In this episode, the group gathers to discuss a selection of poems from Divya Victor's book Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021): three poems from the titular "Curb" series in the middle of the book ("Curb" 3, 4, and 5) and another poem, "Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)."

In this episode, we talk about two prose poems in Harryette Mullen’s collection Sleeping with the Dictionary, published by California in 2002. The poems are “Dim Lady” and the title poem, “Sleeping with the Dictionary.”

In this episode, our discussion takes us to the great Ostashevskyan topics — knowledge otherwise somehow alienated; language that embodies or transliterates a kind of violence; the (sound) differences between knowing and saying no (and similarities); his sincere (and doubtless Russian Absurdist-influenced) plea to “teach us love / teach us love / teach us love / teach us love” even though “We are wholly unfamiliar with it.” Because the episode was recorded before the February 24, 2022, Russian military invasion into Ukraine, listeners will have to reckon for themselves the many places in our conversation when we would no doubt have commented on the war (continuing at the time of the podcast’s release) and on the role of the avant-garde Russian American poet in relation to Russian cultures historical and contemporary.

In this episode, the group discusses three poems from Diane di Prima's 'Revolutionary Letters' project: #16 (“We are eating up the planet”), #19 (“If what you want is jobs”), and #27 (“How much can we afford to lose before we win”). The project’s goals and modes of address shifted over time. Any single letter-poem, read separately from the others, might seem definitive — tonally evincing ideological as well as poetic choices having been made with apparent finality. Our decision to read and listen to three poems, forming a small sampler of the Letters, helped us understand and, through this hour-long chat, to convey the project’s quality as overall a series of variations; each thus is an instance of ways of thinking about poems’ social efficacy.

Al Filreis convenes Charles Bernstein, Anthony Elms, and Laynie Browne to talk about two poems by George Quasha. The book, published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2020, titled Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole, consists of eight gatherings of preverbs; our two poems, coming from the final section — which bears the name of the book — are “self fast” (numbered 12) and “that music razors through” (numbered 13). The recordings we use in this episode can be found on PennSound’s extensive Quasha author page. These preverbs were recorded by Chris Funkhouser on December 27, 2017.

Today we are releasing episode #168 of PoemTalk, in which Amber Rose Johnson, Daniel Bergmann, and Yolanda Wisher meet up at the Kelly Writers House to talk with Al Filreis about Jayne Cortez's "She Got He Got". This poem/performance piece is comprised of a “She” half and an “He” half, she giving variations of hot, while he instantiates variations of cold.

Today we are releasing episode #167 of PoemTalk, in which Jack Giesking, Jonathan Dick, and erica kaufman meet up at the Kelly Writers House to talk with Al Filreis about Myung Mi Kim's "And Sing We" from Under Flag.

Today's episode dives into Cecilia Vicuña's 'Colliding and not colliding at the same time'. The performance begins as the audience, having been encouraged to ask questions about an art video that had just been screened, went momentarily silent. No questions were being asked, so Vicuña began improvisationally to fill the room with words and sounds, exploring a convergence or collision of topics: the then-recent election of Donald Trump, the “millionaires’ coup” in Brazil, the “mystery of what is happening at this moment in the earth,” the collective thought of the people in the room, and the room itself. Edwin Torres, Huda Fakhreddine, and Jena Osman joined Al Filreis in the Arts Café at the Kelly Writers House to record this episode.

Today, we talk about a poem by Stephen Collis that appeared in his book, A History of the Theories of Rain, published by Talonbooks in Vancouver in 2021. The poem is titled “Yes I Do Want to Punch” — and perhaps should be called “Yes I Do Want to Punch / fascists in the face,” proceeding to its key first line. The eco-poetic turn — an urgent one, although it can also be read as casual, even patient — from the power of a counter-violent radical reaction to a sweet comic catalogue of warblers occurs right at the beginning of the poem. One has no time to get one’s readerly bearings.

This episode discusses a three-page section of Leslie Scalapino’s “‘Can’t’ is ‘Night’” — the passage having been chosen by the poet for It’s Go in Horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006. Close listening and close reading: surely some manner of these, both, are required by every Leslie Scalapino work. The PoemTalk group sought to respect this in the very way in which they moved through the poem’s nonsequential parts and themes and offering of language problems. The poem is utterly political and supremely theoretical at once. No orderly proceeding through the poem beginning to end, nor any confident sense of the poem’s tone (about its borrowing of words and phrases), would disclose those remarkable qualiies. So, called upon by the poem’s “dis-placing” of its own parts, the group ventures toward its front lines, and then back again behind them. What “can’t” this poet do?