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Producer Helena de Groot talks to poets about language, dreams, love and loss, identity, connection, anger, discomfort, the creative process, the state of the world and the world of the soul. Hard conversations are welcomed—laughter is, too.
202 Episodes
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Philip Metres on middle age, writer's block, and praying for the people of Palestine.
April Gibson on chronic illness, religion, and being a teenage mother.
Declan Ryan on his father's construction job, tenderness between boxers, and the inevitable tragic end.
Monica Rico on cooking, grunt work, and the heat at General Motors.
Nam Le on commerce, irony vs. sincerity, and being in the Arctic.
Gregory Pardlo on improv, therapy, and driving around with his father’s ashes.
Caitlin Cowan on rejection, tradwives, and poems from our better self.
Blake Butler on complex mourning, the suicide of his wife Molly Brodak, and finding his way back.
Remembering the lesbian poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt, as well as the Palestinian poet and symbol of the resistance, Refaat Alareer.
Steve Zeitlin and Bob Holman on the healing act of writing, small frogs, and politics at the fiddle festival.
Laura Mullen on academia, death threats, and doing the next brave thing.
Daniel Brock Johnson on risk, a T-shirt mantra, and life after the death of his friend James Foley.
Sebastian Merrill on the voice of his former self, the underworld, and laughing during yoga.
1 Sahar Muradi on cyclical time, leather butterflies, and saying goodbye to her father.
Sean Cole on loneliness, fear of aging, and what poems can do.
Eric Sneathen on queer utopia, bad writing, and San Francisco in the ’70s.
Irène Mathieu on pediatrics, suburbs without a TV, and our body's unknown terrain.
Natalie Shapero on Wheel of Fortune, babysitting for her landlord, and pretending not to grieve.
Rosanna Young Oh on her parents’ grocery store, leaving poetry, and the duties of the firstborn.
Airea D. Matthews on self-interest, starry skies, and her parents’ fateful wedding day.
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These podcasts are great. I learn something new every day. As a podcaster myself, I can draw inspiration from these events. 🤗
And if you can’t shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it by too much contact with the world, by too much activity and talk. Try not to degrade it by dragging it along, taking it around and exposing it so often to the daily silliness of social events and parties, until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on. C.P. Cavafy
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.” You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world. —C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933)
Louis Bogan: Women have no wilderness in them, Curtis Fox: “Women have no wilderness in them”. Bogan wrote that in 1923 just after women had won the vote, the culmination of the first wave of feminism. Louis Bogan: Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. Honor Moore: You can imagine, give me a break! What are you talking about? Curtis Fox: Honor Moore is a poet who came of age in the 1960s and 70s during the second wave of feminism. Honor Moore: It infuriated us! If wilderness is a metaphor and you’re talking about Louis and Clark charting the wilderness (took a woman to get them 'there') that’s what we’re doing. Louis Bogan: They wait, when they should turn to journeys, They stiffen, when they should bend. Alicia Ostriker: It wasn’t one of my favourite poems. Curtis Fox: Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic who has written a lot about poetry by women. Alicia Ostriker: Women have no wilderness in th
Curtis Fox: Doubleness, submission combined with rebellion. Alicia Ostriker says we can see it in Emily Dickinson about a century later. Alicia Ostriker: One of her best known poems, “I’m nobody”. Just about the same identical time as Walt Whitman is saying “I celebrate myself, I sing myself”. Emily Dickinson is saying — Cindy Kats: I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you — Nobody — too? Alicia Ostriker: (LAUGHING) Modest, shy, self-deprecating Emily. Then in the next stanza — Cindy Kats: How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!
“No more masks, no more anthologies...If one woman told the truth about her life, the world would split open.”
I think submission is not the word I would ever use with Gwendolyn Brooks.
“Trilogy”, “Helen in Egypt”. She’s not a mere lyric poet. “Trilogy” has the kind of power and ambition of “The Waste Land” and “The Cantos”, but it’s by a woman so nobody — that long poem “Trilogy”. It really took digging out these poems and liberating them from the dusty back shelves of the library. We continually had the attitude that the strong powerful poems by women were being supressed, and we were meant to find them.
Curtis Fox: Some women poets in the early decades of the 20th century became players in the avant-garde movement of literary modernism. I give you Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein: If they tear a hunter through, if they tear through a hunter, if they tear through a hunt and hunter, if they tear through the different sizes of the six Curtis Fox: But how does a modernist poet like Gertrude Stein fit into the story of women poets finding their voices as women? Alicia Ostriker: I don’t think she fits in. What she fits into is the experimentation of modernism. Modernism for women meant you didn’t write about your feelings at all, or at least not openly. You wrote abstractly, you wrote playfully, you wrote experimentally, you did interesting things with form like Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein. To try to get the approval of the boys club, you had to write like the boys and not write about domesticity, not write about romance, not weep, that kind of thing.
