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A new Craftwork conversation with Maggie Smith, bestselling author of Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, available from Washington Square Press. Smith's other books includeYou Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, Goldenrod, Keep Moving, and My Thoughts Have Wings. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received a Pushcart Prize, and numerous grants and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch Instagram TikTok Bluesky Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“I turn to the poem, I turn to the page for a sense of hope, how to move through life, how to get through a day,” says Danusha Laméris. “I have come to a place where I trust the poem more than I trust myself.” In our second conversation with the award-winning poet, (We also interviewed her in Episode 29 on “the understory”), she shares from her newest collection, Blade by Blade, and we talk about how a writing practice grows us, how it allows us to “salvage time,” and how it helps us see how connected we other with the past and with others.Danusha Laméris' first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. A Pushcart Prize recipient, some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and the winner of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was selected for the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. She is on the faculty of Pacific University's Low Residency MFA program. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe
The queens dish this year's AWP Conference!Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Notes: The Association of Writers and Writing Programs can be found online at www.awpwriter.org Marcela Fuentes is the author of the award-winning novel Malas and you can find her online at https://www.marcelafuentes.comCheck out the exhibit Flesh World at Central Server Works, showcasing paintings by Monica Berger and Sofia Heftersmith.Julie Marie Wade's The Mary Yearsis a novella which won The 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, selected by Michael Martone.Purchase a copy of the Maureen Seaton tribute book When I Was StraightCheck out "From the Motel-By-the-Hour" (originally in The Iowa Review) from Nancy K. Pearson's book Two Minutes of Light from Perugia here.Claire J. Bateman's book is The Pillow Museum, available from the University of Alabama PressJen Jabaily-Blackburn's Girl in a Bear Suit won the Elixir Press Award. Buy it from her on her website: https://www.jenjabailyblackburn.comEmily Lee Luan won the Nightboat Poetry Prize for Return. Visit her website here.More information about the Civitella Ranieri Foundation can be found here. James's Best American Poetry 2025 selection is called "Inheritance at Corresponding Periods of Life, at Corresponding Seasons of the Year, as Limited by Sex" originally published in Adroit Journal.
Please join Julie Murphy as she chats with Santa Cruz County's new Poet Laureate, Nancy Miller Gomez, about poetry in the jails and her plans to bring poetry to our community. Nancy reads Ruth Stone's poem, Another Feeling, and talks about the importance of paying attention and how daily observations, memories and current events can ease the challenge of facing a blank page. Listen to Nancy read poems from her stunning debut collection Inconsolable Objects.Nancy Miller Gomez is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books) and Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, LitHub, Rattle, New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, Verse Daily, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Jentel Foundation. Gomez co-founded Poetry in the Jails, an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails, the Juvenile Hall and as part of Cornell University's Prison Education Program. She earned a B.A. from The University of California, San Diego, a J.D. from the University of San Diego and a Master in Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University. Originally from Kansas she now lives with her family in Northern California and is thrilled to have recently been appointed Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County. She is currently working on a second collection of poems and a collection of personal essays.Don't miss the Poet Laureate Celebration at Bookshop Santa Cruz featuring Nancy Miller Gomez and Farnaz Fatemi. April 14, 7-9 PM.
192 To celebrate the release of Maggie Smith's new guidebook for writers called Dear Writer: Pep Talks and Practical Advice for a Creative Life, we're bringing back this beloved chat with Maggie about writing, self-trust, and life in the ellipsis! ---What do we do when the future we thought we'd have is wiped clean, and we're stuck in uncertainty? Bestselling author Maggie Smith joins us to talk about life in the in-between and how, even when we're at a loss, we can still trust ourselves. She also explores the writerly decisions she made in her most recent bestseller (and one of Nadine's favorite books of all time), You Could Make This Place Beautiful. She closes the conversation with incredible writing advice that will make you want to grab a pen and start writing. Covered in this episode:How to find beauty, even when our lives change in unexpected waysThe difference between a midlife crisis and midlife recoveryHow to turn up the volume of our inner voice and act on itThe wise women who've inspired Maggie & Nadine in life and in writingWhy writing hard things is actually enjoyable Why Maggie wrote her story in real-time rather than waitingWhat has and hasn't changed since the publication of You Could Make This Place Beautiful Maggie's favorite small pleasure–how she's treating herself well Want more Maggie? Grab a copy of You Could Make This Place Beautiful (now out in paperback), subscribe to her popular Substack For Dear Life, and preorder her forthcoming book, Dear Writer (April, 2025).Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.About Nadine:Nadine Kenney Johnstone is a holistic writing coach who helps women develop and publish their stories. She is the proud founder of WriteWELL, an online community that helps women reclaim their writing time, put pen to page, and get published. The authors in her community have published countless books and hundreds of essays in places like The New York Times, Vogue, The Sun, The Boston Globe, Longreads, and more. Her infertility memoir, Of This Much I'm Sure, was named book of the year by the...
Maggie Smith returns to Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about letting imposter syndrome go, fiercely guarding your interior life, getting back to the core place where creativity thrives, rewriting a book from scratch, how writing feels in the body, swerving out of your creative lane, battling the sophomore slump, what it feels like to be watched, when ego gets in the way, fears of paralyzing failure, playing the long game, the best advice she ever got, staying agile and awake in the creative process, and her new book Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life. Ronit's first interview with Maggie Smith: https://ronitplank.com/2023/04/11/lets-talk-memoir-episode-38-ft-maggie-smith/ Also in this episode: -the inner critic -assembling a book freestyle -tenacity and grit Books mentioned in this episode: Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Allison The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow by Steve Almond Greywolf Press series “The Art of…” books Maggie Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books of poetry and prose, including You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir (One Signal/Atria, 2023); My Thoughts Have Wings, illustrated by Leanne Hatch (Balzer+Bray/Harperkids, 2024); Goldenrod: Poems (One Signal/Atria, 2021); Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Atria, 2020); and Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017). Smith's next book is Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, forthcoming from One Signal/Atria in April 2025. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, AGNI, Ploughshares, Image, the Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2016 her poem "Good Bones" went viral internationally; since then it has been translated into nearly a dozen languages and featured on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary. Smith has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. – Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Subscribe to Ronit's Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll's Fingers
Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown's first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry.
Keetje Kuipers is the author of four books of poems, all from BOA Editions. Her most recent collection, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), was the winner of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, was selected by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Named one of the top ten debut poetry books of 2010 by Poets & Writers, her first book also appeared in the top ten on the contemporary poetry bestseller list. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail (2014), was a book club selection for The Rumpus, and her third book, All Its Charms (2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Find more information at: https://keetjekuipers.com/ As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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 poem about a time that you carried more than you ever thought possible, and include a reference to temperature. Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that references small talk in a big way. 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.
Inner Moonlight is the monthly poetry reading series for the Wild Detectives in Dallas. The in-person show is the second Wednesday of every month in the Wild Detectives backyard. We love our podcast fans, so we release recordings of the live performances every month for y'all! On Friday 2/21/25, we featured poet Rachel Richardson to launch her newest collection, Smother (W. W. Norton, 2025), joined by Dallas poets Nomi Stone and Tarfia Faizullah.Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother, just out from W. W. Norton, and two previous books of poems, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave, from the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and an NEA Fellow, and her poems have appeared in the New York Times, APR, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Bay Area and teaches in the MFA program at St. Mary's College of California. She is also currently in training as a wildland firefighter.Poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone is the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019), finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and the ethnography Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire, first prize in the Middle East Studies Award from the American Anthropological Association and three other national prizes. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Stone's poems recently appear in The Atlantic, The Nation, Best American Poetry, POETRY Magazine, and American Poetry Review. Stone was most recently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Anthropology at Princeton and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas.Tarfia Faizullah writes books and teaches poetry at UNT.www.innermoonlightpoetry.com
Meghan O'Rourke is a writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022); the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and the poetry collections Sun In Days (2017), which was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year; Once (2011); and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain's Forward First Book Prize. O'Rourke is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. Currently the editor of The Yale Review, she began her career as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. She is a graduate of Yale University, where she also teaches. Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.
Nancy Miller Gomez grew up in Kansas, but currently lives in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology and her chapbook, Punishment, was published as part of the Rattle chapbook series. She has worked as a waitress, a stable hand, an attorney, and a television producer. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails and the Juvenile Hall. She has a B.A. from The University of California, San Diego, a J.D. from the University of San Diego and a Master in Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University. She is currently working on a collection of personal essays. Her first full-length poetry manuscript is now available from YesYes Books.
Donald Platt is the author of eight volumes of poetry, most recently Swansdown (Grid Books, 2022). His poems have appeared in many journals, including The New Republic, Nation, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000, 2006, and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three Pushcart Prizes, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, two Verna Emery Poetry Prizes, and the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize. He's been a professor in Purdue University's English Department since 2000. Find the Swansdown here: https://www.grid-books.org/donald-platt As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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 poem in which something is overfilled. Include as many tactile details as possible. Next Week's Prompt: Think of a word that transports you back to childhood, and give the poem that title. 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.
Today's poem offers an incisive analogy for analogies. Happy reading.A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile(1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.Stallings's poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”Stallings's latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2023, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos.-bio via Poetry Foundation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
SPREZZATURA, Christopher Buckley's 30th book, is due from Lynx House Press, January 2025. The sense of place in these poems-- whether its the foggy cliffs above the sea or the street of Fresno-- is vivid and immediate. Buckley examines friendship and the inevitability of change as he braids grief, love, and hope in these poems, many of which are dedicated to the great Fresno poets including Phillip Levine, Larry Levis and Peter Everewine. Chris opens the show with two Everwine poems and discusses the book of interviews and essays he edited, "Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets." Christopher Buckley's work was selected for Best American Poetry 2021; he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two NEA grants, a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing, and four Pushcart Prizes. Recent books are—One Sky to the Next, winner of the Longleaf Press book Prize for 2022—Agnostic (Lynx House Press), The Pre-Eternity of the World (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), and The Consolations of Science & Philosophy (Lynx House Press). Star Journal: Selected Poems was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2016. He has edited over a dozen critical collections and anthologies, most recently NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS—Interviews & Essays; Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California (with Gary Young) Alcatraz Editions, 2008; with Alexander Long, A CONDITION OF THE SPIRIT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF LARRY LEVIS. Again co-edited with Gary Young, Lynx House Press published, One for the Money: the Sentence as a Poetic Form. With Jon Veinberg, he edited MESSENGER TO THE STARS: A LUIS OMAR SALINAS NEW SELECTED POEMS & READER, published by Tebot Bach in 2014.
