Rachel Zucker speaks with poet Ada Limón about her life as a poet, especially her two most recent books, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things. Limón speaks openly about contests and prizes, money, taboos around performance, her decision to stop trying to have children, writing about secrets, the privilege of being a writer, leaning toward gratitude, pinning the dragon of the mind to the page, writing as a shareable space and a form of connection and so much more.

Episode 76: Ada Limón

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The third of five episodes featuring the lectures that became Rachel Zucker’s newest book, The Poetics of Wrongness. After an introduction from Rachel this episode contains archival audio of “Why She Could Not Write A Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood” presented at the UC Berkeley English Department on November 15, 2016 and the introduction to the event given by poet Robert Hass.

In this lecture, Rachel Zucker—while teaching and mothering and preparing to record a conversation with poet mother Alicia Ostriker in the months leading up to and in the days following the 2016 presidential election—discusses the difficulty of writing a lecture on the work of poet mothers Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Toi Derricotte and others, and what might or might not constitute a poetics of motherhood.

Episode 125: The Poetics of Motherhood

Rachel speaks with poet, memoirist and literary agent Hafizah Geter about her recently published memoir The Black Period: On Personhood, Race and Origin. They speak one-on-one over zoom and then, a few weeks later, at the live-virtual Reading with Rachel salon. They speak about being poets writing prose, about writing to think and talking to think, MFA programs, writing classes, beauty, erasure, revision, being a craft junkie, TV, resisting “the privilege to obscure,” finding the question your book is trying to answer, writing yourself out of the shame you were given, rethinking reading and writing as solitary experiences, getting over the embarrassment of not knowing, and writing all over the walls.

Episode 124: Reading Hafizah Augustus Geter’s The Black Period

Rachel speaks with poet and erasure artist Mary Ruefle about menopause, thresholds, death, reading, museums, schools, podcasting, trees, wind, created violence, real violence, haiku, love, the erotics of reading, Yom Kippur, erasure, how to walk around the world two babysteps at a time, and more.

Episode 123: Mary Ruefle

Rachel speaks with poet and Commonplace producer Christine Larusso and then, a few weeks later, with Nicole Sealey at the live-virtual “Reading with Rachel” salon about Sealey’s recently published book-length erasure, The Ferguson Report: poems.  Sealey describes why, how and when she erased this document and how the erasure and lifted poems became a book.

Episode 122: Reading Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: an erasure

In this two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Fred Moten about poetry as performance, influences and teachers, open field poetics, finding space for listeners and audience to feel welcome, how to define the limits—or lack thereof— of a book and, specifically, the performance they gave the night before at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church on May 24, 2023. Part one (ep 120) is a conversation about the performance. Part two (ep 121) is a recording of that performance.

Episode 76: Ada Limón

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