Close Talking

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 Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking 
Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking
 Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry 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 closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.

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 w

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 t

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-sch

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 examp

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

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

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 Check out episodes of Close Talking on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking 
Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking
 Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry Find us on YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCSpjZcN1hIsG4aDrT3ouw 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 closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.

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

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

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,

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 s

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

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

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. Elegy By: Aracelis Girmay What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed? Perhaps one day you touch the young branch of something beautiful. & it grows & grows despite your birthdays & the death certificate, & it one day shades the heads of something beautiful or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out of your house, then, believing in this. Nothing else matters. All above us is the touching of strangers & parrots, some of them human, some of them not human. Listen to me. I am telling you a 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 
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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-fr

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

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-u

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 
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 Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any