May 27, 2024 • 39 mins
I talk with Ronnie K. Stephens (The Poetry Question; The Kaleidoscope Sisters) about Andrea Gibson's prose poem "Tincture." Up front, apologies to Andrea Gibson, who I misgendered early on in the recording; thanks to Ronnie for his graciousness. We talk about the question of prose poems, pain, and sentimentality. Afterward, we play a less comic, more straightforward game I call "Pulitzer Prize Winner Kendrick Lamar 1, Drake 0." This episode is brought to you by the all-mighty SUV.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Talking Poem Podcast.
(00:07):
I'm your host, Charlie Green.
Sometimes I produce short episodes where it's just me, and on episodes like today's, I
invite a guest to bring in any poem they'd like to talk about for any reason.
We'll follow the poem and the conversation wherever they go, and after that, we'll have
a little silliness.
If you enjoy the show, please follow and rate it wherever you get your podcasts.
My guest today is Ronnie K. Stevens.
(00:28):
He holds an MA in creative writing and an MFA in fiction, and he's pursuing a PhD in
English at the University of Texas at Arlington, specializing in American poetry and transgressive
teaching practices for the 21st century classroom.
His research centers the role of poetry in subverting anti-ethnic and anti-LGBTQ legislation
affecting public education.
(00:50):
He's the author of three books, Universe in the Key of Matryoshka, They Rewrote Themselves
Legendaries and The Kaleidoscope Sisters, all three fantastic titles, by the way.
He also runs the website, The Poetry Question, where he reviews new collections of poetry,
among other things.
Ronnie, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for being here.
Thanks for having me.
Just one point of clarity, I am a staff reviewer for The Poetry Question.
(01:11):
The editor-in-chief is Chris Butler.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I had that wrong.
No worries.
I will get that.
Just want to give him credit where it's due.
Oh, no, no.
You're supposed to take everyone else's credit.
That's how it works in the 21st century.
Before we get to the poem, I'm curious to hear actually more about The Poetry Question
because you review a lot of books.
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And I'm just kind of curious how you choose what you review and also balancing positive
reviews and thinking of negativity and how that works.
I think I might review more poetry collections than anybody writing right now.
And a lot of that is just because The Poetry Question has been really good to me over the
(01:52):
years.
It began with Chris Margolin who ran it for I think a little over a decade.
And we sort of touched base in Portland during AWP in I want to say 2018, might have been
2020.
I can't remember exactly.
But he mentioned that he was wanting to get into the review side and I really wanted to
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get into reviewing poetry more consistently.
I'd been reviewing a handful of collections a year and sending out reviews but wanted
to do it consistently.
So I got on with him and when he passed the reins on to Chris Butler, we sort of touched
base about the trajectory of The Poetry Question.
And he explicitly asked me if I would write exclusively for The Poetry Question and if
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I could produce a minimum of four reviews a month.
And that sort of put me in the space where I am now where I'm reviewing an average of
I guess 48 to 50 collections a year.
And I've been really fortunate.
The presses that I've been in contact with have been really, really supportive and willing
to send me a number of their titles.
(03:01):
They've been very trusting with their material, their content and very engaged in sharing
the reviews when they're publicized.
So at this point, it's been so successful for me that I get probably a hundred books
a year that are sent to me by publishers and I've developed a policy essentially that I
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only write reviews for the books that I really and truly love.
And I've talked to my dissertation director actually, Dr. Nathaniel O'Reilly about this
a lot because most of my reviews are very positive and outside, you know, of America,
I guess there's an international sense, he's Australian, and there's an international sense
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that poetry reviews in particular in America are congratulatory and celebratory without
being critical.
But from my standpoint, I could write about the collections that don't really speak to
me, but more often than not, I find that those collections speak to others and I think I'm
best served just focusing on the collections that really move me and that really do something
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for me mentally, emotionally, you know, intellectually.
So when I'm sitting down to decide if I want to review a book, the first thing I consider
is what went through my mind when I was reading it?
Was I excited to move forward?
Was I pushing myself forward out of obligation?
And the more excited I am, the more likely I am to review.
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The poetry question is determined to highlight voices that are historically underrepresented.
So you will see that for me in particular, almost every review that I publish is by an
author of color and or a member of the LGBTQ community because we really want to make sure
that voices that are not typically highlighted and celebrated in the publishing industry
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get that space with the poetry question.
Yeah, that's something I noticed and something I appreciate and you know that whole question
about like our reviews in the US too celebratory.
It's such a difficult question to sort of navigate because I do feel like most of the
vast majority of poetry reviews I read are positive, but at the same time, like the poetry
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reviews that I think of as negative are always like William Logan and like sort of hatchet
jobs and I don't know how much use there is in that, you know, that at times he can be
observed on other episodes I've mentioned.
I think he's writing more for funny lines rather than observations when he's writing
negatively and I do find myself sometimes wondering if there's more space for that,
(05:40):
but I also really appreciate your approach because you're looking for, you know, underrepresented
groups and that you really love the books.
It isn't a matter of just saying, oh yes, I'm going to congratulate every book of poems,
but that to some extent you're, or to a large extent, you're really trying to draw readers
in to reading books of poems that you love.
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So I think that's fantastic.
I like that approach.
So for today, you've brought in Andrea Gibson's prose poem, Tincture.
Why don't you go ahead and read the poem and then we'll dive in and talk about it.
Okay.
This is Tincture by Andrea Gibson.
It's from their collection, Lord of the Butterflies.
Imagine when a human dies, the soul misses the body, actually grieves the loss of its
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hands and all they could hold.
Misses the throat closing shy, reading out loud on the first day of school.
Imagine the soul misses the stubbed toe, the loose tooth, the funny bone.
The soul still asks, why does the funny bone do that?
It's just weird.
Imagine the soul misses the thirsty garden cheeks watered by grief, misses how the body
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could sleep through a dream.
What else can sleep through a dream?
What else can laugh?
What else can wrinkle the smile's autograph?
Imagine the soul misses each falling eyelash waiting to be a wish.
Misses the wrist screaming away the blade.
The soul misses the lisp, the stutter, the limp.
The soul misses the holy bruise glue from that army of blood rushing to the wound's
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side.
When a human dies, the soul searches the universe for something blushing, something shaking
in the cold, something that scars, sweeps the universe for patients worn thin, the last
nerve fighting for its life, the voice box aching to be heard.
The soul misses the way the body would hold another body and not be two bodies but one
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pleading God doubled in grace.
The soul misses how the mind told the body, you have fallen from grace, and the body said
erase every scripture that doesn't have a pulse.
There isn't a single page in the bible that can wince, that can clumsy, that can freckle,
that can hunger.
Imagine the soul misses hunger, emptiness, rage, the fist that was never taught to curl,
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curled, the teeth that were never taught to clench, clenched, the body that was never
taught to make love, made love like a hungry ghost digging its way out of the grave.
The soul misses the unforever of old age, the skin that no longer fits.
The soul misses every single day the body was sick, the now it forced, the here it built
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from the fever.
Fever is how the body prays, how it burns and begs for another average day.
The soul misses the legs creaking up the stairs, misses the fear that climbed up the vocal
cords to curse the wheelchair.
The soul misses what the body could not let go, what else could hold on that tightly to
everything?
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What else could hear the chain of a swing set and fall to its knees?
What else could touch a screen door and taste lemonade?
What else could come back from a war and not come back, but still try to live, still try
to lullaby?
