The Poet Salon

Hello there! After last week's episode with Jericho Brown in which we hashed it out over rhyme and why we write, Jericho brought us Lucille Clifton's "The Lost Baby Poem" to nerd out over. Hear us out. Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Writer's Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection is The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019). His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University. Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, on June 27, 1936. Her first book of poems, Good Times (Random House, 1969), was rated one of the best books of the year by the New York Times. Clifton remained employed in state and federal government positions until 1971, when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she completed two collections: Good News About the Earth (Random House, 1972) and An Ordinary Woman (Random House, 1974). She was the author of several other collections of poetry, including Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (BOA Editions, 1987), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Two-Headed Woman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee as well as the recipient of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize. Clifton was also the author of Generations: A Memoir (Random House, 1976) and more than sixteen books for children, written expressly for an African-American audience.

What's good fam—did our first a live episode with the inimitable Natalie Scenters-Zapico as part of Lit Crawl: Seattle. It was wonderful. Hear us chop it up about Concha Piquer, ending poems, and the ethics of repetition. Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, U.S.A., and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México. She is the author of Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon 2019), which has been reviewed widely in prominent periodicals including The New Yorker, and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015), which won the PENAmerican/Joyce Osterweil Award, GLCA's New Writers Award, and more. She has won fellowships from the Lannan Foundation (2017), CantoMundo (2015), and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation (2018). Her poems have appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary magazines including Best American Poetry 2015, POETRY, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and more. She teaches poetry workshops in English and Spanish through the Department of English and the Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.

It's our last episode of the season! After chopping it up with Hanif Abdurraqib last week on his work, he brought in Angela Veronica Wong's "Elsa Was Stabbed To Death She Had Her Key" to share and marvel over. HANIF ABDURRAQIB is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in 2016 from Button Poetry, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. Hanif’s book Go Ahead In The Rain published this year by University of Texas Press debuted as a New York Times Best Seller. His next books are A Fortune For Your Disaster from Tin House and They Don't Dance No' Mo' 2020 from Random House. ANGELA VERONICA WONG is a writer, artist, and educator living in New York City. She is a former Fulbright scholar and Humanities New York Public Humanities fellow. She has won the Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship and been a finalist for the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, The Frost Place Chapbook Contest, Slash Pine Chapbook Contest, Fordham University Poets Out Loud Prize and a semi-finalist for Center For Book Arts Chapbook Competition and Akron Poetry Prize. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and the Best of the Net. She was a Hemispheric Institute EMERGENYC fellow. Her performance work has been featured in independent galleries in Buffalo, Toronto, and New York City.

Ayyye—look at us here together again! I'm sure you know by now, love, but last week we talked it up with Erika Meitner on whiteness, witness, and weathering trauma. This week, she brought us the poem "Night Travelers" by Campbell McGrath for us to be mesmerized by. Check it out! ERIKA MEITNER is the author of five books of poems. Her first book, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, won the 2002 Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and was published in 2003 by Anhinga Press. Her second book, Ideal Cities, was selected by Paul Guest as a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series competition, and was published in 2010 by HarperCollins. Her third collection, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, was published by Anhinga Press in 2011. Her fourth collection of poems, Copia, was published by BOA Editions in 2014 as part of their American Poets Continuum Series, and her newest collection, Holy Moly Carry Me, was also published by BOA Editions in September 2018. Holy Moly Carry Me is the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. CAMPBELL MCGRATH has published numerous collections of poetry, including Spring Comes to Chicago (1996), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. McGrath’s many books of poetry include Capitalism (1990); American Noise (1994); Florida Poems (2002); Pax Atomica (2005); Seven Notebooks (2007); and In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (2012). McGrath’s work typically works as a kind of catalog; its long lines attempt to look at the vast complexity of America and penetrate its paradoxes and attractions. McGrath is also the co-translator of Aristophanes’s The Wasps (1999). He has won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares literary journal, and a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1999), The New American Poets (2000), and Great American Prose Poems (2003). McGrath has taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Florida International University.

