingthehighline.com. If you want to listen to the music we used and want to learn more about us, come visit us at our website thisexonianlife.org! This Exonian Life is unaffiliated with Phillips Exeter Academy and is created and produced by Nick Song, Class of 2018. Find out more on the This Exonian Life website.
Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled. Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On a cross-country train trip, brothers Kai and Anders armed themselves with a video camera, a secret language of bird calls, and minds tuned to verse. Watch the coal-dust cook in the wind-eddies. Watch it linger. Watch it spiral thinly as it bruises the blue-faded mind of the buffalo sky. We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness. The cargo worth carrying across the distances. There is not a single moment where it is safe to pull yourself from the collection, not a moment to disengage with shifting landscape, memory, and the ruthless bonds of family. This chapbook will make you want to write and remind you of when this country was experienced viscerally, when we refused the lure of complacent stasis and chased pure adventure. Watch their video here and wish them well at the Nappa Valley Film Festival next month: “Riding the Highline.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled. Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On a cross-country train trip, brothers Kai and Anders armed themselves with a video camera, a secret language of bird calls, and minds tuned to verse. Watch the coal-dust cook in the wind-eddies. Watch it linger. Watch it spiral thinly as it bruises the blue-faded mind of the buffalo sky. We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness. The cargo worth carrying across the distances. There is not a single moment where it is safe to pull yourself from the collection, not a moment to disengage with shifting landscape, memory, and the ruthless bonds of family. This chapbook will make you want to write and remind you of when this country was experienced viscerally, when we refused the lure of complacent stasis and chased pure adventure. Watch their video here and wish them well at the Nappa Valley Film Festival next month: “Riding the Highline.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled. Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On a cross-country train trip, brothers Kai and Anders armed themselves with a video camera, a secret language of bird calls, and minds tuned to verse. Watch the coal-dust cook in the wind-eddies. Watch it linger. Watch it spiral thinly as it bruises the blue-faded mind of the buffalo sky. We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness. The cargo worth carrying across the distances. There is not a single moment where it is safe to pull yourself from the collection, not a moment to disengage with shifting landscape, memory, and the ruthless bonds of family. This chapbook will make you want to write and remind you of when this country was experienced viscerally, when we refused the lure of complacent stasis and chased pure adventure. Watch their video here and wish them well at the Nappa Valley Film Festival next month: “Riding the Highline.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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