Episodes
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Connor pops in to announce incredibly belatedly what has already been apparent for months: Close Talking is on a hiatus! We've had some big life and career changes that have unexpectedly cut into our capacity for the podcast, but it's not a permanent hiatus! Okay, a poem:
Tune
By: Kay Ryan
Imagine a sea
of ultramarine
suspending a
million jellyfish
as soft as moons.
Imagine the
interlocking uninsistent
tunes of drifting things.
This is the deep machine
that powers the lamps
of dreams and accounts
for their bluish tint.
How can something
so grand and serene
vanish again and again
without a hint? -
A slight departure from our regular format. On today's show, Connor and Jack remember the recently departed poet Charles Simic. They read some of his poems, reflect on them, discuss his life and legacy, and even give a shoutout to the Oak Park Public Library.
Poems Connor and Jack read in this episode include: "Summer Morning" "Hotel Insomnia" "Watermelons" and "Back at the Chicken Shack."
At the end of the episode, hear Simic read his poem "December 21."
Check out episodes of Close Talking on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@cardboardboxproductionsinc
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Find us on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@cardboardboxproductionsinc
You can always send us an email with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Missing episodes?
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Connor and Jack bid farewell to the year they've taken to calling "Twenty Twenty Poo" and contemplate the complexities of language in a wide-ranging conversation about a spectacular untitled poem by Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, from his 2009 collection Flood Song. They discuss movement, the natural world, an extremely informative dissertation and more.
Learn more about Bitsui, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sherwin-bitsui
[Flicking off the light switch.]
By: Sherwin Bitsui
Flicking off the light switch.
Lichen buds the curved creases of a mind
pondering the mesquite tree’s dull ache
as it gathers its leaves around clouds of spotted doves—
calling them in rows of twelve back from their winter sleep.
Doves’ eyes black as nightfall
shiver on the foam coast of an arctic dream
where whale ribs
clasp and fasten you to a language of shifting ice.
Seeing into those eyes
you uncoil their telephone wires,
gather their inaudible lions with plastic forks,
tongue their salty ribbons,
and untie their weedy stems from your prickly fingers.
You stop to wonder what like sounds like
when held under glacier water,
how Ná ho kos feels
under the weight of all that loss.
Check out episodes of Close Talking on YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw
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You can always send us an email with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack discuss the sonically and thematically dense poem "Topsoil, in Repentance" by Sherry Shenoda. Shenoda's book MUMMY EATERS was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2022. The conversation moves from an exploration of internal rhymes and alliteration, to the climate crisis, to the religious implications of the word "repentance," to soil strata, and to the relative weight of humanity.
You can find out more about Sherry Shenoda, here: https://www.sherryshenoda.com/
Read the poem, here: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2022/march/topsoil-repentance-sherry-shenoda
Topsoil, in Repentance
By: Sherry Shenoda
On my mind daily with the insistence of a metronome
is that thin granular layer, rich humus, spare humility,
black earth daily lifted and blown into the Gulf of Mexico.
Thinnest of salvations with a margin of error
wide as the pink, gelatinous body of the earthworm
Which my spade barely misses, and every time
my tines enter the ground, my wrist twists the damp loam,
I breathe easier to see them wriggling, unburied
fleeing the light, burrowing back down, aerating
this earth we have packed down with our culpability
this immense density of earth, only the topmost of which
can support the unimaginable numbers of us, our great warm swarm
Squinting up in immense sunlight I hear the silent swish and tick
the back-and-forth rhythm, the last few seconds before midnight
the enormity of the loan, which has been called in full
The hazy buzzing of the furry bees, busy in the branches
above my exposed neck, on any given day a stay
for a little while longer, of execution
Check out episodes of Close Talking on YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw
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You can always send us an email with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
After a busy couple weeks at Close Talking headquarters, a slightly different show. This episode is from our sister-podcast, Poetry Spoken Here. The episode first aired in the summer of 2020 and was simply called "Black Lives Matter." The poems and voices featured are all from the Poetry Spoken Here archives and address race, policing, and more. Readers include Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, the youngest ever Baltimore Youth Poet Laureate, Maren (Lovey) Wright Kerr, Chicago-area slam legend Maria "Mama" McCray, Sillerman First Book Prize winner Ladan Osman, and SlamFind creator and Bowery Arts and Science Executive Director Mason Granger.
You can listen to full readings, and interviews with the poets featured in this episode, here:
Jericho Brown, Episode #100: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-100-jericho-brown-reading-at-the-unamuno-author-festival
Maren (Lovey) Wright Kerr, Episode #085: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-085-maren-lovey-wright-kerr-and-lynne-sharon-schwartz-reviewed
Maria "Mama" McCray, Episode #058: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-058-tribute-to-maria-mama-mccray
Ladan Osman, Episode #023: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-023-ladan-osman-and-the-book-thing
Mason Granger, Episode #034: https://soundcloud.com/poetry-spoken-here/episode-034-mason-granger-and-billy-collins
Check out episodes of Close Talking on YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw
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Find us on YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw
You can always send us an email with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
In this special episode, Connor and Jack discuss the 2022 National Book Awards — the long list, the finalists, and the winner "Punks: New and Selected Poems" by John Keene. They read and explore a marvelous poem from the collection, "Folks Are Right, My Nose Was Wide Open," which also appeared in BOMB Magazine.
Listen to the National Book Awards Award Ceremony, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hNtsKasx5U&ab_channel=NationalBookFoundation
Get Punks here: https://the-song-cave.com/products/punks-by-john-keene
Folks Are Right, My Nose Was Wide Open
By: John Keene
Folks are right: my nose is wide open. I left one man and fell for this one, he’s not the one, so what am I to do? I don’t. Instead, I stand in the doorway of the New Age café on Newbury Street waiting for Kevin, because we’re going to talk about poems. All the poems I haven’t written, because I spend my waking hours talking about them, reading the work of others, trying to remake myself as Essex Hemphill or Neruda or Celan. For example, I can’t write poems about this crazy dude I’m seeing, how he writhes in bed like a loose hose when he comes, how he stands for hours in front of the mirror admiring and caressing his muscles, saying nothing but “Looking good,” the yelps he serves up when I enter him. I don’t write poems about how he silences me with certain looks, his lies about being from “Black money,” how he laughs at the serious things I say. How often when I’m with him I feel more alone than the hardest years of high school. Rather, I write down lines towards poems, abstract pronouncements about unhappiness and being scared and unknown and misunderstood and death, which makes me think I’m addressing the problem. Love is a dream where both of us are trying, at the same speed, without quitting. Then Kevin shows up, and I’m not so sure, because before I can get a word in about my plight, before I can pass today’s halfstarts and failures across the table, he starts telling me about last night’s fight with his girlfriend.
Check out episodes of Close Talking on YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw
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You can always send us an email with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack discuss a classic poem from a classic poet: The Dancing by the recently departed Gerald Stern. They marvel at how the poem is constructed, get deep into a discussion of encroaching fascism, and even have time to rage at the "evil Mellons," bring in Bruce Springsteen and Michael Bay, and pause to reflect on how lyric poetry can address structural inequalities.
You can read the poem, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57177/the-dancing
The Dancing
By: Gerald Stern
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a postwar Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop—in 1945 —
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.
Check out episodes of Close Talking on YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw
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You can always send us an email with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack have a time talking about the poem "A Time" by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. She is a multi-award winning poet whose latest book-length poem "Look at This Blue" is on the short list for the 2022 National Book Award. Come for the poetry analysis, stay for the discussion of red wolves, climate crisis, Tolkein, impermanence, and diectic words.
You can read the poem, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89060/a-time-570d716c13a77
A Time
By: Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
The problem—
it’s not been written yet, the omens:
the headless owl, the bobcat struck,
the red wolf where she could not be.
None of it done and yet it’s over.
Nothing yet
of night when she called me closer
asked me to bring her crow painting
to stay straight across from her feet
so she could waken into it,
remember her friend.
Of Old Chief alongside her shoulder
still watching over her
just as the mountain had done
throughout her Alberta childhood.
The Pendleton shroud bearing our braids,
her figure in flaming pyre.
The cards, the notes, the tasks
the things undone, not done
and she with us faraway
as this has always been and ever
will continue.
We meet we leave
we meld and vaporize from whatever
it was that held us human
in this life.
And all the beautiful things
that lead our thoughts and give us reason
remain despite the leaving and
all I know is what you know
when it is over said and done
it was a time
and there was never enough of it.
