Episodes
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In Part 2 of our interview, Marc Vincenz—author of over 40 books of poetry—talks about his book of poetry, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani (White Pine Press, 2023). We dive into the deep waters of a consciousness preparing for death. During a health crisis, Vincenz came into a new language informed by this encounter, finding footing in "the heart of a word" and his own fearless observations. "See the island in your mind/or you will always be lost."
Vincenz takes us into "the theater of fear"..."when the audience leaves and you're left only with yourself." The poet and the reader emerge changed. Like a cyborg prophet, Marc now writes from the seam between worlds—life and death, nature and "the machinery of the world" (Borges)—mitigating oppositions with deep music. "The traffic doesn't slow/the bling navigates/like porpoises' eyes/ in the windows,/those deep dangling metaphors/in a city tangled up in its own industrial age."
You can hear Pt. 1 of our interview which aired 10/6/24 on KSQD. We discuss Marc's book, The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars (Lavender Ink, 2024) here:https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/the-hive8/episodes/S6E31-Marc-Vincenz-talks-with-Roxi-Power-e2pcb8o
Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor,publisher, musician and artist. His latest poetry collections are A Splash of Cave Paint, and The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars. His latest translation is An Audible Blue: Selected Poems (1963 - 2016) by celebrated Swiss poet and novelist, Klaus Merz, which won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature. His forthcoming poetry collections are Spells for the Wicked (Unlikely Books 2025) and No More Animal Poems with White Pine Press in 2026. Marc’s work has been translated into German, Russian, Romanian, French, Icelandic, and Chinese. Marc is the publisher for MadHat Press and New American Writing. He produces and hosts the biweekly reading series onZoom, Lit Balm.
https://madhat-press.com/
https://litbalm.org/
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Jan Beatty’s eighth book, Dragstripping, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, September, 2024. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. Recent books include The Body Wars and a chapbook, Skydog (Lefty Blondie Press, 2022). Other work includes Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed creative writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program.
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Luke and Dion read some Larry Levis and then take a deep dive into Luke's latest book.
Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, the Vassar Miller Award, The Levis Prize and the Bittingham. It was recently named a finalist for the California Book Award, winner announced in May. His second full length Distributary is forthcoming Fall 2025 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.
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Ellen Bass joins the Hive in anticipation of her appearance at UCSC for the Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading on November 7. Full details about the event can be found here.
Poems by Ellen which she reads in this episode: Laundry, Because, Black Coffee, Any Common Desolation, and Bringing Flowers to Salinas Valley State Prison
About Our Guest:
Ellen Bass is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Other poetry collections include Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)—which was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, The Milt Kessler Poetry Award, The Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award—The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), and Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002), which won The Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973).
Her poems have frequently appeared in The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review, as well as in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Sun and many other journals and anthologies. She was awarded Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and The California Arts Council and received the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati, Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize, The Missouri Review’sLarry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart Prizes.
Her non-fiction books include Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth (HarperCollins, 1996), I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1983), and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse(Harper Collins, 1988, 2008), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages.
Ellen founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, CA jails. She currently teaches in the low residency MFA writing program at Pacific University.
Maggie Paul is the author of Scrimshaw (Hummingbird Press 2020), Borrowed World, (Hummingbird Press 2011), and the chapbook, Stones from the Baskets of Others (Black Dirt Press 2000). Her poetry, reviews, and interviews have appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader, Rattle, The Monterey Poetry Review, Porter Gulch Review, Red Wheelbarrow, and Phren-Z, SALT, and others. She is a poet and non-fiction writer in Santa Cruz, California.
Maggie's print interview with Ellen Bass can be found here.
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Rick Barot weaves keen observations of the world with reflections and sustenance of human connections across space and time. Please join host Julie Murphy in a conversation with Rick that begins with a discussion of Naomi Shihab Nye's poem Lights from Other Windows and journeys through poems from Rick's new book Moving the Bones. Rick's exquisitely crafted poems examine the human experience deeply and intimately. In our troubled times, his voice is an invitation to find beauty and hope amidst the chaos.
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Marc Vincenz has been called the David Bowie of poetry, reinventing himself and exploring new poetic chops in each of his 40 books. Roxi Power talks with Vincenz about his newest book of surreal poems inThe King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars (Lavender Ink Press, 2024).
From the imperialism of Prussia to the purity of Iceland, Vincenz juxtaposes the monstrous with the meditative in his quiet lyrics of epic scope. Matthew Cooperman writes that "Vincenz conjures a centaur poetics where anything may be attached to anything else." What connects humans with woodworms? How do eels emerge "from the carcass of a waterlogged horse"? We follow the world-traveling and world-building eye of Vincenz across the globe, then perch quietly among constellations that "grow alongside the window" or under the apple trees among the stars, only to experience in his deep images again and again: "Where your eye is, there you grow."
Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, publisher, musician and artist. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His latest poetry collections are A Splash of Cave Paint, and The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars. His latest translation is An Audible Blue: Selected Poems (1963 - 2016) by celebrated Swiss poet and novelist, Klaus Merz, which won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature. His forthcoming poetry collections are Spells for the Wicked (Unlikely Books 2025) and No More Animal Poems with White Pine Press in 2026. Marc’s work has been translated into German, Russian, Romanian, French, Icelandic, and Chinese. Marc is the publisher for MadHat Press and New American Writing. He produces and hosts the biweekly reading series on Zoom, Lit Balm.
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Ryler Dustin has represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam and his poems appear in outlets like Verse Daily, Major Jackson’s The Slowdown, and The Best of Button Poetry. He is the author of Trailer Park Psalms (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Heavy Lead Birdsong (Write Bloody Publishing, 2010). He lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and a dog he met while hiking.
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Danusha Laméris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program. Her third book, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.
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C.S. Giscombe—known to his friends as Cecil--talks with long-time friend Roxi Power about the second half of his newest poetry book, Negro Mountain) (University of Chicago Press) which was recommended by a New YorkTimes critic as one of the 5 best poetry books of 2023.
In the second part of our interview, Giscombe dives deepinto the book’s central concepts, such as “negro luck” and the “the long story of evil” through totemic figures that reappear in dreams and landscapes, including wolves and jaguars. Drawing on stories and ideas from Ed Roberson (“the idea of image and the idea of capture”), we explore ways to write about “what’s there…but not seen,” including the namesake for the real Negro Mountain in Pennsylvania: an 18th c. African-American man named Nemesis, whomGiscombe calls “the long shadow on the mountain.” The book collages dreams, history, and multiple forms of address—"speeches, elocution, and theatrical masks”—to exploremonstrous cultural projections.
C.S. Giscombe teaches at the University of California’sBerkeley campus, where he is the Robert Hass Chair in English. His prose and poetry books include NegroMountain, Prairie Style, Ohio Railroads (“a long poem in the form of an essay”), Similarly (selected poetry and new work), Border Town, etc. In progress are Railroad Sense and Medicine Book. He is a long-distance cyclist.
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Want to hear what it's like teaching poetry to Special Ops soldiers? Or how to delineate (or not) the space grief occupies? Tune in to hear poetry mining the vein of Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke. George Lober's latest book, Rainbow Eucalyptus, New and Collected Poems, is available from Bookshop Santa Cruz and Amazon.
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Award-winning book and letterpress artists Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill (former Poet Laureate of Ukiah, CA.) created a multi-genre project, Heavy Lifting, that speaks in poetry, letterpress, and film to the multiple crises of recent years: fires, Covid, Black Lives Matter, housing injustice, and more.
Roxi Power talks with these remarkable artists about their "urgent publishing" and how to "lift the fallen" with imagery and words focused on birds. Hundreds of thousands of birds fell from the sky during the fires. The artists carry the burden of memory and accountability in what Whitehill calls "this nervous slice of history." We dive into their trans-genre work, poetry's relationship to letterpress, and their process of countering Covid's isolation through radical collaboration.
On August 24, 2-4pm, Rice and Whitehill will bring their Heavy Lifting listening tour to the Felton, CA. public library for the 4th anniversary of California's CZU Lightning Complex Fire. It's a chance to commemorate our losses, including Rice's home and studio. Rice's response to this loss was to collaborate with Whitehill to create a record of these crises as well as ways to survive them, through community and "protest beauty."
https://movingpartspress.com/publications/heavy-lifting/
https://theresawhitehill.com/
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Jessica Cuello reads from her latest book. Jessica and Dion also read the poem "Running Home I Saw the Planets" from Aracelis Girmay's book Kingdom Animalia.
Jessica Cuello’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, was honored with The Eugene Nassar Prize, The CNY Book Award, and a finalist nod for The Housatonic Book Award. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded The 2022 Nina Riggs Poetry Prize, two CNY Book Awards, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in Central NY.
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Join Julie Murphy and fellow Bee, Geneffa Jahan, as they discuss “A Simple Poem for Virginia Woolf” by Bronwen Wallace, and then explore and delight in Geneffa's forthcoming book Spilling the Chai: Poems about Family and Food, published by Jamii Press.
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At this live, in-studio interview, Julia Chiapella chats with Hive member Dion O'Reilly about her new book, Sadness of the Apex Predator.