Mark Strand was born on Canada's Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a BA from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook Prize and the Bergin Prize. After receiving his BFA degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his MA from the University of Iowa.Strand was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives(Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968).Strand also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005); The Golden Ecco Anthology (Ecco, 1994); The Best American Poetry 1991; and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, co-edited with Charles Simic (HarperCollins, 1976).Strand's honors included the Bollingen Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.Strand served as poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995 to 2000. He taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.Mark Strand died at eighty years old on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Craig Arnold, born November 16, 1967 was an American poet and professor. His first book of poems, Shells (1999), was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His many honors include the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell. He taught poetry at the University of Wyoming. His poems have appeared in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 1998 and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, and in literary journals including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, The New Republic and The Yale Review. Arnold grew up in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Arnold's Made Flesh won the 2009 High Plains Book Award and the 2008 Utah Book Award.In 2009, Arnold traveled to Japan to research volcanoes for a planned book of poetry. In April of that year, he disappeared while hiking on the island of Kuchinoerabujima. In the New York Times, the poet David Orr mourned the loss of Arnold, but noted it would “be a mistake to think of him as a writer silenced before his prime... His shelf space may be smaller than one would wish, but he earned every bit of it.”-bio via Copper Canyon Press and Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
A new 'Craftwork' episode about how to write a poem. My guest is Matthew Zapruder, author of the poetry collection I Love Hearing Your Dreams, available from Scribner. Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, including Come on All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Father's Day; Why Poetry; and Story of a Poem, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. His poetry has been adapted and performed by Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider and Attacca Quartet at Carnegie Hall and San Francisco Performances and was the libretto for Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece by Missy Mazzoli commissioned for the Ecstatic Music Festival at Carnegie Hall. He was Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022, and from 2016 to 2017, he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the weekly Poetry Column for TheNew York Times Magazine. He lives with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is editor at large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at Saint Mary's College of California. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch Twitter Instagram TikTok Bluesky Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bob Hicok was born in 1960 in Michigan and worked for many years in the automotive die industry. A published poet long before he earned his MFA, Hicok is the author of several collections of poems, including The Legend of Light, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry in 1995 and named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year; Plus Shipping (1998); Animal Soul (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Insomnia Diary (2004); This Clumsy Living (2007), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress; Words for Empty, Words for Full (2010); Elegy Owed (2013), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Sex & Love (2016). His work has been selected numerous times for the Best American Poetry series. Hicok has won Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught creative writing at Western Michigan University and Virginia Tech.When asked by interviewer Laura McCullough about the relationship between restraint and revelation in his work, Hicok replied, “Because I don't know where a poem is headed when I start, it seems that revelation has to play a central part in the poems, that what I'm most consistently doing is trying to understand why something is on my mind… Maybe writing is nothing more than an inquiry into presences.” Hicok is currently associate professor of creative writing at Purdue University.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
172 What do we do when the future we thought we'd have gets wiped clean, and we're stuck in uncertainty? Bestselling author Maggie Smith joins us to talk about life in the in-between and how, even when we're at a loss, we can still trust ourselves. She also explores the writerly decisions she made in her most recent bestseller (and one of Nadine's favorite books of all time), You Could Make This Place Beautiful. She closes the conversation with incredible writing advice that will make you want to grab a pen and start writing. Covered in this episode:How to find beauty, even when our lives change in unexpected waysThe difference between a midlife crisis and midlife recoveryHow to turn up the volume of our inner voice and act on itThe wise women who've inspired Maggie & Nadine in life and in writingWhy writing hard things is actually enjoyable Why Maggie wrote her story in real-time rather than waitingWhat has and hasn't changed since the publication of You Could Make This Place Beautiful Maggie's favorite small pleasure–how she's treating herself well Want more Maggie? Grab a copy of You Could Make This Place Beautiful (now out in paperback), subscribe to her popular Substack For Dear Life, and preorder her forthcoming book, Dear Writer (April, 2025).Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.About Nadine:Try a WriteWELL class for free on Nov 18!Nadine Kenney Johnstone is a holistic writing coach who helps women develop and publish their stories. She is the proud founder of WriteWELL, an online community that helps women reclaim their writing time, put pen to page, and get published. The authors in her community have published countless books and hundreds of essays in places like The New York Times, Vogue, The Sun, The Boston Globe, Longreads, and more. Her infertility memoir, Of This Much I'm Sure, was named book of the year by the Chicago Writer's Association. Her latest book,
Join our poetry Salon and Open Mic: https://parallax-media-network.mn.co/share/5hSLvQW7bNszFGEo?utm_source=manual About Joe Ross Author of over fifteen books of poetry, Joe Ross was born in Pennsylvania and graduated magna cum laude from the Honors Program at Temple University in Philadelphia. He soon moved thereafter to Washington, D.C. where he wrote his first book, Guards of the Heart, consisting of four plays written in poetic form. In Washington D.C., he worked at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and was extraordinarily active in the cultural scene of that city. He served as the President of the Board of the Poetry Committee at The Folger Shakespeare Library from 1994-1997 and as the Literary Editor of the arts bi-monthly The Washington Review from 1991-1997. He also Co-founded and directed the In Your Ear poetry reading series at the District of Columbia Arts Center. During these years Ross continued to publish poetry, including How to Write; or, I used to be in love with my jailer (Texture Press, 1992); An American Voyage (Sun & Moon Press, 1993); Push (Leave Books, 1994); De-flections (Potes and Poets, 1994); Full Silence (Upper Limit Music, 1995); and The Fuzzy Logic Series (Texture Press, 1996). His poetry reveals close links with the "Language" poets but seeks in its often disjunctive structure, puns, and linguistic riddles, to be accessible to a large audience. Many of Ross's poems are subliminally political while concerned with love and interrelations between individuals. The American Voyage, in particular, concerns the idealism of American culture and its failures as a culture to live up to those ideals. Douglas Messerli, Publisher of Sun & Moon Press In 1997 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award for his poetry and moved to San Diego, where he worked for The City of San Diego Commission's for Arts and Culture. In 1999, he left that position to put his poetics into practice, and to work directly in politics. He served as the Senior Chief of Policy for several elected officials. He also continued to be very active in the San Diego cultural scene, serving as a board member of the San Diego Art Institute and Co-founding and curating the Beyond the Page reading series in that city. Two more books appeared: The Wood Series (Seeing Eye Books, 1997); and EQUATIONS=equals (Green Integer, 2004). In 2003 he received his first of three Gertrude Stein Poetry Awards. In 2004, he moved to Paris, where he continues to publish while working in communication and social change. His most recent titles are: Strati (Bi-lingual Italian/English, La Camera Verde, 2007); Strata (Dusie Press, 2008); Wordlick (Green Integer, 2011); 1000 Folds (Chax Press, 2014); Last Days on Earth (Dusie Press, 2017); and History and its Making – The Making of History (Bi-lingual French/English, Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2017). Forthcoming, Where Was The Flag Before, (Chax Press, 2025). BOOKS : Guards of the Heart: Four Plays (Sun & Moon Press, 1990) How to Write; or, I used to be in love with my jailer (Texture Press, 1992) An American Voyage (Sun & Moon Press, 1993) Push (Leave Books, 1994) De-flections (Potes & Poets Press, 1994) Full Silence (Upper Limit Music Press, 1995) The Fuzzy Logic Series (Texture Press, 1996) The Wood Series (Seeing Eye Books, 1997) EQUATIONS =equals (Green Integer Press, 2004) Strati (Bi-lingual Italian/English, La Camera Verde, 2007) FRACTURED // Conections … (Bi-lingual Italian/English, La Camera Verde, 2008) Strata (Dusie Press, 2008) Wordlick (Green Integer, 2011) 1000 Folds (Chax Press, 2014) Threads in Time (Atelier de Villemorge, 2016 Livre d'artiste, gravures by Jacky Essirard) History and its Making – The Making of History, (Bi-lingual French/English, Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2017) Last Days on Earth, (Dusie Press, 2017) Where Was The Flag Before, (forthcoming, Chax Press, 2025) Anthologies: Debut Edition of - The Best American Poetry 1988, Scribner/MacMillan Publishing Company, John Ashbery Editor Writing From the New Coast, Oblek Press, Peter Gizzi Editor Hungry As We Are, An Anthology of Washington DC Poet, Washington Writers Publishing House, Ann Darr, editor PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century Vol 5. “Intersection – Innovative Poetry in Southern California, Green Integer Press; Douglas Messerli, Editor Honors: Gertrude Stein Poetry Awards, 2003, 2005, and 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, 1997 District of Columbia Commission for Arts and Humanities Grant Recipient, 1992 & 1997 International Who's Who in Poetry, Cambridge, ENGLAND
My guest today on the Online for Authors podcast is Tess Callahan, author of the book Dawnland. Tess Callahan is also the author of the novel April & Oliver. Her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Writer's Digest, National Public Radio, Agni, Narrative Magazine, AWP Notebook, Newsday, The Common, the Best American Poetry blog, and elsewhere. Her TEDx talk on creativity is titled, “The Love Affair Between Creativity & Constraint.” Tess is a graduate of Boston College and Bennington College Writing Seminars and teaches creative writing and meditation. She curates Muse-feed.com, a toolbox for aspiring writers. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, she lives in Cape Cod and Northern New Jersey with her family and number one life coach, her dog. In my book review, I stated Dawnland is a contemporary family life fiction filled to the brim with family secrets and misunderstandings. April has been friends with brothers Allen and Oliver since childhood. Al was bold, athletic, and always pushing boundaries. Oliver was quiet, studious, and always towing the line. April came from a bad home and though she loved Oliver, never felt she deserved him - even after they share their love for one another while in Ireland. In the end, April chooses Al, making the next fifteen years difficult, at best. The main portion of the story takes place during a one-week summer vacation on the Cape - something the family has done for years. Only this time, the pretense unravels and secrets come roaring out. The question is, who will survive unscathed when the dust settles? I loved this story and can't get April, Al, Meredith, Oliver, Hal, Beryl, and the children out of my mind. It's a great read. Subscribe to Online for Authors to learn about more great books! https://www.youtube.com/@onlineforauthors?sub_confirmation=1 Join the Novels N Latte Book Club community to discuss this and other books with like-minded readers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/3576519880426290 You can follow Author Tess Callahan Website: https://tesscallahan.com/ IG: @tess_callahan FB: @Tess Callahan X: @tesscallahan LinkedIn: @tess-callahan-james-4969227 Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2745954.Tess_Callahan Purchase Dawnland on Amazon: Paperback: https://amzn.to/3BlPJJG Ebook: https://amzn.to/4e8MfZR Teri M Brown, Author and Podcast Host: https://www.terimbrown.com FB: @TeriMBrownAuthor IG: @terimbrown_author X: @terimbrown1 #tesscallahan #dawnland #familyfiction #familylife #contemporaryfiction #terimbrownauthor #authorpodcast #onlineforauthors #characterdriven #researchjunkie #awardwinningauthor #podcasthost #podcast #readerpodcast #bookpodcast #writerpodcast #author #books #goodreads #bookclub #fiction #writer #bookreview *As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
We're revisiting our 2021 interview with the poet Jericho Brown, who this week was named a MacArthur Fellow-- one of the highest honors in the arts and humanities. He and Jordan talk about the great mystery of why we desire the things we desire; about oration and the poets he read and memorized as part of his own becoming; mitigating our impulses toward violence with tenderness, and more.Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown's first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Danusha Laméris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently on the faculty of Pacific University's low residency MFA program. Her third book, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.
Books discussed: The Best American Poetry of 2023, The Women, The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman, The Impossible Fortress Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
While we're on a brief recording hiatus, we have a re-issue of an episode from 2019, when our team took a rare look at a non-fiction piece by author Andrew Bertaina. It's great timing to take a fresh look at this episode, as earlier this year Bertaina published a collection of essays called “The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place”. Enjoy the episode and check out Bertaina's new collection! Welcome back to another Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile. Today we have an excellent episode with a bit of something different. After a set of introductions in which Marion gets out her glue gun the gang dives right into a piece of non-fiction by Andrew Bertaina labeled “The Offering”. Andrew Bertaina's work has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications including: The Best American Poetry 2018, The ThreePenny Review, Tin House online, Redivider, Crab Orchard Review and Green Mountains Review. More of his work is available at www.andrewbertaina.com After an excellent reading by Kathleen, Tim describes how churches offer less of a sense of community these days; being more concerned with hellfire and crucifixion. Next, Marion describes how the piece offers a sense of timelessness while lamenting on her own exhaustion from various teaching duties. Marion contends that the piece allowed her to compose herself and gave her a sense of fulfillment. Samantha speaks a bit on curation, and how that differs from what is displayed on social media. Before voting Tim mentions how historically specific the piece is, and the idea of somebody that you used to know. Will this piece make the cut? Or will it fade into obscurity? The Offering At church this morning, I passed around a collection plate to gather up the scraps of all the people I have known. The bowl was silver and its size was like that of space. Inside, I found: a hike through a hailstorm in Colorado where blue jays where eating other bird's babies; I found an evening spent from midnight till morning talking about the way that I dreamed of divinity; I found a piece of a tetherball string, still wound tightly around a silver pole; I found a pocket of gummi worms, unopened, thrown in the trash can at recess; I found a small side yard where I dug for dinosaur bones; I found a picture with the words I love you written across the top; I found tears and tears, until I was swimming through all the tears, trying to remember why we are all such bizarre puzzles; I found a slip of paper with someone's e-mail on it that I threw in the trash; I found a cabin in the woods with a couch and a blanket; I found a picture of you standing with me in the same shirt I wore only two weeks ago, but it was more than a decade ago; I found that the years start to run together like water that you can't separate out the moments that you used to; I found pictures of people in wedding dresses and tuxedos, people that I used to know, and I smiled at their happy faces, because they made me happy when I knew them; I found a picture of San Francisco, stiff breezes off the bay, always so damn cold, and inside the picture was another picture of a hospital, and inside that hospital a memory of people who are now dust; I found an evening in the mountains of Santa Barbara, and a sunrise too; I found a picture of five of us sitting in a room talking about the ways in which we had failed, the ways in which we'd like to succeed; I found a picture of a piano and green couches; I found a picture of a mountain trail, pine trees and old bear scat; I found a picture of the ocean, of your hand in mine, before we glided together. I found a picture of a tower in Italy, a winding staircase leading to a view of some ancient city. I spent the evening afterward, sorting all these pictures into specific piles. Afternoons that could have lasted forever. Times I went to the ocean. Women that I have loved. Women that I did not have the time to get around to loving. People that I once knew. People that I used to know and wish I still knew. Avenues that I have walked down. Avenues that I wish I had walked down. Pictures of places that I am not remembering properly. After I was done organizing these moments, I wrote them all down on the computer screen, which flickered, in and out just like memory does. I know that thousands, millions, far more numerous than the stars, are still missing. I want you to know that I'm trying to remember all of you, despite the futility of it. I'm reaching out to the people I have known and the people I will know. I miss all of you already, so the next time you see me, let's meet, not was if we were strangers, but as people who have, for longer than they can remember, been very much in love.
Latest Spoken Label (Spoken Word / Poetry Podcast) features making her debut, Lynne Thompson. Lynne Thompson was Los Angeles' 2021-22 Poet Laureate and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Beg NoPardon, Start With A Small Guitar, and Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize, the George Drury Prize, as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series, Kenya, and the Vermont Studio Center. An attorney by training with a J.D. from Southwestern Law School.Thompson sits on the Boards of Cave Canem, The Poetry Foundation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In June 2022, she completed her four-year service as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. Thompson's recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Common, Pleiades, The Massachusetts Review, and Copper Nickel, among others. Her Website is the following: https://www.lynnethompson.us/
Tom's guest is Mary Jo Salter, a Professor Emerita in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She has published nine volumes of poetry and has written essays, lyrics, and children's books. This year, she's been chosen as the guest editor of an anthology of verse called The Best American Poetry 2024. Email us at midday@wypr.org, tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.
Mark Strand was born on Canada's Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a BA from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook Prize and the Bergin Prize. After receiving his BFA degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his MA from the University of Iowa.Strand was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives (Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968).Strand also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005); The Golden Ecco Anthology (Ecco, 1994); The Best American Poetry 1991; and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, co-edited with Charles Simic (HarperCollins, 1976).Strand's honors included the Bollingen Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.Strand served as poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995 to 2000. He taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.Mark Strand died at eighty years old on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Susan Terris began her writing career in children's fiction, publishing 21 books with major New York publishing houses before dedicating herself to poetry. Since then, she's published 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and 2 plays. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Susan is editor emerita of Spillway, former co-editor of Runes, and a poetry editor at Pedestal Magazine. For more, visit: www.susanterris.com As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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: Use the random feature on Wikipedia twice to find two articles. Write a poem about one of the topics, and use the other as the title. Next Week's Prompt: Find someone's last words, and use that as an epigraph in a poem where “death” is not mentioned by name. 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.
City Lights & Semiotext(e) celebrate the publication of "Stubble Archipelago" by Wayne Koestenbaum with a conversation between the author & Tausif Noor. Purchase here: https://citylights.com/stubble-archipelago/ Wild new adventures in word-infatuated flânerie from a celebrated literary provocateur. This book of thirty-six poetic bulletins by the humiliation-advice-giver Wayne Koestenbaum will teach you how to cruise, dream, decode a crowded consciousness, find nuggets of satisfaction in unaccustomed corners, & sew a language glove roomy enough to contain materials gathered while meandering. Koestenbaum wrote many of these poems while walking around New York City. He'd jot down phrases in a notebook or dictate them into his phone. At home, he'd incorporate these fragmented gleanings into overflowing quasi sonnets. Thus each poem functions as a coded diary entry, including specific references to sidewalk events & peripatetic perceptions. Flirting, remembering, eavesdropping, gazing, squeezing, sequestering: Koestenbaum invents a novel way to cram dirty liberty into the tight yet commodious space of the sonnet, a fourteen-lined cruise ship that contains ample suites for behavior modification, libidinal experiment, aura-filled memory orgies, psychedelic Bildungsromane, lap dissolves, archival plunges, & other mental saunterings that conjure the unlikely marriage of Kenneth Anger & Marianne Moore. Carnal pudding, anyone? These engorged lyrics don't rhyme; & though each builds on a carapace of fourteen lines, many of the lines spawn additional, indented tributaries, like hoop earrings dangling from the stanzas' lobes. Koestenbaum's poems are comic, ribald, compressed, symphonic. They take liberties with ordinary language, & open up new pockets for sensation in the sorrowing overcoat of the “now.” Stubble—a libidinal detail—matters when you're stranded on the archipelago of your most unsanctioned yet tenaciously harbored impulses. Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, novelist, artist, performer—has published nineteen books, including "The Queen's Throat," a groundbreaking study of sexuality & the human voice which was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Additional books to his credit include: "Camp Marmalade," "Notes on Glaze," "The Pink Trance Notebooks," "My 1980s & Other Essays," "Hotel Theory," "The Anatomy of Harpo Marx," "Humiliation," "Jackie Under My Skin," & "The Cheerful Scapegoat." His essays & poems have been widely published in periodicals & anthologies, including "The Best American Poetry," "The Best American Essays," The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Iowa Review, Cabinet, and Artforum. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Yale & a Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Art's painting department, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, & Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Tausif Noor is a critic, curator, & PhD student in global modern art history at the University of California, Berkeley. His writing & essays have appeared in publications such as Artforum, the Poetry Project Newsletter, the New York Review of Books, & the New Yorker, as well as in various exhibition catalogues, artist books, & edited volumes. He lives in Oakland, CA. Originally broadcast via Zoom on Monday, March 25, 2024. Hosted by Peter Maravelis. Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. citylights.com/foundation
Today's poem is lovely, dark, and deep. Loneliness, Americana, Edward Hopper, literary illusions, clams: it has it all. Happy reading!Poet and editor Grace Schulman (b. 1935) was born Grace Waldman in New York City, the only child of a Polish Jewish immigrant father and a seventh-generation American mother. She studied at Bard College and earned her BA from American University and her PhD from New York University. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, and served as the poetry editor of the Nation from 1972 to 2006. She also directed the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center from 1973 to 1985. She has published nine collections of poetry, including Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2022 (Turtle Point Press, 2022) and Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Harper Collins, 2022). Her collection of essays, First Loves and Other Adventures (2010), reflects on her life as a writer and reader.Typically written in a lucid free verse that occasionally reaches vatic heights, Schulman's poems often take on subjects of art, history, and faith. Schulman's history is usually that of her beloved New York City, where she has lived and worked as a dedicated poetry advocate all her life. Earthly moments and details of city life constantly suggest larger spiritual questions. Poet Ron Slate has described Schulman as “not only a poet of praise, but one who addresses the grounding questions of this mode. How and why do we find beauty in adversity?”Schulman names Hopkins, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, and Marianne Moore as her influences. When Schulman was a teenager she was introduced to Moore, who had a profound effect on her poetics. Schulman wrote on the poet in a critical study, Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement (1986), and edited The Poems of Marianne Moore (2004). Schulman has received numerous awards for her work, including the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, and Pushcart prizes. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her work has been published in the Nation, the New Yorker, and numerous other magazines and journals, and appeared in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1998.She lives in New York City and East Hampton.