Check out episodes of Close Talking on YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw
Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking
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You can always send us an email with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack dig into the list/poem/prose piece/literary mystery Not Writing by Anne Boyer. Along the way they discuss what they are and are not writing themselves, Jack asks about why the poem never becomes monotonous, and Connor offers his thoughts about how writing, time, and capitalism intersect both in the poem and in life.
Read the poem, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58316/not-writing
[I know, I know. This is usually where we put the poem. But this one's too long! It exceeds the 4000 character limit.]
Check out episodes of Close Talking on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw
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You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack discuss Sasha Banks' poem, america, MINE from her collection of the same name. They start by examining some of the poem's formal elements like its lack of traditional punctuation, and quickly jump to big themes like how the idea of vengeance is transformed in the poem and the contested symbol of the American flag is used.
Read the full poem below, or here: http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist/2016/8/27/america-mine.html
america, MINE
By: Sasha Banks
the spit upon this/country's flag is mine and/I do/not weep at it/consider the
twisted shape of grief about/the mouth upon learning the beast/under the bed
has always been your country/careful, citizen/this nation will name
you/daughter/while its tongue/sucks the muscle from every dark body/you
have loved to the edge of this/vanished second/I let the rage be/like
water/this time/drinking and drinking until/my darkness marries/my eyes to
blindness/and I am/led by the ghosts still/awake/in the soil/still/thirsty
from/below/the fear/is under my heal/now/there are multitudes/in my third
rib and/we are not/asking anymore/do you see us now/this is the last
kindness/we will have your sweat/and dress you in your own/curses/oh
country/what I mean to say/is/all the living after/this/will be the vengeance.
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You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Posted at long last after overcoming major technical difficulties!! Connor and Jack dive into the poem "I Hear a Dog Who is Always in My Death" by Samuel Ace. They discuss the poem's evocative imagery, ruminate on it's call to action against encroaching fascism, and find resonances with English and Egyptian mythology. They also make some time to dunk on transphobes.
I Hear a Dog Who is Always in My Death
By: Samuel Ace
How is it you bring me back to the cliffs the bright heads of eagles the vessels of grief in the soil? I dig for you with a gentle bit of lighter fluid and three miniature rakes burning only a single speck of dirt to touch a twig as tiny as a neuron or even smaller one magic synapse inside the terminus limbs of your breath
The fighter jets fly over the house every hour no sound but inside our hands I hear a far chime and I am cold a north wind and the grit of night first the murmur then the corpse first the paddling then the banquet first the muzzle then the hanging the plea first the break then the tap the tap I hear your skin the reach of your arms the slick along your thighs more floorboard than step first the flannel then the gag first the bells then the exhale
I hear a dog who is always in my death the breath of a mother who holds a gun a pillow in the shape of a heart first the planes then the criminal ponds first the ghost boats then the trains first the gates then the bargain a child formed from my fingertip and the eye of my grandmother’s mother a child born at 90 the rise and rush of air a child who walks from the gas
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You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack discuss the poem "First Snow" by Arthur Sze. They discuss life, death, being, nothingness, and all the hidden meaning waiting to leap out of the every day. They also talk about how some poems can urge us towards presence and mindfulness and the necessity of taking the occasional pause in life.
First Snow
By: Arthur Sze
A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:
imbibing the silence,
you stare at spruce needles:
there's no sound of a leaf blower,
no sign of a black bear;
a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack
against an aspen trunk;
a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.
You only spot the rabbit's ears and tail:
when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,
but when it stops, it blends in again;
the world of being is like this gravel:
you think you own a car, a house,
this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.
Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
and stood at Gibraltar,
but you possess nothing.
Snow melts into a pool of clear water;
and, in this stillness,
starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.
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You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
A dive into the Close Talking archives - one of the first episodes we ever recorded in which we discuss the poem "The Lynching Postcard, Duluth, Minnesota" by Ray Gonzalez. Poetry can seem a little insignificant in the face of an onslaught of historically awful news, like the one we've all been experience the last few weeks. But poems like this one have a special kind of power - cutting to deep truths and insisting on action in the face of the horrors of history. And reminding us that history walks along side us every day.
The Lynching Postcard, Duluth, Minnesota
By: Ray Gonzalez
There is a postcard in an antique shop in Duluth
with a photograph of the infamous lynching of
a black man carried out in the town in the 1930s.
