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Episode 149: A Secret (Intellectual) Boner
We welcome in the new year with a full house today, Slushies, as we discuss two poems from Cal Freeman. The first poem’s title glacier reminds Kathy of this year’s epic snowfall in Juneau, Alaska (though it’s forty inches, not forty feet, of snow). All that snow reminds Lisa of Boston’s Vile Pile of snow that would not melt until July. Kathy deftly segues that memory back to our own slush pile. We admire Freeman’s use of sonics in “Glacial Erratics” and the poem’s subtle gestures towards relationship strife. We all agree we’re stealing the poet’s apt description of “overwrought craft beer.”
Since the second poem, “A White Bird,” is a classic Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, the discussion of iambic pentameter that ensues might be helpful to any teachers in the listening audience (as well as KVM’s brother, Dave). Have a listen as we nerd out on meter. All the sonnet particulars lead Marion to admit what it is that gives her a secret intellectual boner.
We end with lots of fodder for your TBR pile. Listen through the end of the episode for everyone’s recommended reads, linked below. As always, thanks for listening!
At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)
PBQ’s Recommended Reads:
From KVM: Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
From Jason: Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi
From Sam: Flesh by David Szalay
From Dagne: When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill
From Tobi: Sally Rooney’s novels
Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett
Midwood by Jana Prikryl
From Marion:
Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture by Jason Schneiderman
Teaching Writing Through Journaling by Kathleen Volk Miller
To learn to describe the animal by Guillermo Rebollo Gil
From Lisa:
Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
Author Bio: Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017), Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022), and The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone Press 2025). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, Willow Springs, Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North's Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. He teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit.
Instagram @johnfreeman5984
Photo credit: Shdia Amen
Glacial Erratics
I’m walking the rocks of mid-coast Maine
and thinking about leaving, haze rolling in
off Penobscot Bay nearly enveloping,
but I can see my hands, swollen, red,
silver ring in folds of skin. It’s been five days
of lobster, haddock, and overwrought
craft beer. Sarah’s in a nimbus on a bluff.
I can’t see her. These tidal patterns strand sponges
and shellac seaweed to the stones.
The tide’s waning now, an hour past
its peak. We arrived five days ago
in a Tecnam T2012, in a two-prop puddle hopper.
You get in the way you get out.
I’m scared Cape Air will strand us in this fog.
I don’t want another day. You get in the way
you get out unless you don’t. An alabaster boulder
rests at the foot of the bluff, a glacial erratic
only special because of its geographical and visual
context. Glacial errata, I thought I heard
our tourist captain say, though Sarah corrected me.
A glacial erratic’s when the ice
deposits stone of another realm
to punctuate a scene in a distant future epoch–
Sarah perched on a gunwale with a lighthouse
at her back, the centenarian Cape Cod schooner
they call the Olad meandering Penobscot Bay
on a quiet afternoon in summer,
and how I loved the way those seals
on the Nautilus Island rock appeared to sweat
(she said the song for our third decade
should be “Me and You on the Rock”),
their bellies gold as riesling in the sun.
Their kind of torpor rests on the precipice
of bathos and delight, their porcine bodies
commas, long pauses between dips.
At intervals they swim like dogs, like dogs
they also growl, yet they dive
with a gymnast’s grace into the depths.
A White Bird
A rustic cottage on a kettle lake,
shells of zebra mussels on the boat lift,
a couple loons, a lone white bird adrift
on combers in a pontoon boat’s slow wake.
Their time is short, they get what they can take.
He reads a short story she wrote to sift
for common nouns and proper nouns to lift
for a poem. He settles on the drake
and hen that dove their lithe bodies below
and resurfaced a hundred yards away.
Such secret lives of love, such dull regret.
In the story, she says he cannot know
what kind of bird they saw floating that day,
as he insists it was the rare egret.
View all episodes
By Painted Bride Quarterly
5
1212 ratings
We welcome in the new year with a full house today, Slushies, as we discuss two poems from Cal Freeman. The first poem’s title glacier reminds Kathy of this year’s epic snowfall in Juneau, Alaska (though it’s forty inches, not forty feet, of snow). All that snow reminds Lisa of Boston’s Vile Pile of snow that would not melt until July. Kathy deftly segues that memory back to our own slush pile. We admire Freeman’s use of sonics in “Glacial Erratics” and the poem’s subtle gestures towards relationship strife. We all agree we’re stealing the poet’s apt description of “overwrought craft beer.”
Since the second poem, “A White Bird,” is a classic Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, the discussion of iambic pentameter that ensues might be helpful to any teachers in the listening audience (as well as KVM’s brother, Dave). Have a listen as we nerd out on meter. All the sonnet particulars lead Marion to admit what it is that gives her a secret intellectual boner.
We end with lots of fodder for your TBR pile. Listen through the end of the episode for everyone’s recommended reads, linked below. As always, thanks for listening!
At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)
PBQ’s Recommended Reads:
From KVM: Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
From Jason: Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi
From Sam: Flesh by David Szalay
From Dagne: When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill
From Tobi: Sally Rooney’s novels
Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett
Midwood by Jana Prikryl
From Marion:
Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture by Jason Schneiderman
Teaching Writing Through Journaling by Kathleen Volk Miller
To learn to describe the animal by Guillermo Rebollo Gil
From Lisa:
Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
Author Bio: Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017), Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022), and The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone Press 2025). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, Willow Springs, Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North's Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. He teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit.
Instagram @johnfreeman5984
Photo credit: Shdia Amen
Glacial Erratics
I’m walking the rocks of mid-coast Maine
and thinking about leaving, haze rolling in
off Penobscot Bay nearly enveloping,
but I can see my hands, swollen, red,
silver ring in folds of skin. It’s been five days
of lobster, haddock, and overwrought
craft beer. Sarah’s in a nimbus on a bluff.
I can’t see her. These tidal patterns strand sponges
and shellac seaweed to the stones.
The tide’s waning now, an hour past
its peak. We arrived five days ago
in a Tecnam T2012, in a two-prop puddle hopper.
You get in the way you get out.
I’m scared Cape Air will strand us in this fog.
I don’t want another day. You get in the way
you get out unless you don’t. An alabaster boulder
rests at the foot of the bluff, a glacial erratic
only special because of its geographical and visual
context. Glacial errata, I thought I heard
our tourist captain say, though Sarah corrected me.
A glacial erratic’s when the ice
deposits stone of another realm
to punctuate a scene in a distant future epoch–
Sarah perched on a gunwale with a lighthouse
at her back, the centenarian Cape Cod schooner
they call the Olad meandering Penobscot Bay
on a quiet afternoon in summer,
and how I loved the way those seals
on the Nautilus Island rock appeared to sweat
(she said the song for our third decade
should be “Me and You on the Rock”),
their bellies gold as riesling in the sun.
Their kind of torpor rests on the precipice
of bathos and delight, their porcine bodies
commas, long pauses between dips.
At intervals they swim like dogs, like dogs
they also growl, yet they dive
with a gymnast’s grace into the depths.
A White Bird
A rustic cottage on a kettle lake,
shells of zebra mussels on the boat lift,
a couple loons, a lone white bird adrift
on combers in a pontoon boat’s slow wake.
Their time is short, they get what they can take.
He reads a short story she wrote to sift
for common nouns and proper nouns to lift
for a poem. He settles on the drake
and hen that dove their lithe bodies below
and resurfaced a hundred yards away.
Such secret lives of love, such dull regret.
In the story, she says he cannot know
what kind of bird they saw floating that day,
as he insists it was the rare egret.
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