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Maggie Smith wrote a poem that went viral, but that wasn't the cause of her divorce. It was just one moment in a much bigger story about infidelity, raising children, and learning to live in a haunted house. Need some divorce catharsis? Join us. Maggie Smith is the best-selling award-winning author of the memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. She also wrote Good Bones and Keep Moving. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. Her awards include the Academy of American Poets Prize, Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Transcript MAGGIE SMITH: It's like the Instagram fail where you try to make the cake based on the beautiful unicorn cake you see, and then it's like, "Nailed it!"—and it looks like it's melting off to the side. You know, no one wants to make something that doesn't become the shining image in your mind you think you're making. BLAIR HODGES: That's Maggie Smith talking about her national best-selling book You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Her cake metaphor gets at some of the anxieties any author might feel, but it also works as a description of the marriage she wrote about in that book. Things started off well, with high hopes and visions of a shared future, but it turned into a Nailed It scenario when she discovered her husband's affair. Maggie Smith joins us to get real about divorce, family, patriarchy, raising kids, and more. WHAT SOME PEOPLE ASK (01:21) BLAIR HODGES: Maggie Smith, welcome to Family Proclamations. MAGGIE SMITH: Thanks for having me. BLAIR HODGES: I thought we'd start off by having you read one of the pieces in your book, it's called "Some People Ask," because it's short but it gives a nice overview of a lot of the things you talk about in this memoir about divorce and family, about your career, and about all kinds of things. Let's have you read that on page ten. "Some People Ask." MAGGIE SMITH: These were my attempts at—people won't ask me these questions if I put the questions and answers in the book. Alas, that did not actually deter the questions. So this is one of them. Some People Ask “So, how would you describe your marriage? What happened?” Every time someone asks me a question like this, every time someone asks about my marriage, or about my divorce experience, I pause for a moment. Inside that imperceptible pause I'm thinking about the cost of answering fully. I'm weighing it against the cost of silence. I could tell the story about the pinecone, the postcard, the notebook, the face attached to the name I googled, the name I googled written in the handwriting I'd seen my name in, and the names of our children, for years and years. I could tell them how much I've spent on lawyers, or how much I've spent on therapy, or how much I've spent on dental work from grinding my teeth in my sleep, and how many hours I sleep, which is not many, but at least if I'm only sleeping a few hours at night, then I'm only grinding my teeth a few hours a night. I could talk about how a lie is worse than whatever the lie is draped over to conceal. I could talk about what a complete mindf*ck it is to lose the shelter of your marriage, but also how expansive the view is without that shelter, how big the sky is. “Sometimes people just grow apart,” I say. I smile, take a sip of water. Next question. BLAIR HODGES: I love the "Some People Ask" sections. They're scattered throughout the book, and they get at questions I think a lot of divorced people run into. I think this is why folks who have been through divorce can relate so much to the book is these questions that are so familiar. What strikes me is, all that thinking in the italic text that you read, that happens in a split second. All of that calculus is so fast. MAGGIE SMITH: It does. I mean, it has to happen fast. Because when you're on the spot—whether you're on stage at an event, or doing a podcast, or someone catches you at the farmers market, like a neighbor—you have to do that quick mental math. What do I really want to get myself into right now? BLAIR HODGES: There's something else behind the question of “what happened,” which is like, what really happened? People kind of want like—there's probably something that's not public, or they want the tea. The question can be asked out of sincere regard for you, but there's also, most of the time probably a little bit of that human impulse to just want to know the dirt. MAGGIE SMITH: I think that's true, but I also think particularly with divorce, the wanting to know—that curiosity is a self-protective impulse. People don't even recognize that impulse when they are asking, but what they're really asking is, how does this not happen to me? GROWING APART (04:44) BLAIR HODGES: Oof. That resonates with people. Throughout the book my mind kept going back to this pinecone. You mentioned the story about the pinecone. Basically this is part of how you found out your husband was cheating on you. He had given your child this pinecone, and then later on you discovered this is a pinecone he picked up on a walk with a woman he was seeing in another state. I can hardly wrap my head around him giving that to your child. It's connected to this whole other thing he was doing. MAGGIE SMITH: That was why I threw it away. [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: That's right. The line I kept thinking of too from this one is, "sometimes people just grow apart." Now that the book's out, does that line still work? Do you find yourself still in conversations like this? People can know more, a lot more, about the situations you went through. Do you still find yourself sometimes having to say, "You know, sometimes things just don't work out?" MAGGIE SMITH: You know, the deep irony of that is when I wrote that section of the book, I thought the truth was in all of that italicized internal monologue text. The sort of, not really lie, but the "let's just get this over with” quick and easy answer was “Sometimes people just grow apart,” and the longer I've been sitting with this, the more I realized that's true. Everything in the paragraph is true, too. But “sometimes people just grow apart,” as sort of toss off an answer as that is, it actually is not inaccurate, and it's not not what happened. I mean, that happened also. BLAIR HODGES: The thing is, the growing apart could be incredibly painful or the growing apart could be incremental over years and people diverge in interests or mature into different people. The growth apart can be really painful, so it can be a true answer, and at the same time what's behind that answer could be really different depending on who you're talking to. MAGGIE SMITH: I just had friends who celebrated twenty years together, and they're posting photos of their younger selves, and you swipe to see the current version, or how it started, how it's going—that kind of meme. It feels like a miracle to me now that there are so many people who grow together over twenty, forty, sixty years instead of growing apart. I think it's a beautiful miracle that some people manage to do that. I did not. BLAIR HODGES: We see you grieve that. There are several times in the book where you talk about grieving the loss of that kind of connected relationship over the years. At this point in your life you can't ever have that. You can't have a relationship you shared when you were in your twenties and are now in your forties. That person is connected to the person you were with and it's not possible to recover it. MAGGIE SMITH: I get a little envious of seeing pictures of people from the nineties and they're still with that person. I don't get to do that. I don't get to carry forward that human being with another human being. I suppose if I met someone and got married this year and live to be ninety-seven, I could still have a golden anniversary, if they also live to be ninety-seven. I think it's unlikely that's going to happen. That was actually a fair amount of the grieving process. It wasn't just my specific marriage. I think everybody gets this. It's all the things in the future you think are guaranteed you when you "settle down" with someone, and then all those things go up in smoke when it doesn't work out. REGRETS (08:38) BLAIR HODGES: Did you wrestle a lot with feeling like those years were lost? A lot happened. You had kids during those years. You grew professionally. You struck out on your own in bold professional moves. You became a successful and very known writer. I'm wondering if there's a sense of lost years, because even some people that have a lot of things to look back on fondly still might feel like, "Dang it, I wish those years were spent differently." Do you live with a sense of regret about it? MAGGIE SMITH: No, not necessarily. I think at the beginning I did. Like, "Really, now I'm in my forties and I have to start over? Now?" It would have been easier ten years ago, for sure. It would have been easier fifteen years ago, for sure. But when I look at my kids and the life we've built here it's impossible to imagine it happening any other way. Because to rewind the film far enough to get a different result, I would be erasing them from the story and I can't. BLAIR HODGES: I wanted to ask you about this. How long—to preface this question—how long was it from beginning to end of writing the book? Do you remember? MAGGIE SMITH: Some pieces of the book existed before I knew I was writing a book. I pulled some poems in. I pulled some previous essays in, but I wrote the book for a year. BLAIR HODGES: The reason I ask is because we get to see you grow during that year. This is one of my "gasp out loud" moments. There are a few of them in the book where I literally gasped. It usually involved something your ex had done. But this one, one of the biggest for me, was something you said. When people would ask you a question, "Wasn't it all worth it because you got the kids out of it?" Earlier in the book your internal voice says, "Actually, I might undo it all, even knowing that would entail the kids." What you verbally say to the person is, "Well, I can't imagine life without my kids." The thing you're not seeing in italics is, "Maybe,” or “maybe even probably." But we see you grow from that. Talk about that growth over the course of the book, because that was a huge admission to be like, "You know what? Maybe not. Maybe it wasn't worth all that pain." MAGGIE SMITH: Not just for me, but for them. A lot of what I wish for them is a different kind of childhood and a different kind of family. I remember thinking about if I never had my children I wouldn't miss them, because I wouldn't have known them and they wouldn't miss me because they wouldn't have known me, and so it's not hurting anyone to say I would rewind the tape and completely do this all over again. Throughout the course of writing the book and living that year and sitting with everything and really thinking about it, I got to a place where I was like, "No, actually, I'll take the heat." I think it's worth taking the heat myself. I think they can take the heat enough so we get to have each other and in the end that has to be worth it. I did a lot of that in the book. A lot of my thinking at the beginning of the book is not my thinking at the end. That's an accurate reflection of life. Not necessarily a convenient narrative arc. "Oh, on second thought, I changed my mind, reader, from what I told you thirty pages ago." But that's how we live. I don't know how we live without that. ON SECOND THOUGHT (12:04) BLAIR HODGES: It didn't feel like a setup. I felt like I was experiencing you process that in real time and that when you wrote that original piece you hadn't set out thinking, "How is this going to fit into my book overall?" You were writing the pieces as they came and we get to experience that growth with you. Here's the piece "On Second Thought." It's short. I'll just read it. It says: I've been thinking about what I said before about wanting to undo it all. The more that time passes, the less I feel that way. Rilke comes to me in these moments—this is a poet—whispering no feeling is final. I don't just want to have kids, I want these kids, though dammit, I wish they had an easier path to travel. I wish we all had an easier path. Here's what I think about the most. In some parallel universe I can save the children and jettison the marriage. This is magical thinking, as in some Greek myth we're yet to discover. A son and daughter spring from me whole. No feeling is final. It strikes me, that can turn in on itself when it comes to joy too. That quote usually we think about if you're depressed or something, no feeling is final, but there's also a sense in which the best joys can be fleeting. MAGGIE SMITH: That is the last part of a quote I actually have—I'm looking at it right now on a sticky note on my office window. It's been living there for so many years, which tells you I don't wash my windows. "Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." I feel so much of life is toggling between beauty and terror. Sometimes in the same three-minute stretch. BLAIR HODGES: It's great to see your relationship with your kids throughout the book. There's a beautiful piece about Violet, your daughter, and mixtapes. You both have bonded over music. MAGGIE SMITH: That's one of the coolest things as they get older. I feel like I set a music syllabus pretty early with my kids. We had a “no kids music” rule in our house, like no Kidz Bop, no music for children. We just tried to choose clean-ish music so we could enjoy it. One of the coolest things is seeing what from my music syllabus they're carrying forward and what they like of early to mid-nineties indie rock, and then what they