The owner was turned down by eBay when
he wanted to sell it there. Tourists walk into
his shop and stare at the lone card in the glass case.
The owner says it is better to sell it
than donate it to a museum where
it would be locked away in a drawer.
Some people want it removed.
Others snicker and stare, shake their heads
and accept the fact this is "only Minnesota."
Each morning, the shop owner glances
at the case to make sure the postcard is there.
Thousands have bowed over the glass.
At night, when the shop is closed,
the postcard lies in the case, the body hanging
in the cold moonlight from Lake Superior,
the shadow from the swinging body
forming a shape that rises through
the glass to darken the shop.
Over a dozen people have come across it.
They don't know the act of bending over the glass
to study the dead body on the pole is forming
an invisible arc of light over time,
a shadow where those who bow to look
imitate the shape of a hanging tree.
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You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack are joined by special guest Tara Betts to discuss the poem "Small Illuminations" from her forthcoming collection REFUSE TO DISAPPEAR. They discuss the legacy of Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, the realities of incarceration, and how the collection REFUSE TO DISAPPEAR grew over time.
Get a copy of REFUSE TO DISAPPEAR, here: https://wordworksbooks.org/product/refuse-to-disappear/#:~:text=In%20Refuse%20to%20Disappear%20Tara,devoted%20attention%20to%20Black%20Life.
Small Illuminations
By: Tara Betts
I.
Albert is a gentle tower.
His arms arched over tabletop
like bridge beams or girders.
Even if he does not understand
everything he reads, he smiles
like a good kid, like the kid he
probably was 30-some-years
ago when he was in the wrong
car with the wrong people
at the wrong time that he will
never get back.
II.
The attention to detail
borders on flawless.
Unscuffed white sneakers,
perfected lined fades
tucked under precisely
folded skullies immaculate
with what you got as a
clean, hard-fought pride.
III.
One week, I bring
crisp folders,
a bundle of sharpened pencils
with full pink erasers, round
and soft as a doll’s blush.
They rub away small errors,
clearing smudges from a page
like an actual correction.
IV.
I look for Albert’s easy grin first
when I walk into the concrete block
classroom. Locked in the education
building, relieved that the broken
window denies the cold like a plea.
One brother in blues with thermal sleeves
peeking out of the dull faded ocean
of cloth arching over his torso.
A cellmate hands me the slightly worn,
safeguarded, staple-bound book of poems—
the signature resolute and matching letters
of a poet’s name who strolled into prison
like a mother without fear of any child.
Margaret Burroughs—more than a decade
since she left the cell of her body. I clutch
her poems knowing how they passed
from her hands like a prayer. We both smile—
small illuminations in a dark hell—when
the cellmate says Albert wanted you to have this.
He got transferred. He knew you’d keep it safe.
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You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack are joined by poet, essayist, and journalist Noor Hindi. They dig into the poem "Self Interrogation" the first poem in Hindi's new collection DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. coming out on 5/31 from Haymarket Books. She discusses the inspiration behind some of the poems in the book, the significance of the color yellow, and the importance of having a variety of experiences and perspectives in newsrooms.
Learn more about Noor Hindi, here: https://noorhindi.com/
Get a copy of DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW., here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1871-dear-god-dear-bones-dear-yellow
Self Interrogation
By: Noor Hindi
At the airport terminal, a woman is crying.
Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me, I --
Need to focus. On something besides.
The ruse of migration. Lights so loud.
The unending sound. Of a newscaster's voice.
Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Mother. Please, forgive
me. I want to call in dead. Last week,
there was a child in a yellow dress reading a poem.
For minutes on end, I could not be indifferent
to anything. Not the grass, dying yellow.
Not the bombs, twisting limbs. Not the gates.
Not the--Yes. There is a woman crying
at terminal six. Yes, I think of the child.
The tiny silver heart she placed in my palm.
How I threw it in the trash, seconds later.
But I promise. I promise. I promise. I --
meant it as an act of survival. Maybe love.
