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Why This Poem Matters: Listen to Tresha Faye Haefner discuss Rita Mookerjee's poem, "The Silor Moon Transformation Sequence." Hear her explain why it matters to her personally, and what it teaches her about the craft of writing poems.
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Inspiration, mental health struggles and what to make with a giant bag of tapioca starch, this conversation has it all. Rita tells me about her new book, False Offering, and a bit about her upcoming book, Banana Heart. She discusses the way her partner, Dorothy K. Chan helped her get back into writing poetry after taking a haitus and how important it is for her to see people with her background represented in the art. False Offering navigates much of what it means to be the daughter of Indian immigrants growing up in Pennsylvania, exploring a hunger for culture, and interogating religion. We also discuss the possibilities of finding and creating beauty and strangeness in poetry. As Rita says, poets can write about their trauma if they want to, but they don’t owe it to anyone if they don’t want to write about it. While she is interested in “burning it all down” she is also interested in growing something new with her writing. We also had a lot to say to one another about how to find that newness through food. So, poets and epicureans both should have a lot of fun listening to this interview and trying out some of the writing practices and recipes Rita recommends here.
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Eksik bölüm mü var?
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“If we can’t face it, we can’t change it.” In our interview, Sarah Browning discusses her latest book, Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). It tackles subjects such as racism and gun violence, but also memories of being a nerdy girl in high school and the year she was lucky enough to live in Italy. What comes through is Sarah’s attention to both the personal and the political realms. Early in her career, one of Sarah’s mentors told her not to write political poems because they were propaganda. Over the years Sarah has written to change this dynamic, witnessing how the cannon has changed, co-founding Split This Rock poetry festival and writing poems of witness and self-exploration. Whereas some poems tend to point the finger at others, Sarah writes to explore and understand her own complicity. We end by discussing a funny poem called “Hot Priests,” because, when Sarah does a reading, she wants to include a balance of poems that focus on sex, love, politics, and something uplifting.
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Please enjoy our interview with Kelli and Susan on their new book! Here are the key take aways I got from our discussion.
You don’t necessarily need to go in chronological order. Start with the juciest parts or the most vulnerable poems.Get an outside perspective. It’s the best way to be objective.If you can you identify more than one theme, try organizing and titling your book after one sub-topic so that it becomes a main topic. Can you use the same poems to tell alternative stories?Take writing advice from a ghost, not a muse. Make your book talk to another book by an author who has passed away, even if they have nothing to do with you.When you get a rejection letter, it doesn’t mean your book isn’t publishable. Kelli rejects up to 75 publishable books each year. Small presses can only publish so much.The book you send to the publisher doesn't need to be the finished project. You will edit it even after it is accepted.Your title needs to make people want to read it. Use images that pull people in. Find a title that opens possibilities rather than shutting them down.Don’t assume you know what the judges want or don’t want.There are no direct rules. Experiment. The more you say something, the less power it has. Avoid repetition. -
Jose calls his book, Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) “two books in one.” The first section is deeply autobiographical, but the second half is truly surreal. Jose and I talked about honoring his writing and life.
In the first section the speaker subverts stereotypes around growing up in economic hardship. Jose notes that though his family was poor they were, “Fucking happy, because his parents showed us so much love.” He felt that if he had only collected his surreal poems, people would ask, “Where are your Chicano poems? Where are your poems about social justice?”
Then his book shifts to an impersonal, third person narrator. Many of the poems begin with “A Man Wearing a Rage Against the Machine Shirt…”, creating worlds symbolic of what the poet is going through, but in some instances Jose says, they are him playing with his imagination and world-building. Though the language in all of the sections feels approachable, the surrealism draws out images that are otherworldly, archetypal and surprising. They have in common their use of imagery from Mexican Culture and modern-day pop culture. The “Man wearing the Rage Against the Machine T-Shirt” might encounter a jaguar, an eagle, a pyramid a magician, or he might turn into the same. -
Audre Lorde
Pleasure Activism adrienne maree brown
Octavia Butler
Chen Chen, “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities”
Khadija Queen’s “I’m so Fine”
Take-Away Quotes
“I thought about (the book) like a jewel setting. The Gettysburg poems were the center ring. The first and last sections would be the side settings. There are memoriam poems, and then there are love poems and happier poems about children.