strike out and find on their own. That's pretty much a metaphor for living with children. BLAIR HODGES: That's exactly why I brought it up. Then also the reciprocal love, the love your children showed for you. There's a piece called "Hidden Valentines," where your son Rhett had gone out of town. I think he went to his dad's— MAGGIE SMITH: I have one right here! It says, "You are nice and you make me laugh." BLAIR HODGES: He put these all around the house for you. It's so sweet. So I see romance happening in the book even when your partner was gone after the divorce. A certain kind of romance. MAGGIE SMITH: It's funny. It's the end of a love story, but not the end of all the love stories. I really think so much of this book is a love letter to writers and writing, but it's also a love letter to parents and kids, and a love letter to my kids in particular. The real love story is a self-love story, and finding yourself in the mess, but we have each other. DIVISION OF LABOR (15:26) BLAIR HODGES: That's Maggie Smith, and we're talking about her memoir, You Could Make this Place Beautiful. Her writings appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, the Paris Review, and the Best American Poetry. She's a best-selling, award winning author of the books Good Bones and Keep Moving. Those books are also available. Maggie, you write a lot in this book about a common problem in marriage. This podcast has other episodes that will touch more on this, but I liked how you explore it, and that's how professional success and a division of labor in marriage can make a big impact. You wrote a poem that went viral. This was a landmark moment in your journey toward divorce, because your partner had started out as a writer as well and then had diverged from that path to become a lawyer. And it seemed like because you persisted with writing your partner couldn't fully embrace your professional success and he'd even downplay and sometimes even ridicule your career as maybe a hobby or a little indulgence. He also wanted you to step into the traditional mother role, despite the fact you're both progressive-minded folks. There was one time when he called you on a work trip to come home because your son had a fever. That, again, was another one of these gasp out loud moments. MAGGIE SMITH: I think this happens in all kinds of families, whether one of the partners is an artist or a writer or not. It doesn't necessarily keep itself to families where one person has a more traditional job and one person has a creative job. Frankly, it doesn't only happen in families in cis-het marriages where the man out-earns the woman. I know women who earn more than their husbands who are still packing every lunch and doing every pediatrician appointment and having a hard time getting away for professional obligations. I know lots of women who, when they go to conferences, someone comes up to them and says, "Oh, who's got the kids?" BLAIR HODGES: I've never heard that. MAGGIE SMITH: Exactly. And I don't think men get that, "Oh, who's got the kids?" Everyone assumes your partner has the kids. It's a real issue, and it's not a poetry versus law issue. It's not a creative versus traditional issue. I don't even think it's about earning—although I do think it can make the power dynamic more pronounced when one person significantly out-earns the other. BLAIR HODGES: It's in the data. MAGGIE SMITH: It's in the data. And there is a sense of feeling somewhat exempt from some of the domestic responsibilities if you are the person who's paying most of the bills via your income. That sets up couples for a lot of resentment, frankly. I don't think there's anything that kills a relationship faster than resentment, feeling like you can't be your full self. BLAIR HODGES: I think that's right. You talk a lot about it in the book, but you also pull back somewhat, because you mention at one point there's this spreadsheet of the cognitive labor that you're doing in the relationship, the day-to-day schedule keeping. One example that comes to mind for me is when a dad feels like he really succeeded because he showed up to Junior's ballgame, but he didn't take them to practices. But he didn't sign Junior up for ball. He's not washing Junior's uniform. He's not bringing treats, blah, blah, blah. But he feels like a really involved dad because he shows up for the game. You talk about this spreadsheet of labor and then you say, "I thought about including it here, but I'm not going to." So you didn't include the actual spreadsheet. But really, you know it's peppered throughout the book, right? The spreadsheet is pretty much in the book. MAGGIE SMITH: It's pretty much in the book. Anyone reading this knows what's on the spreadsheet. We all know—or maybe if you don't know what's on your spreadsheet— BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. MAGGIE SMITH: —take some time and write it down. Sometimes I'll get done with a day, and I'll think I feel like “I didn't accomplish much today,” meaning I only wrote five hundred words or something. Then if I think about what I accomplished, I've done three loads of laundry, I took the dog to the vet, I signed up someone for a camp or soccer, I emailed a teacher about a project my child had a question on, I looked at something, I planned a vacation, I did this, I did this. It's so much of that domestic stuff that doesn't count as "work" that takes up so much time and doesn't really feel like accomplishment or achievement. It's not performative. It's invisible labor. The one thing I realized about my invisible labor is when I was gone to teach or give a reading or visit a university, the invisible labor your partner does becomes very, very visible to you when they are not there. You realize the dishes don't do themselves and the laundry doesn't just arrive folded in the dresser drawer and the play dates don't get scheduled without this human being. BLAIR HODGES: This reminds me of your "Google Maps" essay where you wrote this beautiful piece about tracing your divorce through Google Maps, because you can go back and see pictures of the house. You sent it to your partner after the divorce to say, "Hey, take a look at this. I'm going to be publishing this and it involves you so I thought you should take a look before it goes out." He sent you notes back and one of them was like, "Oh, see the recycle bin? I took that out." [laughter] MAGGIE SMITH: It was illuminating. His edits were like, all of my crying was deleted. Anytime I mentioned crying was deleted. BLAIR HODGES: That's too on the nose, Maggie. Isn't that too on the nose? [laughs] MAGGIE SMITH: I mean, that's why I said it was psychologically revealing. Wanting credit for household chores and wanting to not acknowledge the pain you've caused another person. I found that interesting. I published that piece in the Times. I didn't think I was going to write a memoir, so I thought that was it. But when I went to write the memoir, I thought, I don't know how to tell the story without offering these edits as a kind of shorthand. I mean, I'm not going to offer the annotated version in this document, but it said so much in so little space. You know how if you know someone well, you look at them across the room at a party and their expression tells you “It's time to go,” or “Get a load of this.” That's kind of how I received those edits. It was a lot of data in a very small space. MOTIVATION(S) (22:11) BLAIR HODGES: I imagine there were probably legal considerations or some interpersonal considerations about sending it to him first. As you were writing that piece and then the book more in depth, did you worry at all about his reputation? Maybe the lesson here is, don't ever marry an author. But at the time, he was one. MAGGIE SMITH: It's tricky. We have responsibility to other people when we write about them. I was careful and people who know me, very considerate. The people who know more about the situation are like, "Oh, yeah, you were really considerate." [laughter] And I was. And not just because of the legal considerations. That's always something, but also because I didn't write this book to hurt other people. I certainly didn't write this book to expose other people. For people who might be thinking about writing about their lives, whether in a memoir or an essay or something, if they think they're going to share it with other people, the piece of advice I have is to always think about your motivations. If your motivation is anger or revenge or “they thought they could do this, well now I'll show them,” then put your pen down. Or pick your pen up, but that's for your journal or something you can share with a therapist or a friend. That's like Happy Hour venting. If your desire is to know yourself better because you're curious about a situation, because you think unpacking this might be useful for you or for someone else, I think those are safer, healthier motivations for writing about your life, and will probably, if you keep true to those motivations, will keep you out of the weeds. BLAIR HODGES: I want to go back to motivations in a second, but also want to point out you don't name him. You call him “Redacted” sometimes. This is the age of Google though. MAGGIE SMITH: If people want to do the legwork, anybody can find anything. BLAIR HODGES: Is it weird to you that people do? I did. [laughs] MAGGIE SMITH: It's a little strange, but I think it's a human impulse. Have I read stories where someone was unnamed and have I tried to figure out who they are? Of course. We've all done that. I don't think there's any shame in it. We live in an age where if you can find Trump's taxes, you can find anything. BLAIR HODGES: It's true. I also wanted to point out too, here's a piece called "An Offering," where you say: I feel like I need to reiterate something. This isn't the story of a good wife and a bad husband. Was I easy to live with? Probably not. I crave time to myself. I thought I knew best what the children needed. I was stubborn. I disliked, dislike confrontation. So I could be, can be avoidant or passive aggressive. We see this confessional mode a few times throughout the book, too. MAGGIE SMITH: Gina Frangello, who's a terrific writer, said something really smart about memoir, which is there are two essential ingredients. One is self-assessment and the other is societal interrogation. I think this book has both, which I'm grateful for because I didn't know the two ingredients from Gina until after I was done writing it and had already turned it in. But that goes back to motivations. If you are writing a book in which you are going to be the hero of your story? No. That's the wrong motivation. Not only did I not want to write that book, I don't want to read that book. I don't want to read that book. That's too easy. BLAIR HODGES: That's right. It's wonderful to see you wrestling with motivations throughout the book. This book is very meta. You talk about the creation of the book throughout the book, and what we learn is you didn't have one single pure motive. There were times when you talk about being led by curiosity and writing was an exercise in trying to figure out what you thought about something. When you're trying to make sense of everything. Another reason why you would publish it is so you could share pain and share discovery with other people. This is where memoir becomes a sort of curation. Why we read memoirs is because we get to try on other people's lives. Or why we ask someone what really happened, in that question is, “I want to see how this fits on me.” MY TEACHER, MY PAIN (25:57) There's one particular lesson you're trying to draw out. This comes out in this piece I just read from called, "An Offering." You're quoting from a Buddhist teacher about how—and this is the Amazon highlighted quote by the way. If you go to your Amazon page, this is the top highlighted part of your book. MAGGIE SMITH: Oh, wow. BLAIR HODGES: Here it is. It says: Thank you for the pain you caused me because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend's therapist once told her, “because that's how you'll change.” That really resonated with people. Pain teaches us. There's a utility to pain. There can be an underside to that, of celebrating pain or of having a privileged pain when other people have worse pains. It can be easier for me to talk about pain when the pain could be worse. I wanted to explore that with you, about the limits of the idea that pain can teach us. Because I agree it can, but there's limits to that. MAGGIE SMITH: Of course. I would like to learn lessons any other way, frankly. I don't want pain to be my teacher. But I think the bottom line is we don't get to choose our teachers. And so I've learned a lot in my life through joy. I've learned a lot in my life through, frankly, confusion, and not knowing things and having to figure it out for myself. In the case of the end of my marriage, experiencing that pain and grief and loss taught me a lot about myself. I don't know if I would have learned those lessons another way. That doesn't mean the scales are balanced. I'm not at all saying the lessons I learned about myself through my divorce made all this suffering for myself and my family worthwhile because they got me this lesson. No. I would always choose not to have the pain any day of the week. I would rather know less about myself and feel better. Absent that choice, which I did not have, I'm glad to have at least made some progress with myself and my life via this unpleasant experience. I do think that's part of why we go to memoir, it's also to feel seen and feel understood. When we share our pain with someone else, whether it's a big pain or a small pain, I think we're telling other people, “This happened to me, maybe something similar happened to you.” You