When a human dies, the soul moves through the universe, trying to describe how a body
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trembles when it's lost, softens when it's safe, how a wound would heal given nothing
but time.
Do you understand?
Everything in space can imagine it.
No comet, no nebula, no ray of light can fathom the landscape of awe, the heat of shame, the
fingertips pulling the first gray hair and throwing it away.
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I can't imagine it, the stars say.
Tell us again about goosebumps.
Tell us again about pain.
Thank you so much.
You've written about this poem before in terms of how it approaches pain and chronic illness.
I'm just curious why you wanted to talk about this poem in particular.
This poem, when I first sat with Lord of the Butterflies, I had known Andrea for close
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to a decade.
I was already a big fan of their work and what they were doing in terms of navigating
mental health, but quietly to some extent and behind the scenes, Andrea had been battling
chronic illness and Lyme disease.
This was the first book where I really felt like they were coming to terms with it in
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their poetry.
When I read this poem, a few things stood out to me.
The first is how gracefully they approached chronic illness.
I admire most about Andrea that throughout the tremendous struggles they have faced,
they always lead from a place of love.
In writing this, I really felt like they were insisting on loving their body despite all
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of the reasons that they might have not to.
It really struck me also that the poem celebrated the pain.
The last word of the poem is pain.
When I'm reading that and I'm taking into account the number of poems they've written
about suicidal ideation and their own attempts to leave this life and then to see the resilience
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in this poem and the unflinching grace they're willing to grant themselves, it just really,
really hit me in the heart.
But also from a technical standpoint, I always look at prose poems and have that eternal
question that my students repeat to me every year.
How do you distinguish prose from poetry and what makes a prose poem poetry and not prose?
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I don't think there's a definitive answer, but I do think when you read a poem like Tincture,
it's clear when you sit with the language that this poem could just as easily be written
with very tight rhymed couplets.
There's a lot of rhythm and subtle meter embedded in the line.
So, even though it's presented as a single block of text, there's a lot about it that
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very clearly and explicitly signals that it's a poem.
And then, you know, I often in my reviews sit with structure and so when I'm reading
it and I'm noticing all of these rhymes and how easily they could be couplets, I then
have to wonder why then is it presented as a prose poem, as a block of text?
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Because it's not a style that Andrea Gibson uses often.
And for me, when I look at that block, what it feels like is something that visually,
textually does not resonate immediately as beautiful or artistic in its structure.
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It's just a block of text.
But when you read it, you begin to find the poetry and the beauty and the grace inside
the lines in the same way that I think the poem is trying to find that grace and that
beauty and that poetry inside the body.
That makes a lot of sense.
I really like that explanation in part because I always, I think of this as old fuddy duddiness
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in myself, but I'm always skeptical of prose poems.
I feel like, and with this poem, I was not totally sure that I totally was accepting
it as a prose poem, in part because when you read it and I watched her video with Button
Poetry on YouTube, which I'll link to, reading it, and she reads with lots and lots of pauses.
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And hearing you read it, I heard the sound much more.
I think that the way you read it allowed me to hear the sound and understand it better
as a prose poem.
And I think part of it, the way you just explained it, makes a lot of sense because I basically
read the poem as spoken to a specific person, so that the person being told to imagine is
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a specific person or kind of person and not people in general.
And it's somebody who is having suicidal ideation and it's this sort of plea to try to think
of these things this way.
Think of fever as how the body prays and not pain.
Think of the soul as something that will continue missing something once the body is gone.
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And so for some reason, that also makes it work for me as a prose poem that it de-aestheticizes
it where it would seem like a different kind of plea if it were broken into lines.
And so I feel like maybe what we miss in terms of sound, which is there, it's just that it
doesn't announce itself because it's not broken in lines.
That gets taken up by the emotion of the poem and the way it's addressed.
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Yeah.
Just one point of clarity.
Andrea Gibson does use they them pronouns, I want to make sure we honor that.
Did I say she?
Yeah.
Oh, I apologize.
I apologize to her.
I apologize to them.
Yeah.
You know, I was reading about the poem and reading about them and in my head said, say
thee that they them and don't make the mistake.
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So I apologize to them and to you, so into listeners.
So yeah, it seems their choice makes a lot of sense to me to put it in prose in terms
of what you talked about.
So yeah, and I mean, Andrea has talked about this poem a few times, you know, when reading
it and it's actually interesting because, you know, I've seen them live a number of
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times and because we're somewhat close, there are times when they've sort of asked like,
you know, is there any poem that people in the audience really want to hear?
And I've asked them to read this and I remember when I asked them to read this, they mentioned
that they'd never read it on stage at that point.
And I kind of wondered if that's because it is a poem that benefits from sitting with
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it, I think.
Even this morning I was sitting with it in anticipation of our conversation and I started
looking again, you know, down the page at how frequently you encounter these rhymes
like thirsty garden cheeks watered by grief, misses how the body could sleep through a
dream.
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And I was thinking back to the ways that I introduce assonance to my students and, you
know, I frequently cite things like Tupac and I'll put a verse up that puts on display
his repetition of the A sound through a series of 32 bars.
And when I'm looking at this, I'm seeing that same thing and I feel like if you listen to
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it quickly in a YouTube video and you're distracted, it's very easy to miss it.
But when you sit and look at the words on the page and you let those sounds sort of
come to the surface, it's incredible how attentive they are to sound in this poem, how harmonious
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the sound is despite what looks like a very large block.
I mean, it's more than a page long and it looks like a very heavy poem.
Yet when you read it, if you allow yourself to find that rhythm, it's not heavy at all.
Like there's a lightness and almost a release to the rhythm of it, I think.
Yeah, I agree.
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They have a really fantastic ear that what else can laugh, what else can wrinkle, the
smiles autograph and then the soul misses the lisp, the stutter, the limp, the soul
misses the holy bruise blue from that army of blood rushing to the wound side.
It's a really fantastic, elegant movement of sounds in those sentences.
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I wonder, I feel like that is a potential compromise with a prose poem is that I think
you have to sit with the poem a little differently.
I'm just so used to when I see a line on the page, like my brain is sort of already processing
what sounds I'm seeing and hearing.
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Whereas with a prose poem, I think my brain just does, yeah, in reading prose, I'm trained
to read a novel.
So I'm attentive to sound in a different way.
And so there is, I think that compromise, but I think it's a worthwhile compromise in
this, especially if, like you said, we spend the longer time with the poem.
Well, I was just going to point out, I was sort of flipping through the book and reminding
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myself.
It's been a few years since I reviewed this collection and I teach tincture and a handful
of poems, but I was sort of flipping through the book and recalling that for me, this book
was also a really interesting movement, I think, for Andrea Gibson because they made
their name and they sort of are most popular as a performance poet.
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I don't say that to mean that their poetry doesn't work on the page, but I do feel like
with this book, there are several poems where it's really indicative to their attention
to the page and to textuality itself that wasn't present in previous books.
Most of them had very conventional approaches to poetry, but this one plays with white space,
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it plays with blocking in a couple of prose poems.
And I really think that as they were writing this book, they became more aware of what
they could do with the material page outside of a performance of a particular poem.
And when I think about this poem in particular, Andrea has said a number of times that their
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writing process is fairly unique.
They write most of their poetry without sitting at a typewriter or a screen, they write it
in their head, they write it walking around.