“You don’t have to try so hard to just be yourself. . . There’s plenty to write about each day. Just look at the news.”
“We’re all being trained to be fierce in our writing, but are we doing it safely? Are we taking care of ourselves as we write?”
“As much as I want to be a witness to the difficulty of the world, I also want to be a place of comfort. I think about that when (organizing a book or doing a reading).”
“It’s about the battles, but it’s also about the love. We can’t keep going without the love. . . From what I remember about learning of the French Revolution, it started with mothers who couldn’t get bread for their children. I realized that revolutions are fought for love, not for ideals, but for love.” -
In this interview Nadia discusses her second book of poems, I Say the Sky from published by University Press of Kentucky. You can take Nadia’s 7-Day New Year Writing and Meditation Program, starting January 17th, for free when you buy a copy of her book.
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How do you process the passing of someone you love? In this interview, Lindsey Royce discusses her latest collection, The Book of John. Already an established poet, when her late husband, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Royce wrote consistently about what she experienced during his last year of life. Her book documents the tender beauty, despair, anger and resilience of that last year and her journey into the next chapter. As the title suggests, The Book of John takes on a magnitude of biblical proportions, though it is not God who cares for John as he passes, but Lindsey. In this interview she discusses her influences, story, and what motivated the title poem of the book.
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Tresha talks with Angela Penaredondo about her third collection, nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press, 2022). Angela discusses how personal and world history inspired her book. She relies on reading and research to generate writing, but sometimes allows another voice, less conscious and more magical. She utilizes different parts of her voice, voices of others, and multiple themes to create a collection that is intricately layered and rewards a second reading.
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We're born in a specific place with a specific history. How do these arbitrary facts affect us as artists? In this podcast I talk with Jane Muschenetz about her collection, All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents (Kelsay Books, 2023). Jane was born to a Jewish family in Lviv, a city once under Soviet control, now located in Western Ukraine. As a resident of the US, Jane wrote poetry about a variety of topics. However, when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Jane wrote about her roots and her experience as a Russian-Jewish immigrant. She writes, "Naming God is an ambition I do not share / I am only trying to unpack one girlhood’s worth of beginning". Enjoy this interview with our special guest.
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Can a writer finish a book in time to meet a deadline? In our interview with DeShawn McKinney we discuss the genesis of his first chapbook, father, forgive me from Black Sunflower Press, 2003. Deshawn explains that he wrote a large portion of the book in 12 hours in order to meet the deadline for Black Sunflower. How does this help the process and how can other writers learn to work with these kinds of deadlines to catch and capture the heat of their emotions? Listen to this interview to hear our thoughts on this and other topics.
References: James Baldwin, Ajanae Dawkins, Liz Barry, Sherman Alexie, Danez Smith, June Jordan -
How does a person deal with grief in poetry? In this interview Joan Kwon Glass discusses her first full-length collection, Night Swim, winner of the Diode Poetry Prize (2021), which explores the death by suicide of both her nephew and sister. Glass believed nobody would want to read her book, but she discovered many with similar issues who craved an open forum to discuss them. These are the "Tribe of invisible people." Kwon discusses the poets she read to give her courage to write her own book, and what she learned about truth-telling along the way.
References
Black out poems
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
TED KOOSER
T.S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
Objective Correlative
Diannelly Antigua
Eugenia Lee
Sparrows and Blood Sparrows
Ugly Music
Don't speak ill of the dead
Spartans
How Writing Heals, Hayley Bauman, Psy.D.
