POETICS: Poetry Podcast

Most writers learn the publishing industry through rumor: a bad experience relayed at a conference, a thread about an agent, a sense that the doors are locked and someone is holding the keys.

This week Ben Rockwood makes a different case. Ben is COO of Bainbridge Island Press, which means he has spent years on the side of the table writers rarely see. His argument is that almost everyone in this business is acting in good faith, and that the small fraction who aren’t get far more attention than their numbers deserve. What looks like a closed door is usually arithmetic.

We get into how the Big Five are structured, what hybrid publishers do and how to evaluate one, how a manuscript actually travels toward a yes, and what a book sells in a bookstore once it arrives. Then we talk about what running a press has taught us that no article about publishing ever did.

I also ended my intro by saying “okay now off to bed” and that…was me in a rush, and I’m too far away from my microphone to fix it. So, take it as you will.

This week I hand the microphone to Ben, who comes at poetry books from the vantage of a reader and a designer. His argument is that a collection is a mixtape. You choose your listener, you choose your emotion, you choose your songs, and then you spend hours on the sequencing, because sequence is where the affection lives.

Along the way he offers the three S’s he uses to describe any book he loves (style, story, structure), a defense of Infinite Jest‘s endnotes as a tennis match, and two poetry examples worth your afternoon: Janée J. Baugher’s The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, in which every poem is a numbered footnote, and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, which he reads aloud twice, once as prose and once as free verse, to show you the poem hiding in the punctuation.

If you cannot describe your manuscript in a single log line, this one is for you.

Poetry is a solitary practice with a communal spine. The page is quiet. The community around the page does not have to be.

This week, as the United States turns 250, we follow that idea across two thousand years. A famous sentence about free speech, written by a woman named Evelyn Beatrice Hall and handed by history to Voltaire. Ovid exiled to the edge of the world for a poem. Dante writing the Divine Comedy with a death sentence at his back. Nadezhda Mandelstam carrying her husband’s life work in her memory because paper was too dangerous. Anna Akhmatova’s friends becoming living manuscripts. And Lawrence Ferlinghetti, arrested in 1957 for publishing a poem called Howl, standing in an American courtroom where the First Amendment finally held the poet back.

Fair warning: I cried recording this one, and I left it in. Some episodes are about poetry. This one is about why there is any poetry left to be about.

Free zine at our Grand Old Fourth booth. Come find us.

Every poetry book you've ever held was shaped twice. Once by the poet, once by the press. Last episode, Ben Rockwood took us into the first half of the second shaping: layout, the work of the page. Today, he widens the lens. What a press is actually looking for in a submission, how to prepare a manuscript so it survives the trip into production, and a page-by-page tour of how a poetry book gets built, from the title spread to the colophon. Practical, opinionated, and especially useful for poets getting ready to send work out.

Available in POETICS Bookstore:

Muscle Memory of Love and Disaster, poetry by Tim Mayo

If you open this book in the bookstore, open it to "At the Chemo Clinic" –– a powerful elegy that refuses to go quietly as a father accompanies his daughter to the chemo ward, and likens it to a kind of gas station, where nurses "attach the clear plastic hose to her chest and start the pump." In his poem "Self-portrait with Trache," Mayo writes "Grief is a black parrot in my throat." But there is more than grief in these poems. They tell us how a life is carried—stubbornly, tenderly—in the body––as the lyric moment glides from still-life landscapes and winter woods to hospital rooms, rehab corridors, and how life can still be remade with meaning via the music and clarity of poetry. An insistence on attentiveness lives fiercely in these compelling poems. — Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic

Ever wondered why a poem feels different on the page than it does in your head? Join Ben Rockwood for a deep dive into the silent art of the layout. From the precise geometry of margins to the philosophy behind font selection, we explore how a press transforms a raw manuscript into a physical work of art. If you've ever wanted to know how an editor actually "builds" a page for poetry, this episode is your blueprint.

Six hundred and fifty years after his death, Petrarch is still teaching us how to navigate a hostile sea. In this rain-paired episode, Tamarah opens A.M. Juster's new translation of the Canzoniere, out this April from Liveright with an introduction by Andrew Frisardi, and finds herself unexpectedly in love with the man who invented the European love sonnet. Three things about the poems. Three surprising ways the form holds them. Three biographical facts that change every line. From Laura's name dispersed into the breeze, to the Babylon sonnets banned for two centuries, to the storm-tossed vessel of poem 189, this is a conversation about why love poetry isn't dead, and how Petrarch shows us the way home.

Available Here →

Episode 41: Poetry That Pairs With Bread

What do a Brooklyn bakery at dawn, the bones beneath the soil, and a political manifesto have in common? They’re all hiding inside a loaf of bread—at least when poets get their hands on it.

This episode, we’re pulling three poems warm from the oven: Richard Levine’s tender portrait of a grandfather whose night shifts fed more than just his family, Margaret Atwood’s unflinching reminder that every slice carries the weight of the earth’s dead, and Pablo Neruda’s passionate demand that bread belong to everyone.

Along the way, we explore why poets have always reached for food when they want to say something true—about memory, labor, mortality, and love expressed without words. Because bread is never just bread. It’s what we make when we want to say you are home.

Settle in with something warm. This one’s meant to be savored.

Five poems walked into a rainstorm.

One sat in a hut during a war and thought about dying. One stayed in bed and didn’t apologize. One woke up next to someone and watched the cage break open. One wandered a muddy field looking for arrowheads. And one, the oldest of the bunch, told us what we already knew: into each life, some rain must fall.

This episode is for the gray days. The ones where you look out the window.

🎧 Listen now.

Where Literature Meets the Cheese Board

Indulge your mind and your palate. This episode pairs timeless works from literary masters—Doyle’s mysteries, Chesterton’s wit, Hall’s bold verse—with the perfect artisanal cheese. Discover Gorgonzola, Pont l’Évêque, Port du Salut, Caprice des Dieux, and the mighty Stilton. It’s the podcast for readers who savor every bite.

Subscribe and taste the classics anew.