And according to what I've heard from them, they very often don't sit down to put the
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poem onto paper until it's pretty much been written and revised in their mind.
And I think that's one of the ways the sound permeates so clearly.
And I think also why Litany and Anaphora work so well in this prose poem because it's a
fairly immense poem to organize as technically as they have, but those sound devices I think
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sort of allow for that memorization and that writing process independent of the screen.
That's kind of mind blowing to me, in part because it's always impossible for me to imagine
writing that way because I lose things.
But you're absolutely right that the Litany and the Anaphora do so much of that.
It's like, I think John Milton did this as well, especially once he went blind where
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he's sort of doing the revising in his head.
Whereas I don't have a kind of memory where I can hold onto something.
I have to write something down and let other things get clear, have that space empty for
them to come through.
But it really, it makes a lot of sense that we get imagine, misses, imagine, misses, that
really structures the poem.
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The other thing that kind of blows my mind about it in that sense is the different kinds
of things in the poem.
One of the things I love about it is the sense of scale because it feels like it contains
both a biography and it's also as minute as an individual bruise, but also to the scale
of space.
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And that's something that I just really admire, that the poem has that scale.
And I wonder how much writing it in prose also allowed them to do that, to have, because
it's one thing to have a poem in lines, especially composing it in their head, but also to have
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both kinds of repetition that are so heavy and then also the kinds of scale that the
poem has.
I want to share, so I have a couple of things in the poem I'm not crazy about.
Thinking about the talk about balancing positive and negative, because I think my first instinct
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when I read the poem was to find a few things sentimentalized.
There are things in here that blow my mind, like what else can sleep through a dream is
fantastic.
The entire structure of the poem, fever is how the body prays, I absolutely love.
There are a few things, and I wonder if you had this reaction or maybe I'm being too overly
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searchy for sentimentality.
The thirsty garden cheeks watered by grief for me felt a little sentimentalized, although
I'm aware that I'm reading, teach personal narrative class, and what I find is very often
students will labor over, and I've done this too, so it's not like a student thing, but
there's this labor to describe tears in a really intense way or a really ornate way
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and feels in those instances and in this instance, like it's trying to do a little too much where
the emotion already is.
What do you think about that?
Do you have that reaction to it or do you want to sell me on this, for lack of a better
word?
You know, I don't disagree as a general idea that tears, I think more than any other image
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are probably overwrought and especially I think burgeoning writers in my experience
are eager to describe them as something other than what they are, but I don't have that
reaction within Tincture and I think I don't have that reaction specifically because Andrea
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Gibson has owned sentimentality throughout their career.
They are unapologetically sentimental and encouraging of sentimentality.
I think that a lot of poets are trained away from honoring sentiment and allowing for sentiment
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to overtake a particular image and if anything, I think that the last three years as Andrea
has navigated ovarian cancer and treatment have put their dedication to sentimentality
on full display.
They do not shy away from the overly sentimental and the sometimes cliche because they find
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beauty in those most mundane moments, the most ridiculous circumstances and I think
that they've come to appreciate probably with their fan base as well that they're free to
be sentimental and they've been so exposed and so open and so public with so many of
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the things they've experienced that even those more sentimental moments feel honest and authentic
to Andrea as a person.
They might not feel authentic to another poet if I was reading the same line, you know,
by someone like Rachel McKibben's for example who does not often write with that same sort
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of sentimentality and does not have that same sort of aura to their work.
I might question it a little bit more, but the more of Andrea's work you read, the more
it becomes clear that they embrace that sentimentality and I think almost would walk away from poetry
before they would refuse those moments of sentimentality in a poem.
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I really like that way of answering the question in part because it is what they have sort
of chosen as an essential part of their poetics.
Also I do think every poem should be risking sentimentality in some way, even poems that
are really stripped down, there's the Louise Glick poem that, and of course I can't remember
the title of, but talked about with Morgan Frank on a previous episode where it comes
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close to the end, it says cry, risk, joy, and even in this compact poem that feels sort
of emotionally stripped, there is that move toward sentiment and feeling.
I think part of it is also sometimes these words get a little conflated, like emotion
and sentimentality, and there is a very clear definition people use for sentimentality in
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a lot of cases, but I think that making it a central part of their work, and I'm not
that familiar with their work, it makes sense that within the context of their work, it's
more that it feels more of the voice.
And then also the thing for me is that everything I like in the poem outweighs anything that
I respond to as sentimental, and it's also I think a risk of writing a poem that has
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this much scale in terms of like a life within the poem, that it starts with childhood.
I think that my initial, where it first aimed for me was the phrase reading out loud on
the first day of school, in part because this is something that may be me, but there was
something, actually this may be me, because I talk with students a lot about the personal
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statements that they write for graduate school and med school, and the very strict rule is
do not depict yourself as a child because you want the evaluators to see you as an adult,
and the reading out loud on the first day of school, the throat posing shy, still feels
a little on that border, but it's something that also is very resonant and I think identifiable
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and recognizable.
So I think that may be my own kind of hesitation in that moment.
The thirsty garden sheiks I think still feel sentimental to me, but otherwise I just, I'm
really a fan of what they're doing in the poem so much that I'm happy to let it go and
happy to look at it in the context of their other poems.
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Stan It was just interesting when you pointed out
Mrs. The Throat Closing Shy Reading Out Loud on the First Day of School, it's such an interesting
line and I did not immediately associate it with the speaker as child.
I can see that angle and if I look at it from that angle, it actually still sits okay with
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me because Andrea has a poem where they're writing in the voice of themselves as a child
on the playground responding to a bully and it's maybe one of the most self-accepting
poems and it's a poem that resonates with students very often.
And so I could see that voice, but Andrea also has a poem describing a brief position
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where they worked I think at a preschool and when I first, when I read that normally, I
associate Andrea as an adult in the schools but feeling nervous because I've seen them
presenting to students and presenting with classes and so then I read it as their own
nerves sort of choking them up as they're reading aloud.
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And it's interesting that I think the line allows for both of those things to be true
and now I might be projecting because I know that I've been teaching for 15 years and I
still get nervous every time I meet students for the first time and I almost always stumble
on things as simple as reading clauses from the syllabus on the first day because of those
You know it's funny, by the way I would love to get rid of those first day jitters just once,
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nerves so maybe I'm just projecting for myself there.
just to feel calm even though it's like you know I'm gonna be with you for a long haul
students.
I think I read it as a student because of what follows.
It feels to me like the poem is setting it up to have that sort of larger biography.
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Even the soul misses the stubbed toe, the loose tooth, the funny bone.
The soul still asks why does the funny bone do that.
It's just weird which I really like because for me it's setting up a kind of younger voice
and I think that's part of why I'm seeing it as, seeing it reading out loud on the first
day of school as a child with that throat closing shy.
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But you're absolutely right.
I think that's, it's me, I think it's an assumption a reader could make either way honestly and
both are fair to the poem.
Yeah, yeah I totally agree.
I see what you're saying there and I do think it follows that trajectory if you're reading
the poem, start to finish as sort of a reflection that begins in childhood and moves toward
you know that eventual death and adulthood.
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Are there other things you'd like to talk about in the poem, things you want to mention
that we haven't talked about before we move to the silliness part?
