SLEERICKETS

By Matthew Buckley SmithArts Books

SLEERICKETS episodes

June 30, 2021 Ep 11: Twitter v. Poetry
NB: In the opening segment, I refer to six poems, but then I only cite five. This is because what I originally took to be a soaring free-verse get-out-the-vote poem turned out to be just a transcription of a Bruce Springsteen Sirius XM ramble. Though, on second thought, maybe that still counts.
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”
– James Wright’s poems “Northern Pike,” “The Blessing,” and “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
– Jessica Salfia’s poem “The First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantined”
– Ada Limón’s poem “The End of Poetry”
– Ross Gay’s poem “Sorrow Is Not My Name”
– Kitty’ O’Meara’s poem “In the Time of Pandemic”
– Derek Mahon’s poem “Everything Is Going to Be All Right”
– Alex Manley’s article “Twitter Doesn’t Want to Let the Poets Find Out About Science”
– Freud’s book “Totem and Taboo”
– Freud’s essay “The Uncanny”
– 30 Rock’s uncanny valley episode
– Alex Manley’s poem “Aeroelastic Flutter”
– 32 Poems 19.1 Summer 2021
– Anne-Marie Thompson’s poem “Okay is”
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Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 6 min
June 23, 2021 Ep 10: Debunking Kafka, ft. Austin Allen
NB: We touched on so many topics in this one that I’m here going to limit myself to the readily linkable stuff. Come to think of it, that may be a good policy going forward…
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Austin Allen’s book Pleasures of the Game
– Poetry by the Sea
– C. P. Snow’s essay “The Two Cultures”
– Roger Kimball’s essay on “The Two Cultures”
– Amit Majmudar’s essay “Kepler’s Snowflake”
– Amit Majmudar’s essay “The Brains of Animals”
– William Blake’s poem “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau”
– Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Sonnet: To Science”
– Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen”
– Dan Chiasson’s incoherent tweet about UFOs
– Richard Dawkins’ bizarre tweet about The Metamorphosis
– The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
– The Travels of Blad J. Garamond
– Annie Dillard’s book The Writing Life
– Amit Majmudar’s poem “Patient Histories”
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Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 41 min
June 20, 2021 BONUS: Not a Poetry Person, ft. Anna Backer
– The Cincinnati School of Music
– Mark Twain: sad, wise riverboat captain
– Emily Leithauser: sad, wise poet
– Alain de Botton’s book The Architecture of Happiness
– Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony
– Development vs. structure :: Beethoven vs. Bach
– Liszt’s Étude no. 3, Un sospiro
– Poetry appreciation class
– Serious amateur art
– Poetry is weirdly personal
– From-the-heart-ness
– Yeats’ poem “Adam’s Curse”
– Prodigiousness and precocity
– The David is top-heavy
– The live version of Radiohead’s song “Like Spinning Plates”
– Schubert’s Piano Sonata No 21 D 960 B flat major
– Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
– Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116
– John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

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

Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 3 min
June 16, 2021 Ep 9: Thou Shalt Not Jazz June
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Pantoums vs. pantuns
– The medical fecklessness of poets
– My imperfect book reviews
– Art is bad at teaching lessons
– Hollywood studio movies are all about why you should be an unpaid intern for a Hollywood studio
– Christmas is about presents
– Pedantic English majors
– Horace’s Ars Poetica
– Horace’s Ode i.11
– To delight vs. to instruct
– Lay off Polonius already
– Magic quotation marks
– A. M. Juster’s poem “No”
– John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X, “Death be not proud”
– Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool”
– Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
– The Giving Tree
– “Baby It’s Cold Outside”
– The epilogue to Crime and Punishment
– The lovely, talented, and extremely online Quincy Lehr
– Some actual formalist Nazis
– A New Yorker article about the time W. E. B du Bois walloped Lothrop Stoddard in front of a live audience
– Dave Eggers’ short short “Woman Waits, Seething, Blooming”
– Reginald McKnight’s story “Into Night”
– Reginald McKnight’s story “Float”
– Alan Shapiro’s poem “Happy Hour”
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 28 min
June 09, 2021 Ep 8: Prodigal Dad, ft. Traci O’Dea
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Traci’s new poetry collection, Restricted Movement, featuring paintings by her dad, Tommy O’Dea
– The Kit-Kat Klock
– Reading for a magazine
– Form vs. free verse
– Mimesis is born, not made
– Casual Britishisms
– How to pronounce “Appalachian”
– Art vs. artists
– Metaphysical sex poetry
– Famous British poets love to help high school students cheat on their exams
– The Prodigal Son every week!
– Lear is funny
– Shtick and the teen pop sex icon
– Pandering to the patriarchy
– “…performatively dead eyes…”
– A doting New York Times piece on Billie Eilish
– British Vogue’s debut of a new Billie Eilish
– A scornful New York Times piece on Billie Eilish
– The HBO of influencers
– The Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”
– Marina Abramovic is a good performance artist
– Olly Eley’s (lightly ghostwritten) self-introduction
– Dad brain
– Traci’s forthcoming poetry collection Waving
Find Traci online at traciodea.com and follow her on Instagram and Twitter @traciodea

