Close Talking

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