I guess the only thing that we haven't addressed explicitly is that I am obsessed with universe
metaphors and I know that's one of the things that drew me in pretty quickly having written
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you know a book that is sort of rooted in that metaphor and using that metaphor frequently
to describe my role as a father and trying to process like what pregnancy is from the
outside and what it means for a child to grow and expand and I kept coming back to this
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idea that they really are like small universes that begin and expand you know toward infinity
and then cease and that energy is essentially recycled into the universe and new universes
continue to be born.
And so when I read this and it got to the point where the soul is sort of released into
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the universe and is encountering all of these tangible objects but tangible without sensation,
it was a fascinating thing for me to think about and also a really cathartic one because
I have struggled immensely with my own attachment to my physical body and body dysmorphia.
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I had written around the same time that I read you know this book, I'd written a poem
that includes a line, for you the body will always be a warehouse of pain and I think
when I read this I was just really struck with that idea of if there is a part of us
that continues on and it's not the physical body, what must that you know be like for
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this thing that has spent most of its existence with the senses and with you know sensory
experience and then to relinquish all of that was just a really incredibly cathartic thing
for me to consider because I think we always approach the body as the weakest part of ourselves.
You know when we think about the everlasting and what might transcend whether it's memory
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or soul or you know you believe in an afterlife, whatever it is, it's the body that deteriorates
and we always think of the body as the most fragile and in that I think that we forget
to celebrate it and we forget to recognize the absolute miracle of every sensation that
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we are capable of experiencing and I just love that Andrea was able to pull us back
to that by essentially moving into the ethereal and saying okay let's like let's piggyback
on this idea, let's imagine the soul really is released out into the universe and continues
to interact but without a physical form that might sound like it's transcending pain but
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it's really losing probably 99% of its experiential memory.
Yeah I think that's fantastic because you know the question is what is the self without
pain especially with chronic pain and that's you know because the poem is I think interested
in pain over the course of time that everyone pain is a thing but everyone feels with occasional
(33:28):
very rare exceptions and I like that what you say about the power of a metaphor that
comes from astronomy and looking to space that you know there's the universe in a grain
of sand and also shout out to previous guest Lisa Ampelman for her book Mom in Space and
it gives us a scale.
There's a complexity to the scale because our sense of it is always changing and our
(33:52):
sense of ourself in terms of where we are in the world our own scale is something that
I think changes for us quite a bit over the course of our lives.
Many times we think we're the Sun and it turns out we may just be one of the unidentified
moons around Jupiter.
Right.
So well thank you so much for bringing in this poem which I was not familiar with prior
(34:14):
and I'm very very glad to know now.
So let's transition to the silliness and the game.
First as always we have an ad on episode 14 with the previously mentioned Rebecca Morgan
Frank I shared an ad by Nissan for their line of cars Poetica.
Today we're back on the road with SUVs that similarly pay tribute to our poetic heritage.
(34:37):
Here are your options for 2025 honoring Frank O'Hara Chevrolet's the day Escalade died and
Carson's Chevy Equinox GMC's TR Hummer the hybrid William Staff Ford or Russell Edson
the Ford and sexplorer which carries a ton the Subaru Forester Gander the Volkswagen
(34:59):
Tiguan Felipe Herrera the Ford Expedition Chen the Hyundai Tucson it the Ford Richard
Blanco Bill DeMore stately mansions oh my kia soul the GMC Yukon is now the GMC Yousef
Komunyakan the Jeep David Waggoner and of course the Chevy Traverse.
All right that's that's very very stupid.
(35:21):
So on to the game which I'm calling Pulitzer Prize winner Kendrick Lamar won Drake 0.
I'm going to give you the name of the poet and I want you to tell me if they won the
Pulitzer Prize for poetry or not.
Oh wow.
Yeah as a bonus if they won you can try to guess the book and any it's very straightforward
any questions about the game.
(35:42):
No I'm terrified but let's give it a shot.
I would have done horribly on this I spent I spent a good while just scrolling back and
forth through the list it's kind of astounding.
All right number one Carolyn Forchet as Carolyn Forchet won a Pulitzer Prize.
I'm going to say no.
That is correct ding ding ding.
(36:02):
She was a finalist in 2021 with Natalie Diaz won for postcolonial love poem but that's
her only appearance on the Pulitzer list.
So you're one for one.
Number two Natasha Trethewey.
Yes I do feel like she is one.
Do you want to guess the book?
I couldn't tell you the book.
It's a yes she did win and it's for Native Guard.
(36:24):
Okay.
Which is I think my favorite of her books just because it has an incredible really incredible
crown of sonnets in it.
Number three Sylvia Plath.
Wow I'm gonna say no.
That is incorrect.
Did she win posthumously?
Yes she did she won in 1982 for the collected poems.
(36:46):
Oh wow okay.
Every time I see that I think give it to a living person you know.
And it begs the question did she win or did Ted Hughes win for collecting you know and
editing that volume.
Yeah in which case someone should take the award away from it.
I agree.
(37:06):
Number four Nikki Giovanni.
Oh I'm gonna say yes and if I'm wrong I'm comfortable in that because she should have
won or she hasn't.
I feel the same way but she did not.
I was kind of surprised.
One of the things I did with the full list was just you know doing control F searching
for names and I was surprised to find she hadn't even been a finalist.
That's wild.
(37:27):
Yeah.
Number five last one and then I will have a bonus question.
Number five Gwendolyn Brooks.
I'm also gonna say yes and I'm gonna be very upset if I'm wrong.
You're gonna be very happy because it is yes.
Okay good.
Do you want to guess the year?
The year oh man.
I couldn't guess the year.
(37:49):
For some reason I'm thinking of the year that they wrote a series in sonnets that were really
exploring the structure of the sonnet and Emmett Till but I can't remember the year.
1950.
Wow.
No that would not have been that exploration.
No I was surprised to see it in 1950 and the little happy is for her book Annie Allen.
(38:13):
And never since?
No.
No.
That's insane.
They seem the Boettler committee housed at Columbia which lately has seemed like a university
of bad decisions at the administration in any way.
They don't seem to want to award it multiple times to people which is a great transition
into the bonus question because a few people have won it multiple times and my question
(38:35):
for you is how many times did Robert Frost win the Pulitzer Prize?
Too many.
One is too many.
Really?
You know what?
I'm not a Robert Frost fan.
I'm not.
I'll admit it.
I'm gonna say three.
Very close.
It was four.
Wow.
Four too many.
I feel like Robert Frost very much.
So I think it's too many just because if they're gonna follow the press it...
(38:59):
Steven Vincent Bonet won it twice and I didn't know he had a brother who was also a poet
who also won it.
So the Bonet family was writing.
Hi.
Ronnie thank you so much for being here.
Is there anything you want to mention or plug before we go?
I don't think so.
I mean our big thing is the poetry question and I feel like we've given that some new
attention so if you're looking for new books just pop over to the poetry question and read
(39:20):
some reviews maybe you'll find something that resonates.
Yeah.
I really liked your review especially of Joy Priest's Horsepower which was actually how
I discovered the... or discovered how I came across the poetry question because she had
actually mentioned you know thanking you for the review and I just...
I was either about to record with her or just had so yeah.
Go to the poetry question listeners.
(39:42):
And listeners also go have a great day.
Read some poems, pet some dogs and support striking workers wherever you find them.
Bye.
Welcome to the Talking Poem Podcast.
(00:07):
I'm your host, Charlie Green.
Sometimes I produce short episodes where it's just me, and on episodes like today's, I
invite a guest to bring in any poem they'd like to talk about for any reason.