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 12 min
June 02, 2021 Ep 7: My love is like a red red grawlix
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– You still can’t read Ryan Wilson’s translation of Catullus XI
– Etymology problems
– Are curses real? (Yes)
– Mean shit vs. maledictions
– Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals
– Shylock was on to something
– The dozens
– The Onion’s post 9/11 article “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell”
– Two less-than-great reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden
– David Ferry’s The Odes of Horace
– Horace I.37
– Ben Folds’ song “Song for the Dumped”
– CeeLo Green’s song “Fuck You”
– SLEERICKETS’ nonexistent Patreon
– Heather McHugh’s poem “Earthmoving Malediction”
– Everette Maddox’s poem “Anonymous”
– Yeats’ poem “No Second Troy”
– Mary Jo Salter’s poem “No Second Try”
– Thomas Gray’s poem “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes”
– My scientifically unimpeachable neurotransmitter analogy
– Steve Scafidi’s poem “To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire”
Errata: Contrary to an offhand remark I make in this episode, “piss” is not, in fact, of Anglo-Saxon origin, but rather of Old French! And my reading of Horace I.37 does come off as kind of sarcastic even though I say he’s not being sarcastic. And also, yes, I for some reason make a big deal at the end about not doing biographical readings right after recording a whole episode that’s just crammed from top to bottom with biographical readings. What can I say? I’m a fucking genius.
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 8 min
May 26, 2021 Ep 6: There Are Some Things We Just Don’t Talk About
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook
– What makes a writing manual worth reading
– Too much talking, not enough poems!
– The SLEERICKETS logo
– Van Gogh’s “Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette”
– Daniel Alexander Smith: designer, artist, measurably cooler sibling
– Steve Jobs ruined fonts
– Janet Loxley Lewis’ poem “Days”
– Eratosphere exists and is good
– Some well-reasoned dissent re: the teachability of dessert and the artistic value of ASMR, podcasts, and (maybe) porn
– Young people love/tolerate/acknowledge the existence of SLEERICKETS!
– Robert Hayden’s poem “Paul Laurence Dunbar”
– Paul Muldoon and Kevin Young are talented and have at least two other things in common
– The New Yorker Poetry Podcast’s February 17, 2016 edition
– Donald Justice’s poem “There is a gold light in certain old paintings”
– Uncle Vanya
– Louis Malle’s porn-free last movie, Vanya on 42nd Street (Don’t be fooled by the trailer on YouTube, which badly misrepresents the tone, pacing, and atmosphere of the movie!)
– What the fuck “sleerickets” means
– Anthony Hecht’s poem “A Letter”
– Ashley Anna McHugh’s poem “The Unquarried Blue of Those Depths Is All But Blinding”
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 11 min
May 19, 2021 Ep 5: Ars Foetica
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Poems about semen
– The book contest–industrial complex
– A competing theory of “y’all”
– foetry.com
– There’s no money in poetry
– It’s hard to publish a first (or second, or third) book of poetry
– PoBiz!
– The Jorie Graham Rule
– Alan Cordle, et al.
– The Yale Younger Poets Prize, The Contemporary Poetry Series, and the rest
– Auden and Ashbery
– A little bit of accounting for taste
– The CLMP Contest Code of Ethics
– Harriet vs. Scarriet
– The Poetry Hot 100!
– “Rappers React to Rich Brian ft. Ghostface Killah, Desiigner, Tory Lanez & More”
– Aristotle on lion drawings
– The priamel
– Sappho’s Fragment 16, translated by Sherod Santos as “To Anactoria”
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Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected].
Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 23 min
May 12, 2021 Ep 4: Six Intros, No Show
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– I was a jerk in college
– Mispronunciation is a sign of intelligence (except with names, in which case it’s just a sign of laziness; sorry again)
– “Reticent” is not a chic way to say “hesitant”
– Growing up on Disney movies
– The real reason Grimms’ Fairy Tales isn’t suitable for children
– What ASMR and Louis Malle movies have in common
– “ASMR Chess”: weirdly soothing, and also kind of educational
– A bad definition of pornography
– Lars Von Trier’s movie Antichrist
– Aristotle’s three categories of human activity
– Is porn too useful to be art?
– The five wits (The one I couldn’t think of is estimation)
– Mark Strand’s smile
– Surrealists vs. fantasists
– Dreams and laughter, according to Freud
– The existence of podcasting is proof of widespread human misery
– Terror vs. horror
– The Queen’s Gambit is actually Warrior
– Knockouts vs. submissions
– Sisyphus vs. Oedipus
– A subject on which The Simpsons and Maurice Blanchot can agree
– Marcus Aurelius and the privilege of not having to blind yourself because you’ve killed your dad and married your mom
– Bill Coyle’s poem “Kolmârden Zoo”
Please rate, review, and subscribe!
Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected]. Or just go to matthewbuckleysmith.com and direct your hate mail straight to my personal inbox.
Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
1 hr 15 min
May 05, 2021 Ep 3: Poetry is the worst
NB: I hesitated to release this one because I worried that the tone (and sound quality) at times comes off as a little harsh, but I think it’s a pretty fun episode, and I figure if you’ve listened this long, then you already have some idea of how prickly I am. So, fuck it. Enjoy!
Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:
– Baudelaire's mom
– Midlife malaise
– Ben Lerner's book The Hatred of Poetry and my in retrospect maybe overly mean review of same
– Object permanence
– Adam Kirsch's essay "On 'Getting' Poetry"
– Ryan Wilson's essay "How to Think like a Poet"
– Rupi Kaur
– Acquired vs. unacquired tastes
– The hermeneutic circle
– Sex vs. masturbation
– Modernism and its discontents
– T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (Yes, I realize that in this episode I deride the Poetry Foundation as basically useless and am now linking to an essay they helpfully posted on their website. I may have overstated my case.)
– Jorge Luis Borges' essay "Kafka and His Precursors"
– Vers libre vs. free verse vs. doggerel
– John Ashbery
– Fenton Johnson's poem "Tired"
– David Yezzi's essay, "These Are the Poems, Folks"
– Stephen Hawking's Penthouse subscription
Please rate, review, and subscribe!
Send questions, comments, and suggestions to [email protected]. Or just go to matthewbuckleysmith.com and direct your hate mail straight to my personal inbox.
Music by ETRNL
Art by Daniel Alexander Smith
49 min