Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, scholar and activist Juliana Spahr about teaching, language poetry, studying at SUNY Buffalo, post-colonialism and anti-colonialism, personal rules she established when living, writing and teaching in Hawaii, finding a more nuanced way of avoiding appropriation (without just avoiding it completely), who she is willing to upset, what it means to not uphold a nation, funding, the influence of the state on literature, why literature and higher education (especially MFA programs) remain so segregated and influenced by whiteness, the problems with declamatory political poems, Commune—both the book press and the magazine—occasional poems, how the genre of poetry is changing, the role of the internet on political poetry projects, the impact of Black Lives Matter on literature, and how literature is becoming more and more like opera.

Episode 63: Juliana Spahr

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Rachel speaks with poet, memoirist and literary agent Hafizah Geter about her recently published memoir The Black Period: On Personhood, Race and Origin. They speak one-on-one over zoom and then, a few weeks later, at the live-virtual Reading with Rachel salon. They speak about being poets writing prose, about writing to think and talking to think, MFA programs, writing classes, beauty, erasure, revision, being a craft junkie, TV, resisting “the privilege to obscure,” finding the question your book is trying to answer, writing yourself out of the shame you were given, rethinking reading and writing as solitary experiences, getting over the embarrassment of not knowing, and writing all over the walls.

Episode 124: Reading Hafizah Augustus Geter’s The Black Period

Rachel speaks with poet and erasure artist Mary Ruefle about menopause, thresholds, death, reading, museums, schools, podcasting, trees, wind, created violence, real violence, haiku, love, the erotics of reading, Yom Kippur, erasure, how to walk around the world two babysteps at a time, and more.

Episode 123: Mary Ruefle

Rachel speaks with poet and Commonplace producer Christine Larusso and then, a few weeks later, with Nicole Sealey at the live-virtual “Reading with Rachel” salon about Sealey’s recently published book-length erasure, The Ferguson Report: poems.  Sealey describes why, how and when she erased this document and how the erasure and lifted poems became a book.

Episode 122: Reading Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: an erasure

In this two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Fred Moten about poetry as performance, influences and teachers, open field poetics, finding space for listeners and audience to feel welcome, how to define the limits—or lack thereof— of a book and, specifically, the performance they gave the night before at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church on May 24, 2023. Part one (ep 120) is a conversation about the performance. Part two (ep 121) is a recording of that performance.

Episode 121: Fred Moten and Ronaldo V. Wilson (part 2)

In this two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Fred Moten about poetry as performance, influences and teachers, open field poetics, finding space for listeners and audience to feel welcome, how to define the limits—or lack thereof— of a book and, specifically, the performance they gave the night before at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church on May 24, 2023. Part one (ep 120) is a conversation about the performance. Part two (ep 121) is a recording of that performance.

This reading took place at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in New York City on May 24, 2023 and was recorded by the Poetry Project. (Audience audio was recorded on the same night and in the same location by Rachel Zucker.)

Mixing and Mastering by Stephen Becker

Episode 63: Juliana Spahr

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