We'll follow the poem and the conversation wherever they go, and after that, we'll have
a little silliness.
If you enjoy the show, please follow and rate it wherever you get your podcasts.
My guest today is Ronnie K. Stevens.
(00:28):
He holds an MA in creative writing and an MFA in fiction, and he's pursuing a PhD in
English at the University of Texas at Arlington, specializing in American poetry and transgressive
teaching practices for the 21st century classroom.
His research centers the role of poetry in subverting anti-ethnic and anti-LGBTQ legislation
affecting public education.
(00:50):
He's the author of three books, Universe in the Key of Matryoshka, They Rewrote Themselves
Legendaries and The Kaleidoscope Sisters, all three fantastic titles, by the way.
He also runs the website, The Poetry Question, where he reviews new collections of poetry,
among other things.
Ronnie, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for being here.
Thanks for having me.
Just one point of clarity, I am a staff reviewer for The Poetry Question.
(01:11):
The editor-in-chief is Chris Butler.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I had that wrong.
No worries.
I will get that.
Just want to give him credit where it's due.
Oh, no, no.
You're supposed to take everyone else's credit.
That's how it works in the 21st century.
Before we get to the poem, I'm curious to hear actually more about The Poetry Question
because you review a lot of books.
(01:32):
And I'm just kind of curious how you choose what you review and also balancing positive
reviews and thinking of negativity and how that works.
I think I might review more poetry collections than anybody writing right now.
And a lot of that is just because The Poetry Question has been really good to me over the
(01:52):
years.
It began with Chris Margolin who ran it for I think a little over a decade.
And we sort of touched base in Portland during AWP in I want to say 2018, might have been
2020.
I can't remember exactly.
But he mentioned that he was wanting to get into the review side and I really wanted to
(02:14):
get into reviewing poetry more consistently.
I'd been reviewing a handful of collections a year and sending out reviews but wanted
to do it consistently.
So I got on with him and when he passed the reins on to Chris Butler, we sort of touched
base about the trajectory of The Poetry Question.
And he explicitly asked me if I would write exclusively for The Poetry Question and if
(02:40):
I could produce a minimum of four reviews a month.
And that sort of put me in the space where I am now where I'm reviewing an average of
I guess 48 to 50 collections a year.
And I've been really fortunate.
The presses that I've been in contact with have been really, really supportive and willing
to send me a number of their titles.
(03:01):
They've been very trusting with their material, their content and very engaged in sharing
the reviews when they're publicized.
So at this point, it's been so successful for me that I get probably a hundred books
a year that are sent to me by publishers and I've developed a policy essentially that I
(03:23):
only write reviews for the books that I really and truly love.
And I've talked to my dissertation director actually, Dr. Nathaniel O'Reilly about this
a lot because most of my reviews are very positive and outside, you know, of America,
I guess there's an international sense, he's Australian, and there's an international sense
(03:47):
that poetry reviews in particular in America are congratulatory and celebratory without
being critical.
But from my standpoint, I could write about the collections that don't really speak to
me, but more often than not, I find that those collections speak to others and I think I'm
best served just focusing on the collections that really move me and that really do something
(04:09):
for me mentally, emotionally, you know, intellectually.
So when I'm sitting down to decide if I want to review a book, the first thing I consider
is what went through my mind when I was reading it?
Was I excited to move forward?
Was I pushing myself forward out of obligation?
And the more excited I am, the more likely I am to review.
(04:32):
The poetry question is determined to highlight voices that are historically underrepresented.
So you will see that for me in particular, almost every review that I publish is by an
author of color and or a member of the LGBTQ community because we really want to make sure
that voices that are not typically highlighted and celebrated in the publishing industry
(04:56):
get that space with the poetry question.
Yeah, that's something I noticed and something I appreciate and you know that whole question
about like our reviews in the US too celebratory.
It's such a difficult question to sort of navigate because I do feel like most of the
vast majority of poetry reviews I read are positive, but at the same time, like the poetry
(05:17):
reviews that I think of as negative are always like William Logan and like sort of hatchet
jobs and I don't know how much use there is in that, you know, that at times he can be
observed on other episodes I've mentioned.
I think he's writing more for funny lines rather than observations when he's writing
negatively and I do find myself sometimes wondering if there's more space for that,
(05:40):
but I also really appreciate your approach because you're looking for, you know, underrepresented
groups and that you really love the books.
It isn't a matter of just saying, oh yes, I'm going to congratulate every book of poems,
but that to some extent you're, or to a large extent, you're really trying to draw readers
in to reading books of poems that you love.
(06:01):
So I think that's fantastic.
I like that approach.
So for today, you've brought in Andrea Gibson's prose poem, Tincture.
Why don't you go ahead and read the poem and then we'll dive in and talk about it.
Okay.
This is Tincture by Andrea Gibson.
It's from their collection, Lord of the Butterflies.
Imagine when a human dies, the soul misses the body, actually grieves the loss of its
(06:25):
hands and all they could hold.
Misses the throat closing shy, reading out loud on the first day of school.
Imagine the soul misses the stubbed toe, the loose tooth, the funny bone.
The soul still asks, why does the funny bone do that?
It's just weird.
Imagine the soul misses the thirsty garden cheeks watered by grief, misses how the body
(06:46):
could sleep through a dream.
What else can sleep through a dream?
What else can laugh?
What else can wrinkle the smile's autograph?
Imagine the soul misses each falling eyelash waiting to be a wish.
Misses the wrist screaming away the blade.
The soul misses the lisp, the stutter, the limp.
The soul misses the holy bruise glue from that army of blood rushing to the wound's
(07:10):
side.
When a human dies, the soul searches the universe for something blushing, something shaking
in the cold, something that scars, sweeps the universe for patients worn thin, the last
nerve fighting for its life, the voice box aching to be heard.
The soul misses the way the body would hold another body and not be two bodies but one
(07:32):
pleading God doubled in grace.
The soul misses how the mind told the body, you have fallen from grace, and the body said
erase every scripture that doesn't have a pulse.
There isn't a single page in the bible that can wince, that can clumsy, that can freckle,
that can hunger.
Imagine the soul misses hunger, emptiness, rage, the fist that was never taught to curl,
(07:56):
curled, the teeth that were never taught to clench, clenched, the body that was never
taught to make love, made love like a hungry ghost digging its way out of the grave.
The soul misses the unforever of old age, the skin that no longer fits.
The soul misses every single day the body was sick, the now it forced, the here it built
(08:18):
from the fever.
Fever is how the body prays, how it burns and begs for another average day.
The soul misses the legs creaking up the stairs, misses the fear that climbed up the vocal
cords to curse the wheelchair.
The soul misses what the body could not let go, what else could hold on that tightly to
everything?
(08:39):
What else could hear the chain of a swing set and fall to its knees?
What else could touch a screen door and taste lemonade?
What else could come back from a war and not come back, but still try to live, still try
to lullaby?
When a human dies, the soul moves through the universe, trying to describe how a body
(08:59):
trembles when it's lost, softens when it's safe, how a wound would heal given nothing
but time.
Do you understand?
Everything in space can imagine it.
No comet, no nebula, no ray of light can fathom the landscape of awe, the heat of shame, the
fingertips pulling the first gray hair and throwing it away.
(09:20):
I can't imagine it, the stars say.
Tell us again about goosebumps.
Tell us again about pain.
Thank you so much.
You've written about this poem before in terms of how it approaches pain and chronic illness.
