In this episode, host Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, critic, biblical scholar Alicia Ostriker about the election, feminism, the difference between the contemporary moment and the idealism of the sixties, how the ego is subsumed in the process of writing poetry, William Blake, and the differences between writing poetry and prose. They also talk about motherhood, daughterhood, Ostriker's friendship with Toi Derricotte, teaching, and the interpretive process of biblical reimagining called "midrash."

Host Rachel Zucker talks with her friend D.A. Powell, author of five award winning books of poetry and professor at University of San Francisco. They talk about the presidential election, outrage, disturbance, poetry as social activism and action, normalization, resistence, erasures, palimpsests, minimalism, droplifting, notebooks, revision strategies, chaos and order(ing), and going forward. They also talk about their time together at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, teaching, their mutual affection and respect for one another and the importance of friendship.

Rachel Zucker talks with poet-critic-professor Steph Burt about types of criticism, ethical problems of criticism, gender expression, female embodiment, an aesthetic of adornment and neon violet and an aesthetic of naturalness and apparent authenticity, Yeats, form, formalism and informality, The Vision, Kitty Pride and the desire to dematerialize, authority and male privilege, Steph’s recent book of criticism “The Poem Is You” and their unpublished manuscript “Advice from the Lights,” different kinds of questions one might ask of short, lyric art works v. the kinds of questions one might ask of longer more comprehensive works, persona poems, cultural appropriation, whiteness, influence and “a poetics of incremental change.”

Rachel Zucker speaks with Shane McCrae, professor and author of five books, about his poetic process, what he’s working on, and the current political climate. The two discuss the limitations of the term “confessional poetry,” the difficulties of writing about tragedies in the immediate wake of their occurrences, the impulse to witness humiliation in popular culture, the American anxiety of the long poem post-Eliot, and how one might curate an “overwhelming sadness” through art. Shane McCrae reads “In the Language” from his new book In the Language of My Captor, and “Forgiveness in America” from Forgiveness Forgiveness. An audio excerpt from Shane’s newest book-length poem and two hand-picked playlists are available to Patreon subscribers of Commonplace.

Rachel Zucker speaks with Olena Kalytiak Davis, author of three books and a chapbook, about her daily writing practice (or lack thereof), writing autobiographically, and what it means to not fake it in her work. The two discuss a new poem of Rachel’s, “Enough Is Enough,” in which Olena is prominently featured as a subject without her prior knowledge. The poem sparks an animated conversation that explores questions of shared memory, the ethics of writing about people you know, and what it’s like to be concretized in poem. Olena reads two short poems during the podcast: “I Was Minor,” and “My Own Self Still Unconcerned.” Rachel’s poem “Enough is Enough” and Olena’s poem “Late Summer Ode” are available to Patreon subscribers of Commonplace.