No Good Poetry

Poet Christopher Louis Romaguera joins us this week to talk about the Gulf Coast Association ​of ​Creative Writing Teachers Conference, writing poetry as a first generation American, his experience traveling  in Cuba and South America, his love of Mate, and the upcoming New Orleans Poetry Festival.

At the start of Poetry Month, we look ahead to New Orleans Poetry Festival at the end of the month, and Megan Burns visits to give us a Poetry Fest Survival Guide.

Joseph M. traveled to Tampa near the beginning of March to attend Whale Prom, an off-site book fair, held at the same time as the AWP conference. He interviews a couple of the event's organizers about why they started Whale Prom and what need it filled as well as several attendees who were selling books. There are also some great recordings of poet Dylan Krieger reading some of her poetry at  an off-site reading.

Last week we recorded the podcast live from St. Joe Lofts in the Warehouse District of New Orleans. We are revisited by past guests, and a couple new guests join us too. Make sure that you play along with the Poetry Trivia near the end of the episode. Check out the show notes for the PDF of photos for the picture round.

Should poets be poets full-time or should they ply a trade? In episode 49, four of our past guests give us their thoughts on whether or not poets should have day jobs.

Poet Ben Aleshire joins us this week to talk about his recent travels, selling poetry on the street, and troubadours in this extra-long episode. We hit on all kinds of odd subjects, George Whitman's shenanigans at Shakespeare and Company, whether Johnny Depp might have stolen a poetry broadside from City Lights, the fecundity of letterpress printing in Germany, fake news, Ezra Pound's Fascism and Antisemitism, improvisation vs. revision in poetry, John Ashbery, how poetry is like free jazz, and why you should never submit poetry to the New Yorker.

This week printer Peter Anderson joins us to talk about letterpress, book making and the value of tailoring a book specifically to a poet;'s work. We get into the esoterics of page size, paper, and the economy of books, and talk about what we love about books as physical objects.

t's just a little after Valentine's Day, and my wife Raina and our daughter Emma join me to read and talk about love poetry. We share love poems by Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Zachary Schomburg, Sappho, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Louis Aragon, Anne Waldman, Tony Hoagland and Everette Maddox.

This week Chris Sullivan joins us to discuss found poetry and his publications, including the Journal of Public Domain,  Catastrophe Basketballs From New Orleans, and I Love My Van.