I'm just curious why you wanted to talk about this poem in particular.
This poem, when I first sat with Lord of the Butterflies, I had known Andrea for close
(09:46):
to a decade.
I was already a big fan of their work and what they were doing in terms of navigating
mental health, but quietly to some extent and behind the scenes, Andrea had been battling
chronic illness and Lyme disease.
This was the first book where I really felt like they were coming to terms with it in
(10:09):
their poetry.
When I read this poem, a few things stood out to me.
The first is how gracefully they approached chronic illness.
I admire most about Andrea that throughout the tremendous struggles they have faced,
they always lead from a place of love.
In writing this, I really felt like they were insisting on loving their body despite all
(10:34):
of the reasons that they might have not to.
It really struck me also that the poem celebrated the pain.
The last word of the poem is pain.
When I'm reading that and I'm taking into account the number of poems they've written
about suicidal ideation and their own attempts to leave this life and then to see the resilience
(11:02):
in this poem and the unflinching grace they're willing to grant themselves, it just really,
really hit me in the heart.
But also from a technical standpoint, I always look at prose poems and have that eternal
question that my students repeat to me every year.
How do you distinguish prose from poetry and what makes a prose poem poetry and not prose?
(11:26):
I don't think there's a definitive answer, but I do think when you read a poem like Tincture,
it's clear when you sit with the language that this poem could just as easily be written
with very tight rhymed couplets.
There's a lot of rhythm and subtle meter embedded in the line.
So, even though it's presented as a single block of text, there's a lot about it that
(11:53):
very clearly and explicitly signals that it's a poem.
And then, you know, I often in my reviews sit with structure and so when I'm reading
it and I'm noticing all of these rhymes and how easily they could be couplets, I then
have to wonder why then is it presented as a prose poem, as a block of text?
(12:14):
Because it's not a style that Andrea Gibson uses often.
And for me, when I look at that block, what it feels like is something that visually,
textually does not resonate immediately as beautiful or artistic in its structure.
(12:35):
It's just a block of text.
But when you read it, you begin to find the poetry and the beauty and the grace inside
the lines in the same way that I think the poem is trying to find that grace and that
beauty and that poetry inside the body.
That makes a lot of sense.
I really like that explanation in part because I always, I think of this as old fuddy duddiness
(12:56):
in myself, but I'm always skeptical of prose poems.
I feel like, and with this poem, I was not totally sure that I totally was accepting
it as a prose poem, in part because when you read it and I watched her video with Button
Poetry on YouTube, which I'll link to, reading it, and she reads with lots and lots of pauses.
(13:16):
And hearing you read it, I heard the sound much more.
I think that the way you read it allowed me to hear the sound and understand it better
as a prose poem.
And I think part of it, the way you just explained it, makes a lot of sense because I basically
read the poem as spoken to a specific person, so that the person being told to imagine is
(13:39):
a specific person or kind of person and not people in general.
And it's somebody who is having suicidal ideation and it's this sort of plea to try to think
of these things this way.
Think of fever as how the body prays and not pain.
Think of the soul as something that will continue missing something once the body is gone.
(14:04):
And so for some reason, that also makes it work for me as a prose poem that it de-aestheticizes
it where it would seem like a different kind of plea if it were broken into lines.
And so I feel like maybe what we miss in terms of sound, which is there, it's just that it
doesn't announce itself because it's not broken in lines.
That gets taken up by the emotion of the poem and the way it's addressed.
(14:28):
Yeah.
Just one point of clarity.
Andrea Gibson does use they them pronouns, I want to make sure we honor that.
Did I say she?
Yeah.
Oh, I apologize.
I apologize to her.
I apologize to them.
Yeah.
You know, I was reading about the poem and reading about them and in my head said, say
thee that they them and don't make the mistake.
(14:48):
So I apologize to them and to you, so into listeners.
So yeah, it seems their choice makes a lot of sense to me to put it in prose in terms
of what you talked about.
So yeah, and I mean, Andrea has talked about this poem a few times, you know, when reading
it and it's actually interesting because, you know, I've seen them live a number of
(15:10):
times and because we're somewhat close, there are times when they've sort of asked like,
you know, is there any poem that people in the audience really want to hear?
And I've asked them to read this and I remember when I asked them to read this, they mentioned
that they'd never read it on stage at that point.
And I kind of wondered if that's because it is a poem that benefits from sitting with
(15:33):
it, I think.
Even this morning I was sitting with it in anticipation of our conversation and I started
looking again, you know, down the page at how frequently you encounter these rhymes
like thirsty garden cheeks watered by grief, misses how the body could sleep through a
dream.
(15:54):
And I was thinking back to the ways that I introduce assonance to my students and, you
know, I frequently cite things like Tupac and I'll put a verse up that puts on display
his repetition of the A sound through a series of 32 bars.
And when I'm looking at this, I'm seeing that same thing and I feel like if you listen to
(16:18):
it quickly in a YouTube video and you're distracted, it's very easy to miss it.
But when you sit and look at the words on the page and you let those sounds sort of
come to the surface, it's incredible how attentive they are to sound in this poem, how harmonious
(16:39):
the sound is despite what looks like a very large block.
I mean, it's more than a page long and it looks like a very heavy poem.
Yet when you read it, if you allow yourself to find that rhythm, it's not heavy at all.
Like there's a lightness and almost a release to the rhythm of it, I think.
Yeah, I agree.
(17:00):
They have a really fantastic ear that what else can laugh, what else can wrinkle, the
smiles autograph and then the soul misses the lisp, the stutter, the limp, the soul
misses the holy bruise blue from that army of blood rushing to the wound side.
It's a really fantastic, elegant movement of sounds in those sentences.
(17:21):
I wonder, I feel like that is a potential compromise with a prose poem is that I think
you have to sit with the poem a little differently.
I'm just so used to when I see a line on the page, like my brain is sort of already processing
what sounds I'm seeing and hearing.
(17:42):
Whereas with a prose poem, I think my brain just does, yeah, in reading prose, I'm trained
to read a novel.
So I'm attentive to sound in a different way.
And so there is, I think that compromise, but I think it's a worthwhile compromise in
this, especially if, like you said, we spend the longer time with the poem.
Well, I was just going to point out, I was sort of flipping through the book and reminding
(18:06):
myself.
It's been a few years since I reviewed this collection and I teach tincture and a handful
of poems, but I was sort of flipping through the book and recalling that for me, this book
was also a really interesting movement, I think, for Andrea Gibson because they made
their name and they sort of are most popular as a performance poet.
(18:28):
I don't say that to mean that their poetry doesn't work on the page, but I do feel like
with this book, there are several poems where it's really indicative to their attention
to the page and to textuality itself that wasn't present in previous books.
Most of them had very conventional approaches to poetry, but this one plays with white space,
(18:51):
it plays with blocking in a couple of prose poems.
And I really think that as they were writing this book, they became more aware of what
they could do with the material page outside of a performance of a particular poem.
And when I think about this poem in particular, Andrea has said a number of times that their
(19:14):
writing process is fairly unique.
They write most of their poetry without sitting at a typewriter or a screen, they write it
in their head, they write it walking around.
And according to what I've heard from them, they very often don't sit down to put the
(19:34):
poem onto paper until it's pretty much been written and revised in their mind.
And I think that's one of the ways the sound permeates so clearly.
