Poet and educator L. S. McKee tells us about poetry and personas, the joys of secret venues, writing across science and art curricula, and even relics.

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Joan Crawford holding mask of herself (cropped). Photoplay, 1932. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and music!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

Elizabeth Arnold The Reef

Ingeborg Bachmann

Elizabeth Bishop

Anne Carson Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

Rachel Carson Silent Spring

Paul Celan "Death Fugue"

Tyler Childers

Julio Cortázar Blow-Up: And Other Stories

Julio Cortázar Hopscotch

Julio Cortázar The Winners

Kurt Gödel

Frédéric Gros The Security Principle: From Serenity to Regulation

Gruppe 47

Luke Harding "'It's the new normal': in Kiev's newest book store, readers fear how Ukraine's story will end"

Hugh Haughton, ed. Second World War Poems

Zbigniew Herbert "The Prayer of the Traveler Mr. Cogito"

Homer The Iliad (transl. Emily Wilson)

Homer The Odyssey

Hope Jahren Lab Girl: A Memoir

Hope Jahren The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

Brad J. Kallenberg By Design: Ethics, Theology, and the Practice of Engineering

Jack Kerouac

Yusef Komunyakaa

Benjamín Labatut When We Cease to Understand the World

T. E. Lawrence

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook

Primo Levi "The Molecule's Defiance" in A Tranquil Star: Stories

Primo Levi The Periodic Table

Janna Levin A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Christopher Logue War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad

Georg Lukács The Theory of the Novel

L. S. McKee "Alva Watches the Previous President Fly Away"

L. S. McKee Creature Wing Heart Machine

Haruki Murakami The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Maggie Nelson On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

George Oppen New Collected Poems

William Shakespeare

Jonathan Sumption The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God

Greta Thunberg The Climate Book

Alan Turing

Jesmyn Ward

James Wright

Isabel Zapata In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation