Join me for a conversation with Emer Pond Feeney and Sheila Liming about Wallace Stegner's 1984 novel, Crossing to Safety. Emer and Sheila describe their experience becoming friends online during the Covid pandemic, even though they lived only a few miles from one another in Vermont, before eventually bonding in person. One early testament to their connection was their shared love for Stegner's novel, which is also a book suffused with love for the state of Vermont. Our conversation about Crossing the Safety provides an opportunity to think about friendship and reading, about living in a place that you love, about what it means to find your people at different stages in your life. Sheila, who literally wrote the book on hanging out, and Emer have both thought deeply about the life-defining pleasures of friendship; I found this conversation to be so much fun.

Andrew Epstein and Casey Epstein-Gross join Brian for a special Dadcore edition of the pod. Andrew is a scholar of contemporary American poetry who literally wrote the book about poetry and friendship, Beautiful Enemies; Casey is a music journalist for Paste Magazine. They are also father and daughter. They chose to use Silver Jews's "Advice to the Graduate" as a way to talk about the history of their shared musical tastes. Both Casey and Andrew have written movingly about this particular song. You can check out Andrew's essay, "David Berman, Ambivalent Aphorist," at Post45 and Casey's "Time Capsule: Silver Jews, Starlite Walker," in Paste.

Katie Kadue and Ross Lerner drop by to discuss Paradise Lost, a poem that has served as an important touchstone in their relationship.  Kadue and Lerner, who have a co-written book about Spenser's Amoretti and marriage entitled Love's True Object forthcoming in the Re/Verse series from Amherst College Press, explore the difference between writing a sonnet and writing a letter, what it means to work in paradise, the affordances of e-mail courtship, and whether Milton's poem might be the first sitcom.

On today's episode of Some Marvelous Experience, Rainer Diana Hamilton and Shiv Kotecha discuss "Duchamp Fresh Widow," Elaine Sturtevant's 1992 (and 2012) reproduction of a work original produced by Marcel Duchamp in 1920, and consider how Sturtevant's work provides an opening to think about their relationship to one another and to conceptual art and writing. Rainer and Shiv were more or less introduced to Sturtevant via two 2014/2015 museum shows: Double Trouble (MoMA) and Drawing Double Reversal (Hamburger Bahnhof). For examples of the writing  that Shiv and Rainer produced during the period in question, see Rainer's God Was Right and Shiv's The Switch.

David B. Hobbs and Josh Schneiderman join Some Marvelous Experience to discuss a trip they took to see two monumental earthworks from the 1970s: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels. You can find Smithson's Spiral Jetty film, which Holt shot, on UbuWeb. Two essays that come up in our discussion are also worth checking out: Sean J. Patrick Carney's "Ground Control," and Nico Israel's "Non-site Unseen."

On March 23, 1960, the poet Frank O'Hara kissed his boyfriend beneath the Calder mobile hanging in the international terminal of what is now JFK. "That's what it always needed," he wrote on the plane, thinking of the Calder and the kiss, "a little history!" This brief teaser jumps off from O'Hara's appreciation of kissing as a form of art appreciation in order to introduce the general theory of relatability that underwrites this show: namely, the idea that the way not to let an aesthetic experience go wasted is to share it with someone else.