Close Talking

Connor and Jack examine the poem "Could We Please Give the Police Departments to the Grandmothers?" by Junauda Petrus. They discuss police abolition, the poem’s imaginative power, and how poetry can help achieve political liberation. As these struggles continue, many groups are doing great work. One is the Young People's Action Coalition, which got Minneapolis public schools to cut ties with the police. Support them: https://bit.ly/2Ao2cxI. More about Junauda Petrus here: https://junauda.com/ Could we please give the police departments to the grandmothers? By: Junauda Petrus Give them the salaries and the pensions and the city vehicles, but make them a fleet of vintage corvettes, jaguars and cadillacs, with white leather interior. Diamond in the back, sunroof top and digging the scene with the gangsta lean. Let the cars be badass! You would hear the old school jams like Patti Labelle, Stevie Wonder, Anita Baker and Al Green. You would hear Sweet Honey in the Rock harmonizing on “We who believe in freed

It's a landmark episode - NUMBER 100!!! Connor and Jack dive into Cathy Song's "The Man Moves Earth." They discuss the elegance of the poem's language, the four classical elements and, for the first time in the history of the pod, reference former Poet Laureate Billy Collins! Learn more about Cathy Song, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/cathy-song The Man Moves Earth By: Cathy Song The man moves earth to dispel grief. He digs holes the size of cars. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— rain-swollen ponds and dirt mounds rooted with flame-tipped flowers. He carries trees like children struggling to be set down. Trees that have lived out their lives, he cuts and stacks like loaves of bread which he will feed the fire. The green smoke sweetens his house. The woman sweeps air to banish sadness. She dusts floors, polishes objects made of clay and wood. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— the task of something else to clean. Gleaming appliances beg to be smu

Jack and Connor go way back to the 1600s for the George Herbert poem, "Prayer (I)". They discuss the sonnet's beautiful meditation on prayer, its incredible contemporary feel, the profane and divine, and The Doors' Jim Morrison makes a shocking cameo. Learn more about Herbert here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/george-herbert Prayer (I) By: George Herbert Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, Exalted manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, The milky way, the bird of Paradise, Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood, The land of spices; something understood. Find us on Facebook at: facebook.c

Connor and Jack close out Poetry Month 2020 with a series of shorter episodes about short poems that can be comforting springboards to reflection and contemplation. In this episode, they discuss Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Vocabulary of Dearness." They explore the way the poem captures the power of language and go down the rabbit hole of some of their favorite words. Vocabulary of Dearness By: Naomi Shihab Nye How a single word may shimmer and rise off the page, a wafer of syllabic light, a bulb of glowing meaning, whatever the word, try “tempestuous” or “suffer,” any word you have held or traded so it lives a new life the size of two worlds. Say you carried it up a hill and it helped you move. Without this the days would be thin sticks thrown down in a clutter of leaves, and where is the rake? Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking 
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Conor and Jack spend some wild time talking about Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson. They talk about the 2019 movie Wild Nights with Emily, Shakespeare's tragedies as death farces, and all the ways Emily Dickinson managed to be an intellectually engaged person of her time while remaining primarily at home. Wild Nights - Wild Nights (269) By: Emily Dickinson Wild nights - Wild nights! Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury! Futile - the winds - To a Heart in port - Done with the Compass - Done with the Chart! Rowing in Eden - Ah - the Sea! Might I but moor - tonight - In thee! Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking 
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Connor and Jack close out Poetry Month 2020 with a series of shorter episodes about short poems that can be comforting springboards to reflection and contemplation. In this (not short) episode, they discuss William Butler Yeats's poem "The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water." The pair geeks out on Yeats, exploring the relationships between sound, death, and colonialism, and they listen to recordings of a classic hit, a funky drum master, and Yeats the bard himself. The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water By: William Butler Yeats I heard the old, old men say ‘Everything alters, And one by one we drop away.’ They had hands like claws, and their knees Were twisted like the old thorn trees By the waters. I heard the old, old men say ‘All that’s beautiful drifts away Like the waters.’ Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking 
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Connor and Jack close out Poetry Month 2020 with a series of shorter episodes about short poems that can be comforting springboards to reflection and contemplation. In this episode, they discuss Joy Harjo's prose poem "Invisible Fish," reflecting on the poem's incredible sense of time and place and the new resonances of "going to the store." Invisible Fish By: Joy Harjo Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ descendants, who are going to the store. 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 of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.