Honor Moore: She quoted Emily Dickinson, “My life had stood a loaded gun”. We could identify with that poem. Cindy Kats: My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - Honor Moore: i.e. I hadn’t been writing poems, I had no voice. Cindy Kats: till a Day The Owner passed - identified - And carried Me away - Honor Moore: The muse, the ominous. Cindy Kats: And now We roam in Sovreign Woods - And now We hunt the Doe - And every time I speak for Him Honor Moore: i.e. for my muse Cindy Kats: The Mountains straight reply - Honor Moore:— echoes back. Cindy Kats: Though I than He - may longer live He longer must - than I - For I have but the power to kill, Without - the power to die - Honor Moore: (LAUGHING) She is too much.
Joan Larkin: One of the things poetry does is it puts to language things you haven’t thought of in the language. So at a time when the women’s movement was changing women’s lives, and a woman would not be able to wash the dishes again, she might go to a poetry reading and hear a poem in which a woman is talking about being tired of washing the dishes. Susan Griffin: This is a poem for a woman doing dishes. This is a poem for a woman doing dishes. It must be repeated. It must be repeated, again and again, again and again, because the woman doing dishes because the woman doing dishes has trouble hearing has trouble hearing.
the language of the unsaid. My favourite pages of The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë are the notes at the back
I learn a lot from her. When I read her work and I focus on how it is that she chooses not to reclaim language, but instead to turn it over and to remake it and to give it back to the reader as a kind of, overcooked idea. I’m grateful for it. I feel like I’m still a student of it.
I think one thing that Laura Hershey, one of the many things she excels at, includes her play with language and her sort of fearless play with language, right. She often takes up all of the words that have been used to shape her or restrict her or deem her in some light that is less than. And she doesn’t just ... I don’t really know that she reclaims it. I don’t know that Laura Hershey’s interested in reclamation. I think she is interested in, like, turning it back on folks and saying, “This. Is this how you meant to hurt me? This thing right here?” Right.
mysticism contradicts the kind of dogma that religious institutions often depend upon. Which is why I feel drawn to religiosity and the urge to worship but not towards the kinds of institutions which have such a terrible history.
“there is another world, but it is inside this one.”
Poem for Passengers Like all strangers who temporarily find themselves moving in the same direction we look out the window without really seeing or down at our phones trying to catch the dying signal then the famous lonesome whistle so many singers have sung about blows and our bodies shudder soon we will pick up speed and pass the abandoned factories there has lately been so much conversation about through broken windows they stare asking us to decide but we fall asleep next to each other riding into the tunnel sharing without knowing the same dream in it we are carrying something an empty casket somehow so heavy only together can we carry it over a bridge in the snow emerging suddenly into the light we wake and open our laptops or a book about murder or a glossy magazine though we are mostly awake part of us still goes on solving problems so great they cannot be named even once we have reached our destination and disembark into whatever weather for a long time there is a compartment
nothing is essential to poetry
I would go over once a week to this beautiful room and take a class with Brodsky. And he was very grouchy. It was supposed to be a course on 19th century Russian lyric poetry, but the entire time, he just ended up talking about Frost. Like, literally 20 lectures on Robert Frost. Helena de Groot: What! Matthew Zapruder: Yeah, he just talked about whatever he felt like talking about, which again, was his prerogative. Helena de Groot: Sure. Matthew Zapruder: This was in the days when you could still smoke in classes. And so Brodsky would smoke. And he smoked these cigarettes... I’m pretty sure Vantage was the brand. Helena de Groot: Okay. Matthew Zapruder: And the thing about the Vantage cigarette—I believe the thing about the Vantage cigarette is that it has a little hole in the filter for some reason, like through the middle of it, to make sure that you get the maximum amount of whatever. And he would smoke these Vantages, but the funny thing about it is, he would pull the f
I think that poems are the things that protect me from that. As soon as I’m writing a poem, or reading one, for that matter, it pushes out, it creates this space of protection in which I’m thinking, dreaming, having intuitions, making connections that I just don’t get to make in most of my other life. So, in a way, I’ve come to realize that if I’m feeling that way, I have to almost mechanically make myself go over and pick up a book or just simply start writing a poem or scribbling, or whatever. And then I will start to build a field where I can have these different kinds of feelings. And it protects me. I mean, it’s amazing. It’s almost like casting a spell. 📿🎓