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You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack explore Aracelis Girmay's poem "Elegy" from her 2011 collection Kingdom Animalia. They talk through the opening line's call to community and the ways it resonates with Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese," they get scientific while discussing the nature imagery in the poem, and they delve into the poem's pandemic-era relevance.ElegyBy: Aracelis Girmay What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed?Perhaps one day you touch the young branchof something beautiful. & it grows & growsdespite your birthdays & the death certificate,& it one day shades the heads of something beautifulor makes itself useful to the nest. Walk outof your house, then, believing in this.Nothing else matters.All above us is the touchingof strangers & parrots,some of them human,some of them not human.Listen to me. I am telling youa true thing. This is the only kingdom.The kingdom of touching;the touches of the disappearing, things.Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetryYou can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected].
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Connor and Jack conclude their exploration of poetic line breaks with a bit of a catch all episode looking at how line breaks can reveal information, play with time, and enhance surprise. They pull examples from Audre Lorde, Chris Tse, Rae Armantrout, and Emily Dickinson. There's even time for mentions of laminated dough and Indiana Jones.
Episode 1 of Line Break Week - Why break lines?: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-157-why-break-a-line-line-break-week-ep-1
Episode 2 of Line Break Week - Drama: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-158-who-will-bring-the-drama-the-line-break-line-break-week-ep-2
Episode 3 of Line Break Week - Miming: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-159-dramas-silent-cousin-miming-with-line-breaks-line-break-week-ep-3
Episode 4 of Line Break Week - Emphasis: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-160-using-poetic-line-breaks-for-emphasis-line-break-week-ep-4
Episode 5 of Line Break Week - Rhythm: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-161-from-meters-to-measures-rhythm-in-line-breaks-line-break-week-ep-5
Episode 6 of Line Break Week - Ambiguity: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-162-ambiguity-in-line-breaks-line-break-week-ep-6
Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking
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You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
As line break week hurdles towards its conclusion, Connor and Jack pause to consider ambiguity in line breaks. When the meaning of a word or phrase is altered by the positioning of a line break. They discuss the classic WB Yeats poem "Leda and the Swan" and Franz Wright's "Empty Cathedral." Along the way they talk about twists and turns in other literary work like Spiderman: Homecoming, Midnight Mass, and The Birds.
Episode 1 of Line Break Week - Why break lines?: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-157-why-break-a-line-line-break-week-ep-1
Episode 2 of Line Break Week - Drama: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-158-who-will-bring-the-drama-the-line-break-line-break-week-ep-2
Episode 3 of Line Break Week - Miming: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-159-dramas-silent-cousin-miming-with-line-breaks-line-break-week-ep-3
Episode 4 of Line Break Week - Emphasis: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-160-using-poetic-line-breaks-for-emphasis-line-break-week-ep-4
Episode 5 of Line Break Week - Rhythm: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-161-from-meters-to-measures-rhythm-in-line-breaks-line-break-week-ep-5
Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking
Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking
Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry
You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack delve ever deeper into the world of poetic line breaks. This time they're looking at how line breaks build rhythm in poems. They discuss rhythm within lines running through various literary terms and talking through some of the most popular meters. Then they move on to how line breaks facilitate rhythm through rhyme and anaphora. using examples from Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Forrest Gander. Stay tuned for the galactic premier of a new, impromptu song all about line breaks.
Episode 1 of Line Break Week - Why break lines?: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-157-why-break-a-line-line-break-week-ep-1
Episode 2 of Line Break Week - Drama: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-158-who-will-bring-the-drama-the-line-break-line-break-week-ep-2
Episode 3 of Line Break Week - Miming: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-159-dramas-silent-cousin-miming-with-line-breaks-line-break-week-ep-3
Episode 4 of Line Break Week - Emphasis: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-160-using-poetic-line-breaks-for-emphasis-line-break-week-ep-4
Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking
Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking
Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry
You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. -
Connor and Jack continue their exploration of all the ways lines can be broken and all the reasons a poet might have for breaking a line. Today they discuss using line breaks for emphasis focusing on the poem "The Pope's Penis" by Sharon Olds. They also discuss the sacred and profane resonances the poem has with Bob Dylan's masterpiece, "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)."
Episode 1 of Line Break Week - Why break lines?: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-157-why-break-a-line-line-break-week-ep-1
Episode 2 of Line Break Week - Drama: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-158-who-will-bring-the-drama-the-line-break-line-break-week-ep-2
Episode 3 of Line Break Week - Miming: https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-159-dramas-silent-cousin-miming-with-line-breaks-line-break-week-ep-3
Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking
Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking
Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry
You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. - Show more
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