Connor and Jack close out Poetry Month 2020 with a series of shorter episodes about short poems that can be comforting springboards to reflection and contemplation. In this episode they discuss Gwendolyn Brooks' meditation on love and draw connections between the poem's references to - and comments on - confinement and the present. A Lovely Love By: Gwendolyn Brooks Let it be alleys. Let it be a hall Whose janitor javelins epithet and thought To cheapen hyacinth darkness that we sought And played we found, rot, make the petals fall. Let it be stairways, and a splintery box Where you have thrown me, scraped me with your kiss, Have honed me, have released me after this Cavern kindness, smiled away our shocks. That is the birthright of our lovely love In swaddling clothes. Not like that Other one. Not lit by any fondling star above. Not found by any wise men, either. Run. People are coming. They must not catch us here Definitionless in this strict atmosphere. Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking

Connor and Jack close out Poetry Month 2020 with a series of shorter episodes about short poems that can be comforting springboards to reflection and contemplation. To begin with, a simple, untitled piece by Ezra Pound. The conversation encompasses quinces, John Mulaney, Galway Kinnell's poem "Blackberry Eating," and much more. Mediterranean March Black cat on the quince branch mousing blossoms 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 of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.

Connor and Jack close out poetry month with a week of daily episodes featuring short poems that can be springboards for reflection and meditation. Watermelons By: Charles Simic Green Buddhas On the fruit stand. We eat the smile And spit out the teeth. 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 of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.

Connor and Jack dive into the poem that opens Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony. Along the way they discuss Plato's Symposium, Walter Ong's writings on orality and literacy, and the historical significance of World War Two on the civil rights movement along with much more. You can learn more about Leslie Marmon Silko, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/leslie-marmon-silko Excerpt from Ceremony By: Leslie Marmon Silko Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears. She thought of her sisters Nau’ts’ity’i and I’tcts’ity’i and together they created the Universe this world and the four worlds below. Thought-Woman, the spider, named things and as she named them they appeared. She is sitting in her room Thinking of a story now I’m telling you the story she is thinking. Ceremony I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just for entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and d

Connor and Jack discuss a poem that may resonate during this intense, isolated time: "Dedications" by Adrienne Rich, an excerpt from her sequence An Atlas of the Difficult World. They talk about Rich's radical politics, ethical loneliness, Mavis Staples, and how poems can be their own virtual medium of connection. You can read more of and about Adrienne Rich here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/adrienne-rich Dedications [excerpt from “An Atlas of the Difficult World”] By: Adrienne Rich I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plain’s enormous spaces around you. I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and

This week, we revisit an oldie but goodie: Connor and Jack's discussion of Emily Dickinson's short, beautiful poem, "To Make a Prairie." To find the poem, go here: www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/make-prairie-1755 For more on Emily Dickinson, go here: www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/emily-dickinson Find us on facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking Find us on twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking 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 Fady Joudah's, "Additional Notes on Tea" exploring the ways the poem moves around the globe, interrogates history, and deploys the figure of God. You can find out more about Fady Joudah, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/fady-joudah Additional Notes On Tea By: Fady Joudah In Cairo a boy’s balcony higher than a man’s deathbed. The boy is sipping tea, The view is angular like a fracture. Surrounding the bed, women in wooden chairs. They signal mourning with a scream. Family men on the street run up the stairs and drink raven tea. On the operating table in Solwezi a doctor watches a woman die. Tea while the anesthetic wears off, While the blade is waiting, tea. The doctor says the woman knows god is sleeping Outside heaven in a tent. God is a refugee dreaming of tea. Once upon a time an ocean married a sea to carry tea around. Land was jealous. So it turned into desert and gave no one wood for ships. And when ships became steel, Land turned into ice. And when everythin

REBROADCAST! In honor of Black History Month and because it's primary season and this incredible poem touches on presidential themes, we are rebroadcasting our episode about "How to Keep It Down / Throw It Off / Defer Until Asleep" by National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed. Content Warning: Suicidality Connor and Jack discuss a poem by this year's National Book Award winner for Poetry: Justin Phillip Reed. The poem, "How to Keep it Down / Throw It off / Defer Until Asleep," is from that award-winning collection, Indecency, published by Coffee House Press. We talk about the effects of the poem's shifting POV, the intersection of mental illness and white supremacy, and get to maybe two or three of the poem's nearly infinite layers on layers. Plus, Al Pacino makes a surprise cameo! Read the poem below. More on Justin Phillip Reed: www.justinphillipreed.com/ Check out his collection, Indecency, where this poem comes from: coffeehousepress.org/collections/po…ucts/indecency Find us on facebook at: facebo