And I think also why Litany and Anaphora work so well in this prose poem because it's a
fairly immense poem to organize as technically as they have, but those sound devices I think
(19:59):
sort of allow for that memorization and that writing process independent of the screen.
That's kind of mind blowing to me, in part because it's always impossible for me to imagine
writing that way because I lose things.
But you're absolutely right that the Litany and the Anaphora do so much of that.
It's like, I think John Milton did this as well, especially once he went blind where
(20:20):
he's sort of doing the revising in his head.
Whereas I don't have a kind of memory where I can hold onto something.
I have to write something down and let other things get clear, have that space empty for
them to come through.
But it really, it makes a lot of sense that we get imagine, misses, imagine, misses, that
really structures the poem.
(20:41):
The other thing that kind of blows my mind about it in that sense is the different kinds
of things in the poem.
One of the things I love about it is the sense of scale because it feels like it contains
both a biography and it's also as minute as an individual bruise, but also to the scale
of space.
(21:01):
And that's something that I just really admire, that the poem has that scale.
And I wonder how much writing it in prose also allowed them to do that, to have, because
it's one thing to have a poem in lines, especially composing it in their head, but also to have
(21:21):
both kinds of repetition that are so heavy and then also the kinds of scale that the
poem has.
I want to share, so I have a couple of things in the poem I'm not crazy about.
Thinking about the talk about balancing positive and negative, because I think my first instinct
(21:42):
when I read the poem was to find a few things sentimentalized.
There are things in here that blow my mind, like what else can sleep through a dream is
fantastic.
The entire structure of the poem, fever is how the body prays, I absolutely love.
There are a few things, and I wonder if you had this reaction or maybe I'm being too overly
(22:02):
searchy for sentimentality.
The thirsty garden cheeks watered by grief for me felt a little sentimentalized, although
I'm aware that I'm reading, teach personal narrative class, and what I find is very often
students will labor over, and I've done this too, so it's not like a student thing, but
there's this labor to describe tears in a really intense way or a really ornate way
(22:28):
and feels in those instances and in this instance, like it's trying to do a little too much where
the emotion already is.
What do you think about that?
Do you have that reaction to it or do you want to sell me on this, for lack of a better
word?
You know, I don't disagree as a general idea that tears, I think more than any other image
(22:52):
are probably overwrought and especially I think burgeoning writers in my experience
are eager to describe them as something other than what they are, but I don't have that
reaction within Tincture and I think I don't have that reaction specifically because Andrea
(23:13):
Gibson has owned sentimentality throughout their career.
They are unapologetically sentimental and encouraging of sentimentality.
I think that a lot of poets are trained away from honoring sentiment and allowing for sentiment
(23:33):
to overtake a particular image and if anything, I think that the last three years as Andrea
has navigated ovarian cancer and treatment have put their dedication to sentimentality
on full display.
They do not shy away from the overly sentimental and the sometimes cliche because they find
(23:57):
beauty in those most mundane moments, the most ridiculous circumstances and I think
that they've come to appreciate probably with their fan base as well that they're free to
be sentimental and they've been so exposed and so open and so public with so many of
(24:17):
the things they've experienced that even those more sentimental moments feel honest and authentic
to Andrea as a person.
They might not feel authentic to another poet if I was reading the same line, you know,
by someone like Rachel McKibben's for example who does not often write with that same sort
(24:42):
of sentimentality and does not have that same sort of aura to their work.
I might question it a little bit more, but the more of Andrea's work you read, the more
it becomes clear that they embrace that sentimentality and I think almost would walk away from poetry
before they would refuse those moments of sentimentality in a poem.
(25:06):
I really like that way of answering the question in part because it is what they have sort
of chosen as an essential part of their poetics.
Also I do think every poem should be risking sentimentality in some way, even poems that
are really stripped down, there's the Louise Glick poem that, and of course I can't remember
the title of, but talked about with Morgan Frank on a previous episode where it comes
(25:29):
close to the end, it says cry, risk, joy, and even in this compact poem that feels sort
of emotionally stripped, there is that move toward sentiment and feeling.
I think part of it is also sometimes these words get a little conflated, like emotion
and sentimentality, and there is a very clear definition people use for sentimentality in
(25:52):
a lot of cases, but I think that making it a central part of their work, and I'm not
that familiar with their work, it makes sense that within the context of their work, it's
more that it feels more of the voice.
And then also the thing for me is that everything I like in the poem outweighs anything that
I respond to as sentimental, and it's also I think a risk of writing a poem that has
(26:18):
this much scale in terms of like a life within the poem, that it starts with childhood.
I think that my initial, where it first aimed for me was the phrase reading out loud on
the first day of school, in part because this is something that may be me, but there was
something, actually this may be me, because I talk with students a lot about the personal
(26:39):
statements that they write for graduate school and med school, and the very strict rule is
do not depict yourself as a child because you want the evaluators to see you as an adult,
and the reading out loud on the first day of school, the throat posing shy, still feels
a little on that border, but it's something that also is very resonant and I think identifiable
(27:02):
and recognizable.
So I think that may be my own kind of hesitation in that moment.
The thirsty garden sheiks I think still feel sentimental to me, but otherwise I just, I'm
really a fan of what they're doing in the poem so much that I'm happy to let it go and
happy to look at it in the context of their other poems.
(27:23):
Stan It was just interesting when you pointed out
Mrs. The Throat Closing Shy Reading Out Loud on the First Day of School, it's such an interesting
line and I did not immediately associate it with the speaker as child.
I can see that angle and if I look at it from that angle, it actually still sits okay with
(27:45):
me because Andrea has a poem where they're writing in the voice of themselves as a child
on the playground responding to a bully and it's maybe one of the most self-accepting
poems and it's a poem that resonates with students very often.
And so I could see that voice, but Andrea also has a poem describing a brief position
(28:09):
where they worked I think at a preschool and when I first, when I read that normally, I
associate Andrea as an adult in the schools but feeling nervous because I've seen them
presenting to students and presenting with classes and so then I read it as their own
nerves sort of choking them up as they're reading aloud.
(28:32):
And it's interesting that I think the line allows for both of those things to be true
and now I might be projecting because I know that I've been teaching for 15 years and I
still get nervous every time I meet students for the first time and I almost always stumble
on things as simple as reading clauses from the syllabus on the first day because of those
You know it's funny, by the way I would love to get rid of those first day jitters just once,
(28:55):
nerves so maybe I'm just projecting for myself there.
just to feel calm even though it's like you know I'm gonna be with you for a long haul
students.
I think I read it as a student because of what follows.
It feels to me like the poem is setting it up to have that sort of larger biography.
(29:18):
Even the soul misses the stubbed toe, the loose tooth, the funny bone.
The soul still asks why does the funny bone do that.
It's just weird which I really like because for me it's setting up a kind of younger voice
and I think that's part of why I'm seeing it as, seeing it reading out loud on the first
day of school as a child with that throat closing shy.
(29:40):
But you're absolutely right.
I think that's, it's me, I think it's an assumption a reader could make either way honestly and
both are fair to the poem.
Yeah, yeah I totally agree.
I see what you're saying there and I do think it follows that trajectory if you're reading
the poem, start to finish as sort of a reflection that begins in childhood and moves toward
you know that eventual death and adulthood.
(30:02):
Are there other things you'd like to talk about in the poem, things you want to mention
that we haven't talked about before we move to the silliness part?
