This week, Holly Amos speaks with Joanna Klink, who joins us from Austin, Texas. Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields, and she shares some new poems that appear in the February 2023 issue of Poetry. If described directly, the poems feature the mundane, yet they carry a deep sense of unease. Amos states, “The unease is gorgeous, and the gorgeous is uneasy.” Speaking toward that uneasiness, Amos and Klink get into psychic longing, time and aging, attention and attunement, death, and their very different childhood dinner tables. We also hear Muriel Rukeyser, an important influence for Klink’s poem “Called,” speaking in 1959 about the role of the poet in society.

This week, Adrian Matejka sits down with poet and guest editor of the magazine, Charif Shanahan, to talk about oneness, the shifting of identity, and centering love. Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Shanahan’s poems meditate on mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. Shanahan shares how a class he almost dropped with the poet Linda Gregg changed poetry for him forever, and he reads two poems from his new book, Trace Evidence, which is out next month from Tin House Books.

For the month of January, we’re focusing on what keeps us writing. How do we refresh our writing habits and routines? How do poets sustain their writing practices? Today, Holly Amos enlists the help of poets and educators Stefania Gomez and Maggie Queeney. Stefania and Maggie both work in the Poetry Foundation library, and they share some of their inspirations, tips, challenges, and resources. Holly offers two writing prompts, and we hear advice on how to keep making via clips from CAConrad, Jordan Peele, Vi Khi Nao, Ocean Vuong, and Anne Waldman. 

Links and writing prompts mentioned in the episode:

–Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

Boredom Prompt

   1. Do something boring. It could be sitting in front of a window, watching a TV show that is boring, listening to a podcast that's not that engaging, but don't multitask—do just the one thing, and do it for as much time as you have (fifteen minutes if that's all you have, or thirty if you've got longer).

   2. While you're doing whatever boring thing you're doing, have a timer go off every three minutes, and when it goes off, write down three words. 

   3. Now, use the words you wrote down to begin your poem. What do they have in common? What's the thread you're finding? Or string them all together for your first line.

Dream Writing Space Prompt

   1. Envision the place where you're writing in ten years in your dream life. What does that space look like? What's there? Who's there? How tall are the ceilings? What is the light like?

   2. Spend ten minutes writing in detail about the space. Embody that future self in that future space. 

   3. Now write a poem “remembering” your old writing space (so “remembering” your current writing space).

For the month of January, we’re focusing on what keeps us writing. How do poets sustain their writing practices? Are there generative tips and tricks we can learn from them? Today, Holly Amos enlists the help of poet, writer, and dancer Tishani Doshi, whose essay in the December 2022 issue of Poetry is about shape or concrete poetry. Doshi lives in Tamil Nadu, India, and is joining us today from Abu Dhabi, where she is a New York University visiting associate professor. Doshi’s latest book of poetry is A God at the Door (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) and her latest novel is Small Days and Nights (W.W. Norton, 2020). Today, she offers listeners a wonderful writing prompt drawn from one of her favorite concrete poems, which, fascinatingly, is not technically a poem but the dedication that E.E. Cummings included in his book No Thanks.

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Diné poet Tacey M. Atsitty. Atsitty’s debut full-length collection, Rain Scald, was published in 2018, and Arthur Sze described the book as filled with a poetry “where rain, expected to be nourishing, is also a torrent, burning with sensation.” Today, we’ll hear two new poems by Atsitty, “Things to Do with a Monster” and “Lady Birds’ Evening Meetings” from the December issue of Poetry. Atsitty’s new poems come out of her desire to create a bestiary of Diné monsters. The poems explore how and why we create and abandon monsters, what we learn from them, how monsters humble us, and more.

This week, Esther Belin speaks with Diamond Forde, who joins us from Asheville, North Carolina, which she describes as a sort of homecoming. One of five recent recipients of the 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is described as “an intersectional exploration of the trauma and agency held within a body defined by its potential to mother.” Today we’ll hear from a new series of poems by Forde, which appear in the December 2022 issue of Poetry. The poems continue an exploration of maternal lineage, this time centering Forde's grandmother and addressing the complex processes of self-definition, self-reclamation, and biomythography. Belin and Forde also discuss the practice of joy and how poetry is an “assertion of love.”

This week, Ashley M. Jones speaks with Marcus Wicker about a project he began early in the pandemic while looking for sources of calm in books and music. Many of these were space-influenced—OutKast’s album ATLiens, Robert Hayden’s poem “American Journal”—and Wicker began exploring what an extraterrestrial who lands in Atlanta in 2020 would think of America and the way humans treat one another. We’ll hear two poems from this project, “Dear Mothership,” and “How did you learn to speak English?” which appear in Poetry’s December 2022 issue. Like much of Wicker’s poetry, these pieces incorporate popular culture and music references alongside unflinching observations and exciting wordplay.

On this week’s episode, Su Cho speaks with Tariq Luthun, a Palestinian writer and community organizer based in metro Detroit. Luthun is the author of How the Water Holds Me, out from Bull City Press in 2020, and we hear his poem, “I Want to Die,” from the November 2022 issue of Poetry. Cho and Luthun delight us with a brief Pokémon sing-along and discuss hiding bad grades as children in the Midwest, as well as the difficulty of finding joy in an apocalyptic world. Luthun also talks about writing poems as a way to hold and internalize experiences for personal growth.

This week, Su Cho sits down with Taneum Bambrick to talk about two of her favorite things: poetry and intimacy. Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received, recently out from Copper Canyon Press, and Vantage. Their chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the Yemassee Chapbook Prize. Vuong wrote, “This is poetry that encompasses, that let's no one turn away.” That’s exactly how Cho felt reading Bambrick’s poems in the November 2022 issue of Poetry. Cho says, “Bambrick’s poems make me feel incredibly shy and brave at the same time. I say make me because I can’t look away from them. The poems are telling me to sit down and listen.” Join us for a conversation about break ups, vulnerability, rodeos, and so much more.