pick up the book, you read it, and maybe you've been through a very similar experience, and it makes you feel less alone. Maybe you've been through a completely different experience that rocked your world in a similar way. You see how someone else kind of got to the "other side of it" and it gives you a sense of solidarity and like, "Oh, yes, this is the human experience." That's what I'm hoping for in sharing it. READING MEMOIR (29:53) BLAIR HODGES: My partner joked with me when I started this podcast, like, "Oh, you're going to include memoir?" In the past, I've just done academic stuff—sociology, psychology, Religious Studies, and all these things. I was a little snooty about memoir, dismissive of it, skeptical of it. But I decided to lean into it for this show. Two things happen when I'm reading a memoir. The two things I love the most. First, when an author says something I already knew in a way I never would have been able to articulate or didn't even realize I knew. The other one is when they tell me something I'd never considered before, but suddenly it snaps into place in the clearest of ways. These revelations that happen when I'm reading. MAGGIE SMITH: That happens to me, too. That's why it's a genre I turn to a lot. I get that from poetry also. I think that's probably why I read primarily nonfiction and poetry because those are places I go to be changed. I can't pick up a book of poems or a memoir and not be a slightly rearranged, slightly different person when I close the book. I don't think we exit good books as the same person we enter them, and that is a gift. BLAIR HODGES: We carry pieces of it with us too. We're changed. I should point out as we're talking about pain and all the suffering you write about, and the grief, and there's anger, there's frustration, there's some joy, there's some love. But you say you're a lot funnier than your book is. There's a footnote that's so funny. It's like, "I wanted twenty percent more wit and twenty percent less pain in here, but this is what we got." [laughter] MAGGIE SMITH: I think my gallows humor comes out in this book because I feel like I meet people all the time, and they're like, "Oh, you're a lot funnier than your writing." That's probably true of a lot of people unless you're maybe David Sedaris. I'm not a humorist. I tend to write through things I'm puzzling over or grappling with, and that's not necessarily a space where I feel free to be funny, but in every other aspect of my life it's part of my life. BLAIR HODGES: It made me think about the function of humor, too. Because sometimes humor can be an escape hatch out of difficult emotions. It felt like you resisted that. You could have—you're a funny person and I'm sure you could have said lots of quips and witty things. But it seems like you resisted them because you're like, "No, I need to stay in this moment and I'm not going to take the escape hatch." MAGGIE SMITH: It's just not that kind of book. I think I could have maybe written a funny book. Well, maybe not that year. I was not in a place to have written a funny book. Maybe I could write the funny book now. But it's something even, and I write about this, it's something even my therapist notices, that whenever I'm telling a particularly painful story or talking about something painful, I laugh. It's so bad, I have to laugh. Like, can you believe that happened? It is that sort of emotional escape hatch, where you can't let yourself look it straight in the eye and go there. It was important for me to do that. BLAIR HODGES: Well, I'm looking forward to your sequel to this book, You Can Make this Place Hilarious. [laughter] MAGGIE SMITH: I know! I wrote a book called Keep Moving. Then after that I thought maybe the next book is just like, Sit Down, or Rest Up, you know? [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: That's Maggie Smith. We're talking about the book, You Could Make this Place Beautiful. She's an incredible author, and as she mentioned, also wrote a book called Keep Moving, which is a lot more like, keep moving. It's got your happy aphorisms and more motivational stuff. I think pairing these books is a good idea. BEING HAUNTED (33:18) BLAIR HODGES: I wanted to talk briefly about being haunted. You kept the house you lived with your family and your partner there, you wanted to keep the house so badly. But it means you live in a haunted house of sorts, in a haunted city. You drive places and see where you went out to eat, or you see where this thing happened, or that thing happened. Then in your house, all the things that happened there. You mention how—you don't put it in this way, but this is what came to mind, that divorce is kind of marriage by another means, especially if you have kids. I mean the relationship has to continue logistically, also in your memory, so divorce is a hard kind of marriage by other means in this hauntedness you describe throughout the book. MAGGIE SMITH: I still live basically in my hometown. It's always been that way. I see people from different stages of my life all the time. I see places that meant things to me all the time. I live in the house I lived in when I was married. My kids are still here. That was never going to change. One of the commitments I've made is keeping my kids' life as untouched by all of this as humanly possible, which is laughable because it's not untouched at all. I mean, it sort of napalmed everything, but the house is still here, and we're still here, and our neighbors are still the same, and they're still in their schools, and they still see the same people all the time, and we still walk to the farmers market. It's important to me to provide as much stability as possible for them. What that means for me is not being able to get that "fresh start" so many people want after a relationship ends, where you want to leave that part of your life behind and move onto something else. When you've lived in the same place for forty years you don't get to do that. You're taking one for the team, but that's what being a parent is. It's taking one for the team over and over and over. To be honest, on one hand it's difficult because there are a lot of memories. On the other hand, I don't think I would have thrived through this challenging time without my community. I don't think that would have been possible if we'd been living someplace else. BLAIR HODGES: Right, like your first lonely solo Christmas when neighbors were coming by and dropping stuff off on Christmas morning. MAGGIE SMITH: It's ridiculous how kind people are to me. People look out for me so much. My family is here. We have Sunday dinners every week. People have asked if it's weird publishing a memoir and having so many people know about your life and then you're walking the streets knowing people are looking at you, maybe knowing more about you than you know about them. It doesn't actually feel that strange. I feel very held here. I feel really supported here. BLAIR HODGES: You could make “this place” beautiful. “This place” means so many things, but I feel like in the book it also means the literal place—that house, which it's so kickass that you bought it. It's yours. It felt really empowering that you were able to do that. Reclaim it as yours. MAGGIE SMITH: The most terrifying part of the divorce other than being on my own was, where are we going to go? Being able to stay in this house, and that was thanks to the book Keep Moving, being able to stay in this house, and being able to provide that for my kids was something I didn't think I was going to be able to do as a poet. It has been really empowering. It's a good way to think of it. It's a double-edged sword. Yes. On one hand, it's a haunted house. Yes, my ex-husband's handwriting is in some of the cookbooks. But on the other hand, we're here and we're still standing. AFTERLIFE OF A BOOK (37:39) BLAIR HODGES: I love that. Do you have any favorite criticisms of the book? Something where you're like, "Oh, that's really interesting," or have you tried to ignore any of that kind of stuff? MAGGIE SMITH: I don't think people really ignore it. If fifty people say something nice about your book and one person says something mean, that mean thing will live rent free in your head forever. I think that's just what it is to be human. I try not to tune in too much or put too much stock into either criticism or praise because both can be dangerous. Too much praise can make you complacent and not make you challenge yourself to do better. You're competing against yourself when you're a writer more than you're competing against other people. Most of the criticisms of the book I anticipated. I anticipated people would say, "Why are you airing your dirty laundry?" Which is why that's a question I posed to myself in the book. I anticipated that people would say, "Oh my gosh, aren't you worried about your kids reading this someday?" I anticipated some people not liking the meta aspect of the book or the direct address to the reader. I made those decisions anyway because it's my book. Those people can do things their way if they want to. BLAIR HODGES: I imagine when people meet with you who have read the book—Most of the time if you're going to a reading or something, people enjoy the book. You get to see a lot of different positive reactions. There's so much in the book that a lot of different things could resonate with a lot of different people. There were so many pages I marked, like, I want to ask her about this, I want to ask her about this. But time is limited. There was way more than I could possibly cover, but I saw on Instagram you're celebrating the year anniversary of this book coming out. It's heading into paperback now. You said this book has sparked meaningful life-changing conversations. Maybe before we go, talk about the afterlife of the book as it continues in your conversations. Maybe an example of a meaningful life-changing discussions you've been able to have because of the book. MAGGIE SMITH: Book tour is always an opportunity to do that because I get to go to different cities and sit down with different writers and hear their questions and have a conversation about big life stuff with them. We end up talking about not just divorce, but all kinds of things. We end up talking about patriarchy. We end up talking about parenting. We end up talking about memory and hometowns, and family and secrets, and silence and all kinds of things. Depending on who I'm talking to, that conversation takes a different shape and different texture and different color. If someone wanted to follow me like the Grateful Dead on book tour and come to all of my events for the paperback, they would be witnessing five or six different conversations because they're all so personal. Some of the most meaningful moments I get to have around this book are talking to readers. It's sitting at the signing table and having people come up and hand me a card, or hand me a crystal, or hand warmers they knitted me, a little something, or just to say “I gave this to my mom,” or “my best friend really needed this,” or “I wish I had this when I was going through my divorce twenty years ago.” Something that happens with memoirs when you share a lot of yourself, it inspires or encourages other people to share a little bit about their stories with you too. That's been a beautiful point of connection with readers. FORGIVENESS (41:48) BLAIR HODGES: I really hope people who haven't had a chance to check out this book, check it out. It's called You Could Make this Place Beautiful. There's so much we didn't mention, like the fact your husband wound up with Pinecone. I don't know if he's still with Pinecone or not, but that at least happened. He moved out of state, which was earth shattering for you, and how that disconnected him from the kids. There's a ton of stuff we didn't cover, but I thought we would close with having you read a piece on page 302. We started off with a "Some People Will Ask" piece and I thought it would be good to cap it off with a "Some People Will Ask" piece. MAGGIE SMITH: Some people will ask, “You say you want to forgive. Have you?” Someone will ask that, I'm sure, because I ask myself all the time. How do I answer? I could say it's difficult to forgive someone who hasn't expressed remorse. I could counter with questions. Why do I need to forgive someone who doesn't seem to be sorry? What if forgiveness doesn't need to be the goal? The goal is the wish, peace. Can there be peace without forgiveness? How do you heal when there is an open wound that is being kept open, a scab always being picked until it bleeds again. I could say this is my task, seeking peace, knowing the wound may never fully close. “Forgiveness is complicated. To be at peace I think what I need is acceptance. I accept it." REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES! (43:04) BLAIR HODGES: That's Maggie Smith, reading from the book You Could Make this Place Beautiful. There's always a segment at the end of these episodes called “Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises.” It's where I ask people about anything they would change about the book now that it's out, what the hardest part about writing it was, or what the most surprising thing was. You've touched on some of these already, but before we go if you have anything to say about regrets, challenges, and surprises, we'll close there. MAGGIE SMITH: I don't think I have any regrets about the way I wrote the book. Surprises? Honestly, I think the reception has been surprising. I did not expect it to be a New York Times bestseller. It's an Ohio poet's memoir. No one was more surprised about that than me. I think I was folding laundry—literally—when my agent called to tell me I made the list. So that was certainly surprising. BLAIR