Black Box Poetry

In this episode we talk prose poems with our first special guest, Noel Capozzalo! We read "April" by Bernadette Mayer; "The Beggar Woman of Naples" by Max Jacob, trans. John Ashbery; "A Little Fable" by Franz Kafka, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir.

In this episode we discuss line breaks, enjambment, line endings--the typographical feature that alerts readers that they are encountering a poem. We discuss "To a Poor Old Woman" by William Carlos Williams; "What are the Years" by Marianne Moore; and "Dream Song 89" by John Berryman.

Williams:(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/51653)

Moore:

(http://scienceplanets-rudi.blogspot.com/2011/08/poem-what-are-years-by-marianne-moore.html)

Berryman: (https://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-89:-Op.-posth.-no.-12)

For those of you following along with the links... notice how WCW doesn't read the line breaks in the recording of "To a Poor Old Woman"!

In this episode, the team explains how we approach poetry, our reading style, and lay some groundwork for our podcast project. We might even talk about how we all met in college a decade ago...yikes!

We wax a bit nostalgic and showcase our respective and collective toolkits in our discussion about Emily Dickinson's "He fumbles at your Soul"; Elizabeth Bishop's "The Bight", and John Ashbery's "Yes, "Señor" Fluffy."

Sean Hughes made such a great point in our occasional poetry episode, that we did a spin off episode to address his ideas about anecdotal poetry: which isn't a thing, but we might convince you that it is by the end of the episode!

If you missed that episode, Sean says that an occasional poem responds to an event in the public consciousness--like an inauguration or a war. But, occasional poems will often swerve into more personal commentary about an individual's experience of that event so they seem less about the occasion

and more about individual experience. Furthermore, there are many poems that are more engaged with an individual's reflection or memory that describe an event and effect storytelling, but aren't about an event in the public consciousness. To interrogate this phenomenon we discuss "Adlestrop" by Edward Thomas; "Celestial Music" by Louise Glück; and "Anecdote of the Jar" by Wallace Stevens.

In which we told ourselves we were going to talk about inaugural poems and didn't.

This inaugural episode of the Black Box Poetry Podcast was recorded in January 2017, just after the inauguration of President Trump. The original theme was "inauguration poems" which the team quickly reinterpreted as "occasional poetry" since we didn't feel that we had all that much to say about inauguration poetry itself. In this episode, we discuss "Curse" by Frank Bidart; "not an elegy for Mike Brown" by Danez Smith; and the classic, "Easter 1916" by W.B. Yeats.

If you actually want to know something about inaugural poems, since we don't end up talking about them in this episode, you can read what Sean C. Hughes had to say about them in 2013 on Full Stop.