What's delighting you fam. Last week, we talked with Tito Sauce about discipline, death, and, of course, delight. For this week's convo, Uncle Ross brought in for us "The Dog" by Gerald Stern. Listen and weep. ROSS GAY is the author of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays,The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University. GERALD STERN has been called an “American original,” “a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary,” and, by his friend Stanley Kunitz, “the wilderness in American poetry.” Over dozens of books, and decades of teaching and activism, Stern has emerged as one of America’s most celebrated and irascible poets. “His second poetry collection, Lucky Life (1977), was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and nominated for a National Book Award. His next, The Red Coal (1981), received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of American. Subsequent collections include Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (1990); Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Prize; This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Last Blue (2002); American Sonnets (2002); Everything is Burning (2005); Save the Last Dance (2008); Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992 (2010), a volume collecting six of Stern’s earliest books; Galaxy Love (2017); and Blessed As We Were: Late Selected & New (forthcoming). Stern has also written two collections of essays, including the autobiographical What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes from a Life (2004; 2009).

What's good, dearest homies. After last week's riveting conversation with Geffrey Davis about family and ethics, language and tone, we dove into "Goodnight" by Li-Young Lee—a poem that will properly mess you up. You've been warned. GEFFREY DAVIS is the author of Night Angler (BOA Editions), winner of the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm ​(BOA Editions), winner of the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. ​A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis lives with his family in Fayetteville, AR. He teaches at the University of Arkansas and with The Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran's low-residency MFA program. Davis also serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. LI-YOUNG LEE was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. He is the author of The Undressing (W. W. Norton, 2018); Behind My Eyes (W. W. Norton, 2008); Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (BOA Editions, 1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife and their two sons. REFERENCES: "Painting a Body of Loss and Love in the Proximity of an Aesthetic" by Chris Abani; Dante Micheaux

What's good fam. If you're caught up, you know we sat with Casandra and discussed grief, community, obsessions, and writing across genres. This week, she brought in a lovely poem "Birds of Illegal Trade" by Benjamin Garcia, and, here, you can hear us geek out over it! CASANDRA LÓPEZ is a Chicana and California Indian (Cahuilla/Tongva/Luiseño) writer who’s received support from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf and Jackstraw. She’s been selected for residencies with the School of Advanced Research and Hedgebrook. Her chapbook, Where Bullet Breaks was published by the Sequoyah National Research Center and her poetry collection, Brother Bullet is forthcoming from University of Arizona. She’s a founding editor of As/Us: A Space For Women Of The World and teaches at Northwest Indian College. You can follow her on Twitter @casandramlopez. BENJAMIN GARCIA is a Community Health Specialist who provides HIV/HCV/STD and opioid overdose prevention education to higher risk communities throughout New York’s Finger Lakes region. He had the honor of being the 2017 Latin@ Scholar at the Frost Place and the 2018 CantoMundo Fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in, among others, New England Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Nimrod International, RHINO, Four Way Review, Newfound, The Acentos Review, Barrelhouse, Lambda Literary, Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets 2016, and Gulf Coast.

Welcome back, lovelies! Last week, Rick Barot blew our minds with his thoughts on how poetry connects to everything from Spanish paintings to runway models. This week, Rick reads us the poem "Given to Rust" by Vievee Francis, and we delight in how this poem invites us to think about lineation, survival, authorial intent v creation, and Emily Dickinson. RICK BAROT was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002); Want (2008); and Chord (2015), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. Barot is the poetry editor of New England Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at PLU. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2020. VIEVEE FRANCIS is the author of Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Kresge Foundation, Francis currently serves as an editor for Callaloo and teaches English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. REFERENCES: "Give to Rust" by Vievee Francis (Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day), enjambment, "Crumbling is not an instance act, or 1010" by Emily Dickinson

