No Good Poetry

This week we are talking about writing poems in a persona, and what it shows us about how poetry and identity work in general. We read poems by Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, James Tate, and Andre Breton.

It's carnival time, and we are thinking about Mardi Gras poems this week. We share some of our favorite poetry about carnival and wonder why there isn't more out there, and we pontificate about how much that one Tuesday a year shapes New Orleans culture.

This week printer and poet Christ Fritton joins us to talk about visiting letterpress print shops across the country, typography's influence on poetry, the importance of constraints, and embracing the "glitch."

On January 1st, for the first time since 1998, a whole bunch of creative work entered the public domain. This week we talk about how copyrights work and if we think they really work, read some poetry that recently became public domain, and talk about how work from the 20s could be a font of inspiration for today's poets and artists.

Poet Jorge Sánchez has been contemplating how poets find the forms that they write in when the majority of poets don't use traditional forms. We talk about constraints born of choice, medium, lifestyle, chance and luck and hopefully find a way to forge some new paths through the thicket of poetic form. And the best part is Jorge shares with us a couple of his recent science-inspired poems.

This week poet Hank Lazer joins us to talk about docupoetry, his shape writing, keeping open the gateway of poetry, poetry as phonomenolgy of spiritual experience, and how we can make poetry readings less passive and more of an immersive experience.

This week poet and musician Matt Hart joined us by Skype from his basement lair, and we had a great conversation about teaching poetry writing to visual arts students, the intersection of punk and poetry, Apollinaire, translating, writing a poem every day for a year and more. Matt shares with us some of his poems and one of his obliterations of Apollinaire.

This week poet, teacher, and editor Ralph Adamo joins us to chat about teaching poetry, the editing process and how poems are language trying to tell the truth. He shares some of his own poems and poems by Frank Stanford and Everette Maddox.

This week poet Shafer Hall joins us to talk about his long time collaboration with poet John Cotter and their new project: writing poetry about pieces of visual art. We talk about how it creates depth to add collaborators into your writing process, how running a bar intersects with poetry, avocado plants, and Shafer reads 2 of their ekphrastic poems.

This week we're talking about allusions in poetry. Why and how do poets use them and what does it say about who we are as humans? We read poems by Keats, Emily Dickinson, Gregory Corso, and Dean Young.