Connor and Jack discuss the Sharon Olds poem "Armor" about an experience she had with her son. Connor mentions the discussion Jo and Amy have about art and power in "Little Women" and Olds' penchant for four beat lines and heavy enjambment. Jack brings up flatworms and both marvel at the way Olds goes so many places from an everyday experience. Armor By: Sharon Olds Just about at the triple-barreled pistol I can’t go on. I sink down as if shot, beside the ball of its butt loaded with mother-of-pearl. My son leaves me on the bench, and goes on. Hand on hip, he gazes at a suit of armor, blue eyes running over the silver, looking for a slit. He shakes his head, hair greenish as the gold velvet cod-shirt hanging before him in volutes at the metal groin. Next, I see him facing a case of shields, fingering the sweater over his heart, and then for a long time I don’t see him, as a mother will lose her son in war. I sit and think about men. Finally Gabriel comes back, sated, so fattened with gore his eyelids bulg

Ringing in the new year with a poem about capitalism and climate change—"Romance #1" by Eunsong Kim. Connor and Jack discuss how the poem makes late capitalism and climate change visceral, its brilliant opening and chilling ending, crown-of-thorns starfish, and of course their own 14 year old crushes. More about Eunsong Kim here: https://cssh.northeastern.edu/people/faculty/eunsong-kim/ & https://eun-song.org/ Check out Kim's collection here: http://www.noemipress.org/catalog/poetry/eunsong-kim/ Romance #1 By: Eunsong Kim like some 14 year old girl waiting for her crush to glance back i keep waiting for capitalism to end but it won’t end my adult life lover states on what will end: Libraries Birds Retirement Recess Sprinting during recess Hispid Hares Starfish shaped like stars Inconvenience Wrinkles Sunken cheeks Living corals Protests Anti-Nuclear Proliferation Non-Aggression Pacts Dragonflies Mangosteen DMZs Trade Embargos Leopards, all kinds Sawfins Rewilding Infiltration Plot/Dreams

To wrap up 2019, Connor and Jack take on a poem as exquisite in its craft as it is emotionally forceful in its effect on the reader. They discuss the history of the United States' colonial expansion, the danger of using oblique language when writing history, and the way the poem's tone bridges the gap between the past and present. More about Luis J. Rodriguez, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/luis-j-rodriguez Cinco de Mayo By: Luis J. Rodriguez Cinco de Mayo celebrates a burning people, those whose land is starved of blood, civilizations which are no longer holders of the night. We reconquer with our feet, with our tongues, that dangerous language, saying more of this world than the volumes of textured and controlled words on a page. We are the gentle rage; our hands hold the stream of the earth, the flowers of dead cities, the green of butterfly wings. Cinco de Mayo is about the barefoot, the untooled, the warriors of want who took on the greatest army Europe ever mustered—and won. I once saw

Connor and Jack explore the poem "Warming" by dg nanouk okpik. They discuss the poem's interplay between intense specificity and figurative language, climate change as context, and the fact that ice worms are really actually real. More about okpik here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dg-okpik Warming By: dg nanouk okpik She and I make a bladder bag to draw water from the ice trench. She/I chain stitch/es a skin dressed in oil to make a new pot of soup. She/I sew/s a badger hair rough around the top of her/my kamiks to make the steps windward, toward the limits of woman. She/I eat/s club root and white clover to strengthen her/my silver body to bear a child. She/I map/s, following 1 degree from the North Star and 60 degrees from the end of the earth’s axis on rotation for Ukpeagvik she/I use/s a small arc of ice, cleaving into parts, reduced to simple curves fitted with serrated edges of white flesh. She/I mold/s to the fretted neck of frozen water into a deep urn, made like a rock shelter or a cav

Connor and Jack discuss the ekphrastic poem, Decoy Gang War Victim by Carmen Gimenez Smith. They discuss the nature of acting and direction, the history of the photo from which the poem grew, the hard-to-pin-down voice of the poem's speaker, and much more. EDIT: This episode was originally posted with an inaccurate title for the poem, "Decoy War Gang Victim." This has been corrected. We apologize for the mistake. You can find the poem (along with the photograph) here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58875/decoy-gang-war-victim You can buy Carmen Gimenez Smith's latest book "Be Recorder" here: https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/be-recorder Decoy Gang War Victim By: Carmen Gimenez Smith For Harry Gamboa,   Jr. Just a tick ago, the actor was a Roman candle shot to the sky, smudged by rain’s helter- skelter. His motivation was: he’s a stooge on L.A.’s sodden turnpike, so we have “to make” art. Got to rezone and react. The world the bare wall to his bullet. Got to rile up the populace,