HODGES: And you had two of your favorite songwriters write songs based on your book, too! MAGGIE SMITH: Crazy! Challenges? Fear. I think that's probably whether it's a named challenge or an unnamed challenge, I think that's one of the challenges for all of us. Fear of failure, fear of exposure, fear of litigation, fear of falling short, fear of not making the thing you think you want to build in your mind. It's like the Instagram fail where you try to make the cake based on the beautiful unicorn cake you see, and then it's like, "Nailed it!" And it looks like it's melting off to the side. No one wants to make something that doesn't become the shining image in your mind you think you're making. Fear is always the challenge, and the goal is to overcome that. BLAIR HODGES: The goal is to “keep moving,” as a wise person once said in a book you can also pick up at your favorite local retailer! [laughter] Thanks a ton, Maggie. This has been great. I loved your book. I truly, truly did. I hope people check it out. Thanks for taking time to be on this little show. MAGGIE SMITH: It's my pleasure. Thank you. BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Camille Messick, my wonderful transcript editor. Thanks to David Ostler, who sponsored this first group of transcripts. I'm looking for more transcript sponsors, these aren't free so help me out! My email address is blair at firesidepod dot org. You can also contact me with questions or feedback about any episode. There's a lot more to come on Family Proclamations. And here's the moment where I do the thing you hear on so many podcasts: Ask you to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts of in Spotify! Let me know what you think about it so far. Here's a new 5-star review from "Fan of the Sun," and check out the detail here: "I have really enjoyed the variety of books and subjects that have been covered so far. I have been able to incorporate some valuable aspect from each episode into my personal life. Blair is a fantastic interviewer who knows the material and asks engaging questions. He digs deep, yet is able to give the listeners a well-rounded overview." Love that. It's my goal: to go wide but also dig down deep. Thanks fan of the sun, and I imagine that you've already recommended the show to a friend too because you know that's the number one way that people hear about podcasts is through a friend. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and we'll see you next time.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams, forthcoming from Scribner in September 2024, as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California.-bio via the poet's website Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Join us on The MisFitNation Show as we welcome Victoria Kelly, a distinguished author and poet whose work delves deep into the human experience. Victoria's impressive academic background includes an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Harvard University, and an M.Phil. in creative writing from Trinity College Dublin, where she was honored as a US Mitchell Scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection "When the Men Go Off to War" and her fiction and poetry have been featured in prestigious anthologies such as Best American Poetry 2013 and Contemporary American Poetry. Her work has also graced the pages of esteemed literary journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and North American Review. Residing in Virginia with her husband and daughters, Victoria brings a unique perspective to her writing, exploring themes of love, loss, and resilience with eloquence and depth. Don't miss this captivating conversation with Victoria Kelly on The MisFitNation Show, where we delve into the intricacies of literature and the creative process. Connect with Victoria and explore her captivating work: Victoria's Website: https://www.victoria-kelly.com/ Victoria's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/victoriakellybooks/?hl=en Book's Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/Homefront-Stories-Battle-Victoria-Kelly/dp/1647791448
David Lehman is a poet and literary critic, known for his curation of American culture, and for creating "The Best American Poetry" anthologies.
Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of twelve books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Say Goodnight, a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; and Vox Angelica, which won the 1992 Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. Translated into a dozen languages, Liu's poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. Liu is an intuitive reader of occult esoterica, including the Tarot and the I-Ching and the Akashic Records, and he gives readings at Mirabai (Woodstock) and the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies (Rhinebeck). He teaches at SUNY New Paltz and Vassar College. Find more on Timothy and his books here: https://www.timothyliu.net/ As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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 golden prose poem: one that includes the words from your favorite haiku but goes in a different direction. Next Week's Prompt: Pull a random card from a deck and write a poem about it. 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.
The Friends of the Bill Brinton Murray Hill Library sponsored a special Lit Chat Interview with local poet Michelle Lizet Flores. Michelle spoke with fellow poet and Lit Chat alum, Jessica Q. Stark, about her latest book of poetry. Michelle Lizet Flores is a graduate of the FSU and NYU creative writing programs. She currently works as a Creative Writing Instructor at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and co-hosts the What's in a Verse Poetry Open Mic at Rain Dogs. Publications include The NCTE English Journal, Salt Hill Journal, and The Talon Review. A finalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Award for Poetry, she wrote the chapbooks Cuentos from the Swamp and Memoria, and the picture book, Carlito the Bat Learns to Trick or Treat. Her short fiction is in the anthology, Places We Build in the Universe. Invasive Species, her first full-length collection of poetry, is currently available from Finishing Line Press. Interviewer Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020), and four poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). Her poetry has most recently appeared in Best American Poetry, Pleaides, among other literary journals. She is a Poetry Editor at AGNI and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Florida. She co-organizes the Dreamboat Reading Series in Jacksonville, Florida. READ Check out Michelle's work from the library: https://jkpl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/default/search/results?qu=AUTHOR%3D%22michelle+lizet+flores%22&te= THE LIBRARY RECOMMENDS More poetry to enjoy: If They Come For Us, by Fatimah Asghar Pity the Beautiful, by Dana Gioia Third Winter in Our Second Country, by Andres Rojas --- Never miss an event! Sign up for email newsletters at https://bit.ly/JaxLibraryUpdates Jacksonville Public LibraryWebsite: https://jaxpubliclibrary.org/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaxlibrary Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JaxLibrary/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaxlibrary/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaxpubliclibraryfl Contact Us: jplpromotions@coj.net
Today's poem ponders what love makes of language. Happy reading.A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.Stallings's poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”Stallings's latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos. -bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
In episode two of the Gen X Taste podcast, Christy and I have a very special guest, !!! (The poet, not the dame!)Maggie Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books of poetry and prose, including You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, Goldenrod, Lamp of the Body, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Her newest book is My Thoughts Have Wings, a picture book for children, illustrated by Leanne Hatch. Smith's poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The Best American Poetry. I first mentioned Maggie (and how we met) in My Favorite Reads of 2023 post. This was our first time talking IRL and I was thrilled to chat about everything from her writing process to the benefits of bangs.And of course… This season's topic: Movies from Our ChildhoodYou can subscribe via Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts; please leave us a kind rating/review you do!Show Notes:* Episode 1: Adult Friendships* Reusable metal toothpicks* Rideback Rise Circle rewrite class (and my own online writing course)* The Goonies, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Better Off Dead, Ghostbusters, Twins, Junior, Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken* Stridex, Sea Breeze, Cover Girl Pressed Powder* Dr. Elsa Jungman Cleansing Oil* The People I've Slept With aka the movie where Lynn had bangs* Actor Michael Earl Schoeffling* Lives Less Ordinary podcast* Raiders of the Lost Ark shot-by-shot remake* Lynn's IG* Christy's IG* Maggie's Website, IG and other links. Also, check out her Substack ! Get full access to Gen x Taste at genxtaste.substack.com/subscribe
In conversation with Shantrelle Lewis Morgan Parker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Magical Negro, a poetry collection that ponders the nuances of Black American womanhood. She is also the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collections Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the winner of a Pushcart Prize, Parker is the creator/co-curator of the Poets With Attitude reading series and is a member of The Other Black Girl Collective. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues, including The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Best American Poetry, a Broadway playbill, and two Common albums. In You Get What You Pay For, she charts the generational and historical difficulties, traumas, and beauty of existing as a Black woman. Shantrelle P. Lewis is a multi-hyphen creative and scholar who accesses multiple disciplines to help elucidate African Diasporic history, aesthetics, culture and spirituality. After premiering at BlackStar Film Festival, her critically acclaimed directorial debut, In Our Mothers' Gardens, was released on Netflix via Ava Duvernay's Array. Her book, Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, was published by Aperture in 2017. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, LA Times, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, NPR, BBC, Washington Post, Slate, The New Yorker and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She co-founded Shoppe Black with her husband and fellow Howard alum, Tony Oluwatoyin Lawson. As an initiated Lukumi Sango Priest, hoodooist and New Orleans native, Shantrelle can be found waxing poetic about all things African spirituality online and in person at the Beaucoup Hoodoo Shop, the annual Beaucoup Hoodoo Fest this October and within her community, ATRS Book Club. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 3/13/2024)
Today's poem marks the ides (or idus) or March, a day classically associated with the settling of debts (and maybe old scores, too).One of the foremost editors, literary critics, and anthologists of contemporary American literature, David Lehman is also one of its most accomplished poets. Born in New York City in 1948, Lehman earned a PhD from Columbia University and attended the University of Cambridge as a Kellett Fellow. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including New and Selected Poems (2013), Yeshiva Boys (2009), and When a Woman Loves a Man (2005). Two of his collections, The Evening Sun (2002) and The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (1998), were culled from Lehman's five-year-long project of writing a poem a day. Yusef Komunyakaa called The Daily Mirror “a sped-up meditation on the elemental stuff that we're made of: in this honed matrix of seeing, what's commonplace becomes the focus of extraordinary glimpses....” Lehman has also written collaborative books of poetry, including Poetry Forum (2007), with Judith Hall; and Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (2005), a collection of sestinas he wrote with the poet James Cummins.Lehman inaugurated The Best American Poetry series in 1988. As series editor, he has earned high acclaim for his pivotal role in garnering contemporary American poetry a larger audience. In an early interview about the series with Judith Moore, Lehman noted “I want the books to have a lot to commend them beyond the poems themselves. The 75 poems are of course the center of the book, but we want also to have a foreword by me that can provide a context, that gives an idea of what happened in poetry this year, and an essay in which the guest editor propounds his or her criteria.” Lehman's work as an editor also includes such volumes as The Best American Erotic Poems (2008), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), A.R. Ammons: Selected Poems (2006), Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (1996). He was the director of the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry and the Under Discussion series from 1994 to 2006.A prominent literary and cultural critic, Lehman has published works ranging from an indictment of deconstruction, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991); to a history of the New York School of Poets, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998); to a meditation on the influence of Jewish songwriters in American music, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (2009). Lehman's numerous honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. On faculty at both the New School and New York University, he lives in New York City.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Diane Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl; Four-Legged Girl, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open; and It Blows You Hollow. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988. Her new poetry collection is Modern Poetry. We talked about aging, John Keats, dogs, romance, music, objectivity, grief, coldness, and the snarling, flaming bitch of poetry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
