Unwoven Interview #3: Poet Kelly Porter
https://waywordsstudio.com
Find Unwoven and its supplements: https://waywordsstudio.com/project/unwoven/
Kelly is a poet, a PhD Candidate in American History at Tulane University, and Head archivist for Preservation Hall, a historic jazz venue in New Orleans. She’s a Community Organizer, Public Historian, and civil rights activist, and, she’s one of my own former students.
What difference in a little poetic structure? Across 17 traditional forms of poetry–from ballad and sonnet to ghazal and ZaniLa Rhyme–writer, podcaster, and educator Steve Chisnell juxtaposes similar poems in both traditional styles and free verse, “Poetry of Form and Release,” to explore the effects of poetic construction on meaning itself. Along the way, his speakers find their lives torn, unraveled, or dangling as they wrestle with aging, memory, love, myth, and the promise of language. From Waywords Studio, Chisnell’s first book is a layered and provocative collection rich in ironies and meanings found not merely in its words but in the patterns beneath them, not merely in the verse but in the spaces between. The book includes an extensive section of author notes on the inspiration for the poems and as a primer on the meaning in forms. More extensive materials for classroom students and teachers are also available.
01:42 Voicing and Revoicing: Writing Process
05:00 Learning About Form Through Writing
10:44 Oral Performance & Form
13:49 Choosing & Engaging Models for Forms
17:17 Structure in Free Verse
21:27 Policing the Formal Rules
26:26 Private Poets in Public Space
32:22 The Value in a Poem’s Speaker
36:45 Similarities: Fiction and Poetry
39:12 Under-appreciated Forms
42:54 Writing Headspace; Reflection Space
45:41 Adding & Varying Structure
48:26 Wrapping Up & eBook Questions
50:07 Closing
50:51 Literary Nomads Trailer
Transcript: https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/transcript-unwoven-interview-3-kelly-porter
Literary Nomads is the primary program of Waywords Studio (https://waywordsstudio.com). The podcast posts new material each week, with thought-provoking examinations of literature around selected questions or themes and several smaller supplemental episodes in between the larger programs: history, writing, and contemporary applications of ideas.
Visit us for expanded resources for guests and the Waywords community, for other programs and writing, and for opportunities to support our goal to expand reading. Resources available can include full bibliographies of material referenced, full and partial texts, annotated editions, supplemental and expanded episodes, fictional explorations, teaching and learning resources, additional essays, and online courses.
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Original music by Randon Myles (https://randonmyles.com/)
Theme for Unwoven by Randon Myles.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It is open to be used and adapted for all not-for-profit uses with proper attribution.
Chisnell, Steve. “Unwoven Interview #3: Kelly Porter.” Waywords Studio, 17 Jan. 2025, https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/unwoven-interview-3-poet-kelly-porter.
