Connor pops in to announce incredibly belatedly what has already been apparent for months: Close Talking is on a hiatus! We've had some big life and career changes that have unexpectedly cut into our capacity for the podcast, but it's not a permanent hiatus! Okay, a poem:

Tune

By: Kay Ryan

Imagine a sea

of ultramarine

suspending a

million jellyfish

as soft as moons.

Imagine the

interlocking uninsistent

tunes of drifting things.

This is the deep machine

that powers the lamps

of dreams and accounts

for their bluish tint.

How can something

so grand and serene

vanish again and again

without a hint?

A slight departure from our regular format. On today's show, Connor and Jack remember the recently departed poet Charles Simic. They read some of his poems, reflect on them, discuss his life and legacy, and even give a shoutout to the Oak Park Public Library.

Poems Connor and Jack read in this episode include: "Summer Morning" "Hotel Insomnia" "Watermelons" and "Back at the Chicken Shack."

At the end of the episode, hear Simic read his poem "December 21."

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Connor and Jack bid farewell to the year they've taken to calling "Twenty Twenty Poo" and contemplate the complexities of language in a wide-ranging conversation about a spectacular untitled poem by Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, from his 2009 collection Flood Song. They discuss movement, the natural world, an extremely informative dissertation and more.

Learn more about Bitsui, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sherwin-bitsui

[Flicking off the light switch.]

By: Sherwin Bitsui

Flicking off the light switch.

Lichen buds the curved creases of a mind

pondering the mesquite tree’s dull ache

as it gathers its leaves around clouds of spotted doves—

calling them in rows of twelve back from their winter sleep.

Doves’ eyes black as nightfall

shiver on the foam coast of an arctic dream

where whale ribs

clasp and fasten you to a language of shifting ice.

Seeing into those eyes

you uncoil their telephone wires,

gather their inaudible lions with plastic forks,

tongue their salty ribbons,

and untie their weedy stems from your prickly fingers.

You stop to wonder what like sounds like

when held under glacier water,

how Ná ho kos feels

under the weight of all that loss.

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Connor and Jack discuss the sonically and thematically dense poem "Topsoil, in Repentance" by Sherry Shenoda. Shenoda's book MUMMY EATERS was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2022. The conversation moves from an exploration of internal rhymes and alliteration, to the climate crisis, to the religious implications of the word "repentance," to soil strata, and to the relative weight of humanity.

You can find out more about Sherry Shenoda, here: https://www.sherryshenoda.com/

Read the poem, here: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2022/march/topsoil-repentance-sherry-shenoda

Topsoil, in Repentance

By: Sherry Shenoda

On my mind daily with the insistence of a metronome

is that thin granular layer, rich humus, spare humility,

black earth daily lifted and blown into the Gulf of Mexico.

Thinnest of salvations with a margin of error

wide as the pink, gelatinous body of the earthworm

Which my spade barely misses, and every time

my tines enter the ground, my wrist twists the damp loam,

I breathe easier to see them wriggling, unburied

fleeing the light, burrowing back down, aerating

this earth we have packed down with our culpability

this immense density of earth, only the topmost of which

can support the unimaginable numbers of us, our great warm swarm

Squinting up in immense sunlight I hear the silent swish and tick

the back-and-forth rhythm, the last few seconds before midnight

the enormity of the loan, which has been called in full

The hazy buzzing of the furry bees, busy in the branches

above my exposed neck, on any given day a stay

for a little while longer, of execution

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After a busy couple weeks at Close Talking headquarters, a slightly different show. This episode is from our sister-podcast, Poetry Spoken Here. The episode first aired in the summer of 2020 and was simply called "Black Lives Matter." The poems and voices featured are all from the Poetry Spoken Here archives and address race, policing, and more. Readers include Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, the youngest ever Baltimore Youth Poet Laureate, Maren (Lovey) Wright Kerr, Chicago-area slam legend Maria "Mama" McCray, Sillerman First Book Prize winner Ladan Osman, and SlamFind creator and Bowery Arts and Science Executive Director Mason Granger.

You can listen to full readings, and interviews with the poets featured in this episode, here:

Jericho Brown, Episode #100: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-100-jericho-brown-reading-at-the-unamuno-author-festival

Maren (Lovey) Wright Kerr, Episode #085: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-085-maren-lovey-wright-kerr-and-lynne-sharon-schwartz-reviewed

Maria "Mama" McCray, Episode #058: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-058-tribute-to-maria-mama-mccray

Ladan Osman, Episode #023: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-023-ladan-osman-and-the-book-thing

Mason Granger, Episode #034: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-034-mason-granger-and-billy-collins

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In this special episode, Connor and Jack discuss the 2022 National Book Awards — the long list, the finalists, and the winner "Punks: New and Selected Poems" by John Keene. They read and explore a marvelous poem from the collection, "Folks Are Right, My Nose Was Wide Open," which also appeared in BOMB Magazine.

