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This last episode before summer has us dreaming of the beach, Slushies—watching moonlight on the waves, reading novels in the sand. But not before we share this packed episode with you. Today we welcome special guest, Daniel Kuriakose, to hear about “The Common Well,” the literary journal he's relaunching alongside K Hank Jost. Daniel sticks around for our discussion of two poems by Mara Lee Grayson. We admire the duality on display in the first poem's back and forth-ness which has us pondering the undulation of its syntax. The late reveal of whom the lyric speaker addresses is satisfying surprise. A clever turn of phrase sends the more seasoned members of the team straight to this 90's Divinyls' song. The way enjambment revises meaning after a line break in both of these poems reminds Jason of Heather McHugh's poetry. And ultimately Kathy bring us back to the two questions we ask of every submission: do you want to stay with the poem and do you want to share it? Join us in sharing our deep thanks for two members of our staff who are with us for the final time: Reese, our co-op, and Lillie, our sound engineer. Best of luck to your both in the future. Thank you, Reese! Thank you, Lillie! Over the summer, keep tuning in for a retrospective with deep cuts from our archive. Thanks, as always, for listening! At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Daniel Kuriakose (special guest from “A Common Well”), Reese Pfunder, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer), Derek Grebis (sound engineer) Author Bio: Mara Lee Grayson's poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Tampa Review, and Nimrod, among other literary journals, and has been nominated multiple times for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. Grayson is the author or editor of five books of nonfiction. She holds an MFA from The City College of New York and a PhD from Columbia University and was previously a tenured professor in the California State University system. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, she currently resides in New Jersey. Social media: @maraleegrayson Website: maragrayson.com She Winds Her Stems through Fire for Burning Leaves Fend Off the Grief of Being Mowed On the trampoline, young boys next door bounce while inside, their mothers debate wine or coffee. Another weekend when the county's on emergency alert. For now, bees land on dogwood flowers, robins nest in tall trees planted by the prior owners, and my husband's on his knees out back for hours, pulling branches from hydrangeas I have neither time nor thumb to nurture back to life. He's learned a lot in efforts to identify the colony of ants that sent a scout across our deck, through the side door to a cat food bowl, like what distinguishes Bumblebee from Carpenter (they look the same, the bumble fuzzier). A million years of evolution, the male bee still hovers in one place, waiting for a female to fly by. I fold laundry then look up which buds bloomed in 17th Century Versailles. (You'd guess invasive species but, unironically, it's narcissus and orange blossoms.) For years, I worshipped palms on the other side of the Continental Divide, like I was replanted, like new soil could change the nature of the seed. I looked for lightning and caught language in my mouth. I dreamed of blooms, then woke up in the desert, staring at a mountain, believed to be an imprint of ancient gods whose voices echoed off the surface of the earth. The nervous system replicates in utero, its fight or flight part predetermined, part piano keys the brain may tap. Healing, says the therapist, happens in the pendulation. Insects bounce along the glass as children, mothers sip merlot in coffee mugs, and the man I married after you tans wrist to elbow, scratching up his forearms rending dead wood stems. It's sticky business, caught between my lush, infertile soil and flirting with the bees, he knows that when I think about you, I touch my self-concept on the page. What the Fortune Teller Tells Me on the Night I Leave California The Channel Islands will one day rise up in the distance like a resurrected poet high on mescaline and memories of pretty women. You will or won't learn how to tunnel through a prison of the mind. When the wind picks up, she says she was awoken by the rumble of a saw told so many times it must be true. You might as well drive six years backward, park beside a pool in west New Jersey. I think she means beginnings are like endings: eyelid work, a neuron matter, not ontology or god. To transit is to navigate the synapses, trade one water for another, every body's chemistry the same except for how the furniture's arranged, which pieces we keep secret from ourselves. She eschews the label hypocrite, calls herself a hippopotamus instead. Oh, she's drinking like a river now, but can you honestly say you've never felt a kinship for a living being who could crush you and the glass of bourbon in your hand? Maybe when you were a child, your father chalked equations on a dusty blackboard. Your height in centimeters is your adolescent telephone number divided by the times your mother screamed bringing you into this world.