I guess the only thing that we haven't addressed explicitly is that I am obsessed with universe
metaphors and I know that's one of the things that drew me in pretty quickly having written
(30:22):
you know a book that is sort of rooted in that metaphor and using that metaphor frequently
to describe my role as a father and trying to process like what pregnancy is from the
outside and what it means for a child to grow and expand and I kept coming back to this
(30:43):
idea that they really are like small universes that begin and expand you know toward infinity
and then cease and that energy is essentially recycled into the universe and new universes
continue to be born.
And so when I read this and it got to the point where the soul is sort of released into
(31:07):
the universe and is encountering all of these tangible objects but tangible without sensation,
it was a fascinating thing for me to think about and also a really cathartic one because
I have struggled immensely with my own attachment to my physical body and body dysmorphia.
(31:28):
I had written around the same time that I read you know this book, I'd written a poem
that includes a line, for you the body will always be a warehouse of pain and I think
when I read this I was just really struck with that idea of if there is a part of us
that continues on and it's not the physical body, what must that you know be like for
(31:51):
this thing that has spent most of its existence with the senses and with you know sensory
experience and then to relinquish all of that was just a really incredibly cathartic thing
for me to consider because I think we always approach the body as the weakest part of ourselves.
You know when we think about the everlasting and what might transcend whether it's memory
(32:17):
or soul or you know you believe in an afterlife, whatever it is, it's the body that deteriorates
and we always think of the body as the most fragile and in that I think that we forget
to celebrate it and we forget to recognize the absolute miracle of every sensation that
(32:39):
we are capable of experiencing and I just love that Andrea was able to pull us back
to that by essentially moving into the ethereal and saying okay let's like let's piggyback
on this idea, let's imagine the soul really is released out into the universe and continues
to interact but without a physical form that might sound like it's transcending pain but
(33:04):
it's really losing probably 99% of its experiential memory.
Yeah I think that's fantastic because you know the question is what is the self without
pain especially with chronic pain and that's you know because the poem is I think interested
in pain over the course of time that everyone pain is a thing but everyone feels with occasional
(33:28):
very rare exceptions and I like that what you say about the power of a metaphor that
comes from astronomy and looking to space that you know there's the universe in a grain
of sand and also shout out to previous guest Lisa Ampelman for her book Mom in Space and
it gives us a scale.
There's a complexity to the scale because our sense of it is always changing and our
(33:52):
sense of ourself in terms of where we are in the world our own scale is something that
I think changes for us quite a bit over the course of our lives.
Many times we think we're the Sun and it turns out we may just be one of the unidentified
moons around Jupiter.
Right.
So well thank you so much for bringing in this poem which I was not familiar with prior
(34:14):
and I'm very very glad to know now.
So let's transition to the silliness and the game.
First as always we have an ad on episode 14 with the previously mentioned Rebecca Morgan
Frank I shared an ad by Nissan for their line of cars Poetica.
Today we're back on the road with SUVs that similarly pay tribute to our poetic heritage.
(34:37):
Here are your options for 2025 honoring Frank O'Hara Chevrolet's the day Escalade died and
Carson's Chevy Equinox GMC's TR Hummer the hybrid William Staff Ford or Russell Edson
the Ford and sexplorer which carries a ton the Subaru Forester Gander the Volkswagen
(34:59):
Tiguan Felipe Herrera the Ford Expedition Chen the Hyundai Tucson it the Ford Richard
Blanco Bill DeMore stately mansions oh my kia soul the GMC Yukon is now the GMC Yousef
Komunyakan the Jeep David Waggoner and of course the Chevy Traverse.
All right that's that's very very stupid.
(35:21):
So on to the game which I'm calling Pulitzer Prize winner Kendrick Lamar won Drake 0.
I'm going to give you the name of the poet and I want you to tell me if they won the
Pulitzer Prize for poetry or not.
Oh wow.
Yeah as a bonus if they won you can try to guess the book and any it's very straightforward
any questions about the game.
(35:42):
No I'm terrified but let's give it a shot.
I would have done horribly on this I spent I spent a good while just scrolling back and
forth through the list it's kind of astounding.
All right number one Carolyn Forchet as Carolyn Forchet won a Pulitzer Prize.
I'm going to say no.
That is correct ding ding ding.
(36:02):
She was a finalist in 2021 with Natalie Diaz won for postcolonial love poem but that's
her only appearance on the Pulitzer list.
So you're one for one.
Number two Natasha Trethewey.
Yes I do feel like she is one.
Do you want to guess the book?
I couldn't tell you the book.
It's a yes she did win and it's for Native Guard.
(36:24):
Okay.
Which is I think my favorite of her books just because it has an incredible really incredible
crown of sonnets in it.
Number three Sylvia Plath.
Wow I'm gonna say no.
That is incorrect.
Did she win posthumously?
Yes she did she won in 1982 for the collected poems.
(36:46):
Oh wow okay.
Every time I see that I think give it to a living person you know.
And it begs the question did she win or did Ted Hughes win for collecting you know and
editing that volume.
Yeah in which case someone should take the award away from it.
I agree.
(37:06):
Number four Nikki Giovanni.
Oh I'm gonna say yes and if I'm wrong I'm comfortable in that because she should have
won or she hasn't.
I feel the same way but she did not.
I was kind of surprised.
One of the things I did with the full list was just you know doing control F searching
for names and I was surprised to find she hadn't even been a finalist.
That's wild.
(37:27):
Yeah.
Number five last one and then I will have a bonus question.
Number five Gwendolyn Brooks.
I'm also gonna say yes and I'm gonna be very upset if I'm wrong.
You're gonna be very happy because it is yes.
Okay good.
Do you want to guess the year?
The year oh man.
I couldn't guess the year.
(37:49):
For some reason I'm thinking of the year that they wrote a series in sonnets that were really
exploring the structure of the sonnet and Emmett Till but I can't remember the year.
1950.
Wow.
No that would not have been that exploration.
No I was surprised to see it in 1950 and the little happy is for her book Annie Allen.
(38:13):
And never since?
No.
No.
That's insane.
They seem the Boettler committee housed at Columbia which lately has seemed like a university
of bad decisions at the administration in any way.
They don't seem to want to award it multiple times to people which is a great transition
into the bonus question because a few people have won it multiple times and my question
(38:35):
for you is how many times did Robert Frost win the Pulitzer Prize?
Too many.
One is too many.
Really?
You know what?
I'm not a Robert Frost fan.
I'm not.
I'll admit it.
I'm gonna say three.
Very close.
It was four.
Wow.
Four too many.
I feel like Robert Frost very much.
So I think it's too many just because if they're gonna follow the press it...
(38:59):
Steven Vincent Bonet won it twice and I didn't know he had a brother who was also a poet
who also won it.
So the Bonet family was writing.
Hi.
Ronnie thank you so much for being here.
Is there anything you want to mention or plug before we go?
I don't think so.
I mean our big thing is the poetry question and I feel like we've given that some new
attention so if you're looking for new books just pop over to the poetry question and read
(39:20):
some reviews maybe you'll find something that resonates.
Yeah.
I really liked your review especially of Joy Priest's Horsepower which was actually how
I discovered the... or discovered how I came across the poetry question because she had
actually mentioned you know thanking you for the review and I just...
I was either about to record with her or just had so yeah.
Go to the poetry question listeners.
(39:42):
And listeners also go have a great day.
Read some poems, pet some dogs and support striking workers wherever you find them.
Bye.
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