Listen to the National Book Awards Award Ceremony, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hNtsKasx5U&ab_channel=NationalBookFoundation

Get Punks here: https://the-song-cave.com/products/punks-by-john-keene

Folks Are Right, My Nose Was Wide Open

By: John Keene

Folks are right: my nose is wide open. I left one man and fell for this one, he’s not the one, so what am I to do? I don’t. Instead, I stand in the doorway of the New Age café on Newbury Street waiting for Kevin, because we’re going to talk about poems. All the poems I haven’t written, because I spend my waking hours talking about them, reading the work of others, trying to remake myself as Essex Hemphill or Neruda or Celan. For example, I can’t write poems about this crazy dude I’m seeing, how he writhes in bed like a loose hose when he comes, how he stands for hours in front of the mirror admiring and caressing his muscles, saying nothing but “Looking good,” the yelps he serves up when I enter him. I don’t write poems about how he silences me with certain looks, his lies about being from “Black money,” how he laughs at the serious things I say. How often when I’m with him I feel more alone than the hardest years of high school. Rather, I write down lines towards poems, abstract pronouncements about unhappiness and being scared and unknown and misunderstood and death, which makes me think I’m addressing the problem. Love is a dream where both of us are trying, at the same speed, without quitting. Then Kevin shows up, and I’m not so sure, because before I can get a word in about my plight, before I can pass today’s halfstarts and failures across the table, he starts telling me about last night’s fight with his girlfriend.

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Connor and Jack discuss a classic poem from a classic poet: The Dancing by the recently departed Gerald Stern. They marvel at how the poem is constructed, get deep into a discussion of encroaching fascism, and even have time to rage at the "evil Mellons," bring in Bruce Springsteen and Michael Bay, and pause to reflect on how lyric poetry can address structural inequalities.

You can read the poem, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57177/the-dancing

The Dancing

By: Gerald Stern

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture

and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots

I have never seen a postwar Philco

with the automatic eye

nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did

in 1945 in that tiny living room

on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did

then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,

my mother red with laughter, my father cupping

his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance

of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,

half fart, the world at last a meadow,

the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us

screaming and falling, as if we were dying,

as if we could never stop—in 1945 —

in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home

of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away

from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—

oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

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Connor and Jack have a time talking about the poem "A Time" by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. She is a multi-award winning poet whose latest book-length poem "Look at This Blue" is on the short list for the 2022 National Book Award. Come for the poetry analysis, stay for the discussion of red wolves, climate crisis, Tolkein, impermanence, and diectic words.

You can read the poem, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89060/a-time-570d716c13a77

A Time

By: Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

The problem—

it’s not been written yet, the omens:

the headless owl, the bobcat struck,

the red wolf where she could not be.

None of it done and yet it’s over.

Nothing yet

of night when she called me closer

asked me to bring her crow painting

to stay straight across from her feet

so she could waken into it,

remember her friend.

Of Old Chief alongside her shoulder

still watching over her

just as the mountain had done

throughout her Alberta childhood.

The Pendleton shroud bearing our braids,

her figure in flaming pyre.

The cards, the notes, the tasks

the things undone, not done

and she with us faraway

as this has always been and ever

will continue.

We meet we leave

we meld and vaporize from whatever

it was that held us human

in this life.

And all the beautiful things

that lead our thoughts and give us reason

remain despite the leaving and

all I know is what you know

when it is over said and done

it was a time

and there was never enough of it.

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Connor and Jack dig into the list/poem/prose piece/literary mystery Not Writing by Anne Boyer. Along the way they discuss what they are and are not writing themselves, Jack asks about why the poem never becomes monotonous, and Connor offers his thoughts about how writing, time, and capitalism intersect both in the poem and in life.

Read the poem, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58316/not-writing

[I know, I know. This is usually where we put the poem. But this one's too long! It exceeds the 4000 character limit.]

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Connor and Jack discuss Sasha Banks' poem, america, MINE from her collection of the same name. They start by examining some of the poem's formal elements like its lack of traditional punctuation, and quickly jump to big themes like how the idea of vengeance is transformed in the poem and the contested symbol of the American flag is used.

Read the full poem below, or here: http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist/2016/8/27/america-mine.html

america, MINE

By: Sasha Banks

the spit upon this/country's flag is mine and/I do/not weep at it/consider the

twisted shape of grief about/the mouth upon learning the beast/under the bed

has always been your country/careful, citizen/this nation will name

you/daughter/while its tongue/sucks the muscle from every dark body/you

have loved to the edge of this/vanished second/I let the rage be/like

water/this time/drinking and drinking until/my darkness marries/my eyes to

blindness/and I am/led by the ghosts still/awake/in the soil/still/thirsty

from/below/the fear/is under my heal/now/there are multitudes/in my third

rib and/we are not/asking anymore/do you see us now/this is the last

kindness/we will have your sweat/and dress you in your own/curses/oh

country/what I mean to say/is/all the living after/this/will be the vengeance.

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