Drunk as a Poet on Payday

Today's guest is David Baker. Baker is a poet, educator, editor, and literary critic. His new book is Transit, and he is the author of 12 previous collections of poetry, including, most recently, Whale Fall and Swift: New and Selected Poems, and six works of nonfiction. The first of those, Meter in English, I found incredibly important as a young graduate student. Baker is an Emeritus Professor of English at Denison University and for many years he was Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review, where he also curated the long-running annual “Nature’s Nature” feature for the magazine. Among his awards are prizes and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.

Pick up a copy of Transit here.

Read more about Baker here.

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Today's guest is Dan Beachy-Quick! He is a poet, essayist, and translator. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations, and longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. His poetry collections include North True South Bright, Spell, Mulberry, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry, This Nest, Swift Passerine, Circle’s Apprentice, and Variations on Dawn and Dusk. He is also the author of A Whaler’s Dictionary, a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and translations from Ancient Greek, The Thinking Root and Stone-Garland. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

Pick up a copy of Elements & Offerings here.

Read more about Beachy-Quick here.

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Today's guest is Anna Lena Phillips Bell, and her new book, Might Could, won the Anthony Hecht Prize from Waywiser Books. Anna Lena Phillips Bell is also the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. Poems appear in journals including The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Electric Literature, Orion, The Sewanee Review, 32 Poems, and Subtropics, and in anthologies including Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. She is an associate professor in UNCW’s MFA and BFA programs in creative writing and editor of Ecotone.

Pick up a copy of Might Could here.

Read more about Bell here.

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Poet Lauren Camp is the author of the new book, Is Is Enough, a collection of poems that face her father’s dementia and the way she and her family are affected by it. Camp is the author of eight previous poetry collections, including In Old Sky, which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. As New Mexico Poet Laureate, Lauren Camp created the New Mexico Epic Poem Project, a community-centered, crowd-sourced initiative designed to help people in rural and arts-underserved communities express themselves. Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Nation, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, Missouri Review, and Poem-a-Day. Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French, and Spanish.

Pick up a copy of Is Is Enough here.

Read more about Camp here.

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Happy National Poetry Month! Today, poet D.M. Aderibigbe joins me to talk about his new book, 82nd Division. D.M. Aderibigbe was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. Prior to 82nd Division, he published his first collection of poems, How the End First Showed, which won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the James Merrill House, Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, and Boston University. His poems have appeared in Tatu: New-Generation African Poets, The Atlantic, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and New England Review, among others. He teaches in the Written Arts Program as Senior Fellow in Ethics and Writing at Bard College.

Pick up a copy of 82nd Division here.

Read more about Aderibigbe and 82nd Division here.

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Today, I’m so pleased to present my conversation with my friend, the essayist and poet, Heather Lanier, about her newest chapbook, Erasing the Book of Pregnancy. She is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and along with her award-winning poetry chapbooks, she has published the full-length poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, which was called “a powerful poetic reckoning with motherhood and religion” by Kirkus Reviews. She is the recipient of a Vermont Creation Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a New Jersey Artist’s Fellowship. Her essays and poems have been published in The Atlantic, TIME, The Sun, Salon, and elsewhere. Her TED talk, “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Are Incomplete Stories We Tell Ourselves,” has been viewed three million times and translated into 18 languages.

Pick up a copy of Erasing the Book of Pregnancy here.

Read more about Lanier here.

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Today's show features Patricia Smith, whose The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry last fall. It’s a tremendous book, gathering a generous selection of her previous nine volumes along with the new pieces.

Patricia Smith's previous books include Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, among many others, and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. Smith is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. She is also a Guggenheim fellow, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.

A note of caution: Patricia Smith’s second reading contains language that may be difficult for some. Please use discretion.

Pick up a copy of The Intentions of Thunder here.

Read more about Smith here.

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The show's first overseas guest! I'm delighted to present my conversation with poet Matthew Francis, who joins me from his home in Wales to talk about his new book, The Green Month, a rendering of the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, one of the most important figures in Welsh poetry. Matthew Francis, besides his work with Welsh poets, is the author of the poetry collections Blizzard, Dragons, Muscovy, Mandeville, among others, and works of fiction, including, The Book of the Needle and Nocturne with Gaslamps, and he edited W. S. Graham’s New Collected Poems.

Pick up a copy of The Green Month here.

Read more about Francis here.

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Today our guest is Elizabeth Bradfield, author of the new book of poems, SOFAR. Bradfield is also the author of the books Toward Antarctica; Once Removed; Approaching Ice, which was a finalist from the James Laughlin award from the Academy of American Poets; and Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry. She has edited the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, with CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield, and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005 - 2020, co-created with Alexandra Teague and Miller Oberman. Liz works as a naturalist and field assistant at home on Cape Cod, directs the poetry concentration in Western Colorado’s low-residency MFA program, and is editor-in-chief of Broadsided.

Pick up a copy of SOFAR here.

Read more about Bradfield here.

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Today on the show is poet Eric Pankey, whose recent collection, Vanishments, is out from Slant Books. Eric is the author of many books of poems, including For the New Year, which was selected as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award by Mark Strand, The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems, and his most recent book prior to Vanishments, The History of the Siege, to name a few. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals as The Iowa Review, The Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review. His work has been supported by fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Brown Foundation. He is Heritage Chair in Writing and Professor Emeritus at George Mason University, and lives with his wife, the poet Jennifer Atkinson, in Fairfax, Virginia.

Pick up a copy of Vanishments here.

Read more about Pankey here.

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