O dearest listeners, this week’s episode is a banger. The last time you heard us, we chopped it up with our homie, the immaculate Quenton Baker, about erasure, rigor, rap, and more. This week, Quenton brought in an underapprecated Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “Riders to a Blood-Red Wrath”, and, well, we all just marvel at it for a while. QUENTON BAKER is a poet, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. His current focus is anti-blackness and the afterlife of slavery. His work has appeared in Jubilat, Vinyl, Apogee, Poetry Northwest, Pinwheel, and Cura and in the anthologies Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop. He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Southern Maine and is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is a 2017 Jack Straw Fellow and a former Made at Hugo House fellow, as well as the recipient of the 2016 James W. Ray Venture Project Award and the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust. He is the author of This Glittering Republic (Willow Books, 2016). GWENDOLYN BROOKS is one of the most highly regarded, influential, and widely read poets of 20th-century American poetry. She was a much-honored poet, even in her lifetime, with the distinction of being the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. She also was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position—and poet laureate of the State of Illinois. Many of Brooks’s works display a political consciousness, especially those from the 1960s and later, with several of her poems reflecting the civil rights activism of that period. Her body of work gave her, according to critic George E. Kent, “a unique position in American letters. Not only has she combined a strong commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, but she has also managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young Black militant writers of the 1960s.” (read the rest here)

We're here! Last week, we were chatting it up with Nabila Lovelace about the South, the Conversation Literary Festival, and, of course, violence and intimacy. This week, Nabila brought in "On Kindness" by Aracelis Girmay. Hear her read it and be healed. NABILA LOVELACE is a born and raised Queens native, as well as a first generation American. In her debut collection, Sons of Achilles, Nabila attempts to examine the liminal space between violence and intimacy. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Narrative Northeast, Washington Square Review, Day One, ESPNW, & Vinyl. She is co-founder of The Conversation Literary Festival. ARACELIS GIRMAY is the author of three collections of poetry: the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the GLCA New Writers Award, and a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Girmay is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry. She teaches in Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry.

Oh there you are, lovely. Last week, we chopped it up with worldwide sensation Danez Smith on reading for the National Book Awards, joy, and the violence necessary to achieve utopia. For this week's episode, they brought in Franny Choi's "Introduction to Quantum Theory" for us to discuss, and spoiler alert: it's a banger. DANEZ SMITH is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez's work has been featured widely including on Buzzfeed, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. Danez’s third collection, Homie, will be published by Graywolf in Spring 2020. FRANNY CHOI is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, is forthcoming from Alice James Books

Welcome back, dearest. In last week’s episode, we spoke to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha about activism, home, language, and so much more. In this episode, Lena brought to The Poet Salon Mahmoud Darwish’s “To Our Land”. She was even kind enough to read it to us in the original Arabic. LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA is an American poet, writer, and translator of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage. She is the winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize for Arab in Newsland, and the author of Water & Salt, a book of poems from Red Hen Press published in April 2017, which won the Washington State Book Award. You can follow her on Twitter @LKTuffaha. Palestinian MAHMOUD DARWISH was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village that was occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Because they had missed the official Israeli census, Darwish and his family were considered “internal refugees” or “present-absent aliens.” Darwish lived for many years in exile in Beirut and Paris. He is the author of over 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France (excerpted from the Poetry Foundation). FADY JOUDAH has published four collections of poems, The Earth in the Attic, Alight, Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; and, most recently, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine. REFERENCES "To Our Land" by Mahmoud Darwish, English translation by Fady Joudah; Palestinian Deceleration of Independence; "A Conversation With Fady Joudah" (Kenyon Review) "Remembering Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish 10 years after his death" (The National, August 2018)

The Poet Salon is a podcast where poets talk over drinks prepared especially for them. Your hosts are Gabrielle Bates, Luther Hughes, and Dujie Tahat. In our first season, we'll interview some of the very best in the world. Each of our guests will span two episodes over two weeks. In the first episode with them, we have a wide-ranging conversation about their work. In the second, we have shorter discussion about a poem our guest loves. Our first episode drops January 9, 2019. Keep up with us on our website (thepoetsalon.com) and on Twitter (@poetsalonpod).