Dion O'Reilly is the author of three poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator, a finalist for the Steel Toe Book Prize and the Ex Ophidia Prize; Ghost Dogs, winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Poetry Award and The Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition, forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.
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Geneffa Jahan talks with third-generation Japanese American artist and activist, Shizue Seigel about her seven decades of experiential connections across age, class, continents, and cultures. Born in 1946, shortly after her parents emerged from incarceration, Seigel grew up in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, California farm labor camps and skid-row Stockton.
In this candid interview, Seigel shares how she rebelled early against the model minority ethos. In the 1960s, she dropped out of college to explore diverse cultures from the Haight-Ashbury to Indian ashrams, from the Financial District to public housing. Seigel speaks of the common humanity she discovered that informed her desire to forge connections with everyday people, elevating their stories through visual art and poetry.
In this interview, she reads poems that address the challenges of growing up Asian and female and moves on to poignant poems of family history that focus on her bachans (grandmas) who showed her how to cope with grief. Through poems of oral history, Seigel presents a portrait of resilient people—enduring and gracious as they cope with tremendous loss and grief. In keeping with this spiritual alignment, Seigel ends the hour with a poem reflecting on her Buddhist worldview.
Shizue Seigel has worked within marginalized communities for 30 years to help tell unheard stories--working with Black women living in public housing, Japanese American incarceration camp survivors, and other underrepresented groups. She is the founder of WriteNow! SF Bay, supporting writing and art by people of color. For more information, check out http://www.shizueseigel.com/ and www.WriteNowSF.com
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C.S. Giscombe talks about the first half of his newest poetry book, Negro Mountain (University of Chicago Press) which was recommended by a New York Times critic as one of the 5 best poetry books of 2023.
C. S. Giscombe teaches at the University of California’sBerkeley campus, where he is the Robert Hass Chair in English. His prose and poetry books include Negro Mountain, Prairie Style, Ohio Railroads (“a long poem in the form of an essay”), Similarly (selected poetry and new work), Border Towns, etc. In progress are Railroad Sense and Medicine Book. He is a long-distance cyclist.
In Negro Mountain, Giscombe writes about a ridge straddling the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania and Maryland called Negro Mountain. Named after "Nemesis", a man in the 1750s who took a bullet from a Native American man that was intended for a white man, Negro Mountain is provides fertile grounds for exploring complex relationships between people, wildlife--especially wolves--and location.
The book's speaker and characters from his series of 7 Dreams that open the book are shape shifters, moving fluidly between an educated "country doctor" and monstrous personas--including werewolves and jaguars--embodying hybridity and cultural projections.
For over 50 years, Giscombe has written eloquently about borders, geography, and maps, beginning with Giscome Road. His newest book is a tour de force deserving a two-part interview. C.S. (known to his friends as Cecil) talks with his longtime friend from their Cornell University days, Roxi Power, about the granular details of the first part of his book as well as the grander sweep of his career and poetic preoccupations.
You can hear Cecil read from Negro Mountain during his Hive Live! reading with Nancy Miller Gomez at Bookshop Santa Cruz June 9, 7pm.
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Farnaz Fatemi and Nancy Miller Gomez discuss her debut book of poems, Inconsolable Objects, from YesYes Books. In addition to talking about several poems in the collection, Gomez talks about self-doubt along with her assessment of “poets as the fighter pilots of the literary world.”
Poems by others mentioned: Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song” and Wallace Stevens’ “Snowman”.
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Louise Glück, who passed away last October at age 80, was one of the most important poets of our time. Former US Poet Laureate and winner of every major poetry prize, including the Noble and the Pulitzer, Louise was a passionate and beloved teacher. Bay Area poet Veronica Kornberg joins Julie Murphy in reading and discussing her poems, as well as sharing stories from her deep life.
Books by Louise Glück
Ellen Bryant Voigt on Louise Glück ("Brooding Likeness") on Close Readings.
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Sally Ashton, former Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, drops into the Hive to talk with Farnaz Fatemi about her most recent book of poems, Listening to Mars. She shares poems which explore the sadness and surreal world of lockdown, what space exploration says about humans, and more.
Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, San José State University professor emerita, lecturer, blogger, and workshop presenter who has taught over 100 workshops. She was appointed the second Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, 2011-2013. She has collaborated with both visual artists and musicians. She is Assistant Editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, Black Lawrence Press, 2018. Her work is included in many anthologies.
Listening to Mars is her fifth book of poems.
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We discuss a poem by Rachel McKibbons and several from Blanco's fabulous new book, Homeland of My Body.
Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs FOR ALL OF US, ONE TODAY: AN INAUGURAL POET’S JOURNEY and THE PRINCE OF LOS COCUYOS: A MIAMI CHILDHOOD. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.
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