Break out the croquet for a game of poets named Heather before the queens talk poetry inspired by the movie Heathers. No, Heather, it's Heather's turn!Please support Breaking Form:Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books: Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. When she released her 2nd book of poems, TheTrees The Trees, Heather Christle set up a phone number which people could call to have her read a poem to them. The number was (413) 570-3077. You can read more about that endeavor here and here.You can read Heather McHugh's poem "I Knew I'd Sing," listen to McHugh read it, or watch Mary Karr discuss it. Read McHugh's ars poetica "What He Thought" or click here to listen to her read it (at the 30:45 mark).Find out more about the singer Conan Gray.Watch here the clip of the father eulogizing his son at the funeral for Jake and Ram.Check out Dustin Brookshire's poem "If Dolly Parton Had Been My Mother" And then check out the magazine Dustin edits, Limp Wrist.Read GC Waldrep's poem "What Is a Soprano"Read Frank Bidart's "Herbert White"Check out a lunchtime poll in Heathers.Watch the official video for P!nk's song "Trustfall"
The queens get fictional, discussing the poetry equivalents of best supporting actresses with guest Manuel Muñoz.Kay Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010).Randall Mann's Deal: New and Selected Poems is currently out from Copper Canyon Press.Watch Olympia Dukakis's famous "Why do men cheat?" scene in Moonstruck.When Anne Hathaway accepted the Critics Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2013, she said, “This is a bittersweet moment for me because I have this award, but you spelled my name wrong." She kind of forgot to thank the Broadcast Film Critics Association for the honor. “It is with an ‘e,'” she clarified, adding, “It's probably in bad taste for me to point that out here.”Watch Anne Hathaway's cupcake tutorial here. The movie Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough is a 1975 American romance film, directed by Guy Green, starring Kirk Douglas, Alexis Smith, David Janssen, George Hamilton, Brenda Vaccaro, Melina Mercouri, and Deborah Raffin. When Louise Gluck accepted her National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, she said, in part, "I'm astonished. My thanks to the judges for their mercy. Four times," she said, "This is a difficult evening. It's very difficult to lose. I've lost many times. And it is also, it turns out, is very difficult to win. It is not in my script," she said, to a general scattering of laughter in the audience. Watch it here. Gary Soto was born April 12, 1952. He published The Elements of San Joaquin in 1977 through the Pitt Poetry Series, which released the book on February 1 that year—so he was actually 24! Read more about Soto here. He lists his address on his website, in case you want to write to him: https://garysoto.com Heather McHugh read and gave a lecture in April 2009 at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center, which keeps a terrific audio/video recording archive. You can watch the reading here. The poems she reads are:"The Gift""Not to Be Dwelled On""Granny's Song""No Sex for Priests""I Knew I'd Sing""Coming""Etymological Dirge""Glass House""From the Tower""Webcam the World""Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies""Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork""DOMESTIQUE"watch McHugh give a lecture about the design and impact of the ends of poems, including close readings of powerful last lines including examples from the work of Emo Philips, Abd-ar-Rahman III, Su Tung-po, Anthony Hecht, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Valéry, Alan Dugan, Julio Cortázar, Louis Simpson, Samuel Beckett, and John Frederick Nims.Watch Bette Davis chain-smoke on the Dick Cabot Show while praising Gladys Cooper.Watch Mare Winningham in Girl from the North Country and even her recorded performance of "Like a Rolling Stone" is a little flat.
In this episode, the first page of three books of poetry will be read:Poems New and Collected by Wistawa Szymborska,Hinge and Sign by Heather McHugh, andReign of Snakes by Robert Wrigley
Today's poem is Better or Worse by Heather McHugh.
“Reading Tommy Pico’s Junk I kept thinking of Heather McHugh’s pronouncement that the main discipline of poetry is “to keep finding life strange.” Pico is the master of making the stone stony, or returning the sheer absurdity of being to everything, from grief to intimacy to dating apps to donuts. Junk insists on the urgency […] The post Tommy Pico : Junk appeared first on Tin House.
Heather McHugh appears at the 2013 Library of Congress National Book Festival. Speaker Biography: Heather McHugh is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award" and many other honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has told the PBS NewsHour: "The great paradox of poetry is it's the smallest unit of language you can make that releases the greatest number of readings. That's what it's for, if you ask me." In addition to poetry, McHugh has written a collection of literary essays. Her new poetry collection is "Upgraded to Serious." For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6088
Recordings of poet Heather McHugh, with an introduction to her life and work. Recorded September 21, 2007, New York, NY.
Heather McHugh was born to Canadian parents in San Diego, California, in 1948. She was raised in Virginia and educated at Harvard University. Her books of poetry include Eyeshot (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (1994), which won both the Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize, was a Finalist for the National Book Award, and was named a “Notable Book of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review; Shades (1988); To the Quick (1987); A World of Difference (1981); and Dangers (1977).She is also the author of Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993), and two books of translation: Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (with Niko Boris, 1989) and D’après tout: Poems by Jean Follain (1981).Her honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Heather McHugh teaches as a core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and as Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.McHugh read in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall on April 19, 2007. This interview took place the following day.