Chen Chen
Don't Call us Dead
Danez Smith
James Diaz, editor of Anti Heroine Chic
Ellen Bass, The Human Line
M.T. Vallarda, Harbor Review
Kay Iver
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy
Lois P. Jones
Rumi, the Guest House
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Do you struggle to make time for your creative self? In this episode, creativity experts and writers Tresha Faye Haefner and Jon Pearson discuss their different approaches to making time and finding motivation for their writing. As Jon notes, the difficulty is not writing but "starting" to write. Get some great tips to use in your creative process, from starting to celebrating, to just making the time! Listen now.
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-"We thought we knew a lot about our history. We were wrong." - Heather Bourbeau
How do you write poetry about historical people and events? In this interview, Heather Bourbeau discusses the way she tackles the personal and historical in her new book, Monarch. Broken into four parts, the collection illuminate aspects of history that schools often leave out of their curriculum, like the Miss Atomic Blast beauty pageant held in Nevada to celebrate the creation of the bomb, or the list of items left after Mt. St. Helens exploded. Heather gives tips how to connect with historical events, how to write about sometimes difficult subject matter, and how to do good self-care along the way. -
How do we know what other people know?
In this interview Douglas Manuel and Tresha Faye Haefner talk with Jessica Cuello about her third collection, Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for the Barrow Street Book Prize. Her book explores issues of childhood trauma that children are taught to lie about or to hide from adults. Jessica discusses her own ambiguous, uncertain relationship with the lyric "I" when writing, and asks the question, "How do we know what others know?" As James Baldwin says, all art is a form of confession.
Listen for references to James Baldwin, Dorianne Laux, and Mary Oliver. -
In this interview, host Douglas Manuel gets his chance to interview Lois P. Jones, who interviewed him on Poet's Café. Lois discusses how winter stirs her imagination for poetry (as Wallace Stevens put it, "One must have a mind of winter") because of its mystery. Doug, Tresha and Lois discuss how poems confront readers, challenging them to use their own imaginations, and "complete" the poems as they read. She also references Lorca, Rilke, Neruda, Galway Kinnel and Joseph Fasano. Enjoy.
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Get inside the mind of poet-activist, writer, and publisher Edward Vidaurre as Tresha and Douglas ask about his book Cry, Howl from PricklyPear Press and his work running FlowerSong Press. He talks about riding the bus to school and seeing others reading; how that inspired him to seek out authors like Miguel Hernandez, Wanda Coleman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Richard Wright, Claude Brown and others. Now he uses his writing to speak up about issues as a contrary political force in Texas and to use his position as an editor to elevate writers who might not get heard.
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In this interview Kelly Cressio-Moeller discusses how music, art and cinema play into her writing. As a student of art history and a drummer, Kelly describes how she created flow in and between poems to make her first collection, Shade of Blue Trees! When Pulitzer Prize winner Dianne Seuss gave her advice to "build a section" of her book, she had to make hard choices to cut out her darlings. Quoting Yusef Kommunyakkaa, she reminds us, "The ear is the greatest editor," and as a poetry editor who reads hundreds of manuscripts, the hard work that makes things flow can make all the difference. Kelly also relates the story of her "easy poem" dictated to her from the largest moon she ever witnessed.
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Does a poem start with an image or with sound? In this interview Douglas Manuel and Tresha Faye Haefner ask Ellen Bass about her writing process. She tells us about ways she uses an image to start a poem and her use of tools like sound to distract her "overly logical mind" while her more intuitive mind goes to work. When things don't go right the first time, though, she keeps trying, reorganizing syntax, talking with friends, etc. She tells the story of writing the title poem of her latest book, Indigo by writing many "failed" poems first, and only being "successful" after seeing the right image one day while out walking. There are good reasons why poets need to get out, she says, even if they are hermit introverts.
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How can you cope with anxiety? Try writing a book about it. In this interview Kelli Russell Agdon discusses her latest book. Originally she tells us that the book began with two separate manuscripts melding into one. One book was a collection of poems about the broken world, and another about the broken self. Together they become her manuscript, Dialogues with a Rising Tide, out from Copper Canyon Press. Hear Kelli discuss the way she channels anxiety into writing, how she uses constraint to help her choose titles for her poems, and why she has more fun and ease when writing with friends.
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