No Good Poetry

This week poet Laura Goldstein joins us to tell us about the workshop she held this week at The Dragonfly: "Collective Experiment in Audience," and she reads us a solstice poem that she wrote. We also chat about coaching poets, the difference between writing poetry for self-exploration and writing for an external audience, and how the current political situation is making its way into poetry.

This week we start off talking about how we taught a visual poetry workshop at NOCCA and how that went, but as we talk about teaching, what we learned, and how best to present poetry, we spiral off into some interesting linguistic features of speech and how that relates to poetry and visual poetry.

This week we look at the story of John Whitcomb Riley and how his pursuit of fame as a poet led him to forge a posthumous Edgar Allen Poe poem that briefly took the literary world by storm. 

This week we talk about our trip to Uruguay, our great time at the Mundial Poético de Montevideo, and the visual workshop we put on there. We also discuss how impressed we were by the wide range of poetry going on in South America and how there seems to be a greater embrace of exploring sound and visual techniques. we also go through a brief survey of some Uruguayan visual poets that you probably haven't heard of.

While we were in Montevideo, we sat down and had a chat with 3 great Brazilian poets, Amora Pêra, Pedro Lago, & Pedro Rocha. We talk about typewriters, poetry in Brazil, listening to poems in different languages, printing, and they share some poems with us.

We're at Mundial Poetico in Montevideo right now, but here are a couple of poems from our Uruguayan compatriots to hold you over until the full episode next week. 

Poet Rodrigo Toscano joins us this week, and though we don't have much of a plan in mind, we have a pretty nice chat about how the New Orleans poetry scene is different from the scene in other places, writing poetry for a non-poet audience, monetizing poetry, poets looking for fame, hapenings, neo-happenings, interactive readings, poetry schools and factions...and Rodrigo reads us some of his new poetry!

Anaphora for days! Poet Raina Zelinski joins me this week to talk about list poems. How can a poem create repetition? Is there a difference, between litany, catalogues, and list poems? We look at list poems by John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

No guest this week as we talk about the possibilities for computer generated poetry. We discuss Makkos' poetry chatbot, and look at some poetry Bienvenu created using the textgenrnn recurring neural network.

Lee Tiger joins us this week to talk about his recent travels to Bulgaria, playing the Blues while trapped in Paris, and how travel and foreign languages affect writing.