SLEERICKETS

By Matthew Buckley SmithArts Books

SLEERICKETS episodes

August 26, 2021 BONUS: Featuring Brian Platzer! ft. Brian Platzer
Last time I forgot to tag the episode “ft. Brian Platzer,” but not this time!
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Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
41 min
August 25, 2021 Ep 19: The Realish Thing, ft. Brian Platzer
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– The Cosmopolitan Brooklyn Sex Novelist Himself, Brian Platzer
– Jennifer Senior’s essay “Twenty Years Gone”
– Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones
– John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany
– Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom
– Jack Kerouac’s novel Visions of Gerard
– Katy Waldman’s essay “There Once Was a Girl”
– William Logan’s review of Thomas James’ book Letters to a Stranger
– Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones
– Stephen O’Connor’s novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings
– Brian’s novel The Body Politic
– The very fine Able Muse Zoom poetry reading in which I hypocritically participated
– Anthony Hecht's poem "A Letter"
Please rate, review, and subscribe! Or just recommend the show to a friend!
Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 19 min
August 18, 2021 Ep 18: We All Die Together
NB: It turns out the earlier version of the Ralegh poem I discuss appears in the earlier version of the same anthology in which I found it, this being the one edited by the great Arthur Quiller-Couch!
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Daniel Dennett’s speech to the 2009 American Atheists Conference, “The Evolution of Confusion”
– My hypocritical participation in the next Able Muse Zoom Poetry Reading
– White male poetry professors over the age of sixty!
– The New Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Helen Gardner
– Two versions of a poem by Walter Ralegh
– Shelly Kagan’s lecture series “Death”
– The great Elizabeth Brient
– Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal
– The morality play Everyman
– Keats’ poem “Ode to a Nightingale”
– William Cory’s poem “Heraclitus”
– Rachel Wetzsteon’s poem “Nightingales”
Please rate, review, and subscribe! Or just recommend the show to a friend!
Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 27 min
August 11, 2021 Ep 17: A Poem-Shaped Void
NB: Please don’t actually write in demanding $100 as a reward for your lack of familiarity with the editorial standards of contemporary poetry journals. Just consider it an advance on the first 1~20 months of your future Patreon subscription.
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Making the Cut
– Placebo poems
– Maya Angelou’s poem “Phenomenal Woman”
– Housman’s poem “Here dead lie we because we did not choose”
– More Shashi Bhat!
– Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage
– Tertullian’s condemnation of rock ‘n’ roll
– The entertainingly merciless review of Woodstock 99 on a recent episode of Struggle Session
– The very bad definition of ‘corniness’ on a recent episode of Very Bad Wizards
– Plato’s exclusion of TV and the internet from his ideal city
– Tall, friendly men Jonathan Farmer and Ryan Wilson
– A smart, critical email I got from Andrew Palmer about my treatment of Ben Lerner’s poem “The Lights”
– Andrew Palmer’s novel The Bachelor
– Me on Brian Platzer on me on him on the sublime
– Smart and good poet/editor Armen Davoudian
– Elizabeth Bishop’s clairvoyant citation of Alan Shapiro’s book That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration
– Some encouragement to ignore all the dumb stuff I say, like, for example, “Pronunciation doesn’t matter”
– Michael Robbins’ review of Postmodern American Poetry
– Smart and good poet/editor Eric Smith
– Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
– James Wright’s poem “St. Judas”
– Shane McCrae’s poem “Jim Limber on Continuity in Heaven”
Please rate, review, and subscribe! Or just recommend the show to a friend!
Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 30 min
August 04, 2021 Ep 16: Rhino Horn, Diamonds & Meth, ft. Shashi Bhat
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Shashi Bhat’s new novel The Most Precious Substance on Earth
– Shashi’s first novel The Family Took Shape
– Getting accused of plagiarism as a kid
– Pen15
– Writing an accidentally successful blog
– Naben Ruthnum’s book Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race
– That place where Shashi and I both went to grad school
– Melissa Bank’s book The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing
– #OwnVoices
– The Love, Simon controversy
– Kaitlyn Greenidge’s article “Who Gets to Write What?”
– The greatness of Amy Hempel
– Writing believable dialogue
– Casting the audiobook of your own novel
– The Americans
– Toastmasters
– Novels-in-stories vs. novels-in-chapters
– Emily St. John Mandel’s book The Glass Hotel
– Revising your Canadian novel for an American editor
– Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage
– Columbine
– Capturing the Friedmans
– Salman Rushdie’s books Midnight’s Children and Imaginary Homelands
– Hannah Waters’ article “Inaccuracies in fiction: when is reshaping fact appropriate?”
– Margaret Atwood’s book Cat’s Eye
– Shashi’s forthcoming (?) speculative fiction novel Vancouver
– Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities
– Thank You for Smoking
– Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room”
– Lee Edelman’s abbreviated essay “On ‘In the Waiting Room’”