"This weirdness swims up..." Alexandra Regalado talks to Farnaz Fatemi about teeth as relics, finding inspiration in visual artists, attempting to say the unsaid, writing things in poems that might never get said aloud--and more serious and not-so-serious preoccupations. Our conversation focuses on Regalado's second book, the National Poetry Series publication Relinquenda, from Beacon Press. Alexandra Lytton Regalado is a Salvadoran-American author, editor, and translator. She is the author of Relinquenda, winner of the National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2022); the chapbook Piedra (La Chifurnia, 2022); and the poetry collection, Matria, the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Alexandra holds fellowships at CantoMundo and Letras Latinas; she is winner of the Coniston Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, poets.org, World Literature Today, Narrative, and The Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog, among others. Her translations of contemporary Latin American poetry appear in Poetry International, FENCE, and Tupelo Quarterly and she is translator of Family or Oblivion by Elena Salamanca. She is co-founding editor of Kalina, a press that showcases bilingual, Central American-themed books and she is assistant editor at SWWIM Every Day an online daily poetry journal for women-identifying poets. www.alexandralyttonregalado.com
Jane Wong joins Let's Talk memoir for a conversation about the challenge of reflection in memoir, writing that teems with the specific and particular, capturing the experience of being a chinese american woman on the page, writing about exes and domestic violence, keeping ourselves safe while creating, constellations in our lives, avoiding sentimentality, and her new memoir which she calls a love song to her mother, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City. Also in this episode: -how she's never funny in poems -the super secret Jane Wong's been keeping -finding your people Books mentioned in this episode: Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow Tastes like War by Grace M. Cho Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha The Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda Jane Wong is the author of the debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, out now from Tin House (2023). She is also the author of two books of poetry: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything from Alice James (2021) and Overpour from Action Books (2016). She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University. Her poems can be found in places such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and others. Her essays have appeared in places such as McSweeney's, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Common, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Want: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult). A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, 4Culture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, UCross, Mineral School, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Loghaven, and others. She grew up in a Chinese American restaurant on the Jersey shore and lives in Seattle. Connect with Jane: Website: https://janewongwriter.com/ Get Jane's Book: https://tinhouse.com/book/meet-me-tonight-in-atlantic-city/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paradeofcats — Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://twitter.com/RonitPlank https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll's Fingers
Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry,and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In His novel is called Martyr! He is also the Poetry Editor of The Nation. Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. We talked about the transition to novel writing from poetry, transcendence in poetry, not looking away from the terrors of the world, addiction and rehabilitation, the messiness of life, and questions about goodness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jason and Brett talk to Kaveh Akbar (Martyr!) about his transition from poet to novelist, listening to your dreams, how language is a sense memory, parallels with the musical Pippin, and much more. Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City.New York Times Review HERE. **BOOKS!** Check out the list of books discussed on each episode on our Bookshop page:https://bookshop.org/shop/gaysreading | By purchasing books through this Bookshop link, you can support both Gays Reading and an independent bookstore of your choice!Join our Patreon for exclusive bonus content! Purchase your Gays Reading podcast Merch! Follow us on Instagram @gaysreading | @bretts.book.stack | @jasonblitmanWhat are you reading? Send us an email or a voice memo at gaysreading@gmail.com
In their latest collection of poems, Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Brionne Janae dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival. This event took place on July 6, 2023. “I've decided I can't trust anyone who uses darkness as a metaphor for what they fear,” poet Brionne Janae writes in this stunning new collection, in which the speaker navigates past and present traumas and interrogates familial and artistic lineages, queer relationships, positions of power, and community. Because You Were Mine is an intimate look at love, loneliness, and what it costs to survive abuse at the hands of those meant to be “protectors.” In raw, confessional, image-heavy poems, Janae explores the aftershocks of the dangerous entanglement of love and possession in parent-child relationships. Through this difficult but necessary examination, the collection speaks on behalf of children who were left or harmed as a result of the failures of their parents, their states, and their gods. Survivors, queer folks, and readers of poetry will find recognition and solace in these hard-wrought poems—poems that honor survivorship, queer love, parent wounds, trauma, and the complexities of familial blood. Get Because You Were Mine from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/... Speakers: Brionne Janae is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. They are the author of Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021), which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017). Janae is the recipient of the St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook Alum, a proud Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Their poetry has been published in Best American Poetry (2022), Ploughshares, the American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, the Sun Magazine, jubilat, and Waxwing among others. Janae is the co-host of the podcast The Slave is Gone. Off the page they go by Breezy. Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist whose work garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Her first poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published through Write Bloody Press. Flame is a recipient of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture's CityArtist grant and served as Hugo House's 2017-2019 Writer-in-Residence for Poetry. Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, Poetry Magazine, PANK, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review, and elsewhere. She is recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, and 2023 Vermont Studio Center Residency. JR Mahung is a Belizean-American poet from the South Side of Chicago and one half of the Poetry duo Black Plantains with Malcolm Friend. They teach, write, and study in Amherst, MA. JR is a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2017 Emerging Poet's Incubator Fellow, and the 2018 Individual World Poetry Slam representative for the Boston Poetry Slam. Tweet them about rice and beans @jr_mahung. Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine, editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, and author of Blue Hallelujahs. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among other foundations. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/oQzdrRc6y7k Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Today we finish up our annual 6-week summer rebroadcast series. We'll return next week, September 12th with all new episodes for Season 13. A reminder that during this rebroadcast series, our friends of the show, Elly and T have been releasing a companion podcast called Trauma Bonded, where they discuss and dissect each episode of This Is Actually Happening. So check them out if you haven't already, as they will continue releasing new episodes alongside the show as the new season begins next week. Today's rebroadcast episode was one of the most powerful and personally impactful episodes for me and for the show itself. Titled “What if you entered the Void?” it follows the unbelievable journey of Dexter Booth and originally aired as episode 158 on July 28th, 2020.A man suffering the deep generational traumas of poverty, racism, abuse and mental illness finds transformative power in an ancient plant medicine.Producer: Whit MissildineToday's episode featured Dexter L. Booth. Dexter is the author of the poetry collection, Scratchingthe Ghost from Graywolf Press, which won the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbook Rhapsody from Etchings Press. Booth's poems have been included in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2015, The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, The Golden Shovel Anthology honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. He is a professor in the Ashland University MFA program and a residential faculty member at Paradise Valley Community College where he teaches poetry and English composition. You can find out more about Dexter, his writing and teaching by following him on Instagram@dexter_two_omelettes, or on Facebook or Twitter. You can find his books Scratching the Ghost and Rhapsody on Bookshop.org, Amazon, or wherever books are sold.Social Media: Instagram: @actuallyhappeningWebsite: www.thisisactuallyhappening.comSupport the Show: Support The Show on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/happeningEngage with the Community: Join the This Is Actually Happening Discussion Group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/201783687561039/Shop at the Store: The This Is Actually Happening online store is now officially open. Follow this link: www.actuallyhappeningstore.com to access branded t-shirts, posters, stickers and more from the shop. Content/Trigger Warnings: domestic abuse, mental illness, suicide, explicit languageIntro Music: "Illabye" – TipperMusic Bed: “Union Flow” - SpunticOutro Music: "The Moon is Down" - El Diablo & Adam Schraft (Rojo y Negro) @eldiablosf @rojo-y-negro www.eldiablobass.com/ ServicesIf you or someone you know is struggling with the effects of trauma or mental illness, please refer to the following resources:National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 National Alliance on Mental Illness: 1-800-950-6264National Sexual Assault Hotline (RAINN): 1-800-656-HOPE (4673)Crisis Text Line: Within the US, text HOME to 741741See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poems are filled with butchery and blood as she carves space for desire, motherhood, and an encyclopedic knowledge of plants to coexist in life and on the page. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Aimee, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they explore the beauty of solitude, eroticism in poetry, and a letter writing practice for taking inventory of a life.Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of a book of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions, 2020), which was named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and four award-winning poetry collections, most recently, Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). Awards for her writing include fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in NYTimes Magazine, ESPN, and Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
Through her poetry, Patricia Smith generously, skillfully puts language around what can be seen both in the present and deliberately looking back at oneself. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Patricia, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they explore how memory, persona, and a practice of curiosity inform Patricia's work, and the ways writing a poem is like writing a piece of music.Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023); Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House, and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. Smith is a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, a visiting professor in creative writing at Princeton University, and a faculty member in the Vermont College of Fine Arts postgraduate residency program.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
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