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Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 28 min
July 29, 2021 Ep 15: How Not to Write About Poetry
NB: Though the publication is not listed in the book’s acknowledgments, it turns out that “Without” did in fact first appear in Poetry in 1995. So I was wrong, big fucking surprise.
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Anne Helen Petersen’s article “The Master’s Trap”
– LitHub
– Paul Legault’s article “How John Ashbery Thinks: Reading the Collages of a Great Poet”
– Jesse Nathan’s article “Short Conversations with Poets: Kaveh Akbar”
– Kaveh Akbar’s poem “The Palace”
– Donald Hall’s poem “Without”
Please rate, review, and subscribe! Or just recommend the show to a friend!
Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr
July 21, 2021 Ep 14: M*****f****r of the Arts
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– More wisdom from J. Farmer, M.F.A.
– Ben Lerner’s forthcoming poetry collection, Gold Custody
– Ben Lerner’s poem “The Lights”
– Cameron Clark’s poem “Milton with Galileo, 1638”
– Paul Fussell’s book Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
– John Hollander’s book Rhyme’s Reason
– Timothy Steele’s book All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing
– Everything an MFA in poetry will get you! (not much)
– Kurt Vonnegut’s (real-life) book Breakfast of Champions
– Kilgore Trout’s (nonexistent) book The Barring-Gafner of Bagnialto, or This Year’s Masterpiece
– I might go on vacation…
– Borges’ story “Funes the Memorious”
– Wolfgang Iser’s article “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”
Please rate, review, and subscribe! Or just recommend the show to a friend!
Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 19 min
July 21, 2021 Ep 14: Motherfucker of the Arts
In this episode, I demonstrate poor time management and talk about MFAs!
1 hr 19 min
July 14, 2021 Ep 13: Against Hope
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
– Randall Jarrell’s poem “90 North”
– Poet and critic Jonathan Farmer
– Alain de Botton’s book The Architecture of Happiness
– A. E. Stallings’ translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days
– Bulfinch’s Mythology
– Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths
– Bernard Evslin, Dorothy Evslin, and Ned Hoopes’ book The Greek Gods
– My 2019 conversation with JP Gritton
– Colson Whitehead’s novels The Intuitionist, The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys, and Zone One
– Matt Matros’ essay “As the Pandemic Drags on, ‘Zone One’ Warns Us Not to Hope”
– Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz
– The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer”
– Louis MacNeice’s poem “The Suicide”
Please rate, review, and subscribe! Or just recommend the show to a friend!
Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 22 min
July 07, 2021 Ep 12: Two or Three Taboos
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Joe Pesci’s death scene in Goodfellas
– Freud’s book Totem and Taboo
– Other Intractable Problems
– Cosmopolitan Brooklyn Sex Novelist Brian Platzer
– Kant’s book Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
– Tim Parks’ essay “Why Readers Disagree”
– Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections
– The last sentence of The Origin of Species
– The Death-Makes-Life-Worth-Living Delusion
– The question psychiatry residents hate most
– Sherlock Holmes on Copernicus
– Poe on composition
– Flames, old and new
– Yeats’ poem “After Long Silence”
– Wyatt’s poem “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind”
– Derek Walcott’s poem “Sixty Years After”
Please rate, review, and subscribe! Or just recommend the show to a friend!
Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 23 min