19 Saturday May 2018
Episode 315 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s program, I talk to the poet Terri Witek.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
I’ll be reading with the other contributors to this awkward sexcapade anthology!
Episode 315 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
05 Saturday May 2018
Episode 313 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and twitter and other stuff.
NOTES
RIP, Phil Deaver.
Pre-order Vanessa’s forthcoming short story collection, Perfect Conditions,
or check out Vanessa’s other work.
If you like Walt Disney World, subscribe to my Disney-themed youtube channel.
Episode 313 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
28 Saturday Apr 2018
Episode 312 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s program, I talk to poets Gerald Stern
and Victor Hernandez Cruz,
plus I share the prologue to John McMahon’s A Boy from Nantucket.
Texts Discussed
NOTES
Learn more about J. McMahon’s A Boy From Nantucket here.
Hear J. McMahon’s essay on Moby Dick back on episode 196.
Please subscribe to my youtube channel, and leave a review of the show on iTunes.
Episode 312 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
17 Tuesday Apr 2018
Posted in Aesthetic Drift, O, Miami, Poetry
Aesthetic Drift #18 by Freesia McKee
O, Miami!
When you move to a new city and tell strangers that you’re a poet, brace yourself for reactions like, “Do you actually make money?” and “I don’t really get poetry.” But when you tell strangers in Miami that you’re a poet, they tend to say, “Have you heard of O, Miami? Wait till April.”
O, Miami is a colossus of poetry in South Florida, famous for its unusual methods of getting verse into the hands of every Miamian during National Poetry Month. One of their many programs this year is “A Room of One’s Own: A Teeny Tiny Poetry Residency.”
A different poet took residence each day for a week in the Bridge Tender House, a windowed kiosk built in 1939 which stands in front of the Wolfsonian Museum on South Beach. Originally used as an office for bridge operators, the Tender House was moved to this stretch of sidewalk in the 1980s.
For our residencies, the museum staff outfitted the place like a 1940’s office with old photos, a vintage LIFE Magazine, wooden shelves, and all sorts of fun objects for poets to play with like fancy paper, sharp pencils, a Roget’s Thesaurus, and a typewriter. Poets were encouraged to write any kind of poems in any style. Ideally, we’d also interact with the steady stream of pedestrians.
Since my residency fell on Friday the 13th, I’d decided to hand out GOOD OMENS. I enlisted the help of my girlfriend Jade to distribute the omens and play a little live music.
Here’s what threw a wrench into the works: struggling with a cold, I completely lost my voice on the 12th. I would need to distribute the omens without speaking.
The Tender House was full of creative energy. In addition to the vintage setup, the windows were filled with the poems of previous residents. They each took a different approach, some writing on envelopes, some using the typewriter. I felt at home.
We got right to work. Not knowing how many Miamians would need an omen that day, I’d prepared some beforehand, which we painter-taped to the outside of the house. With the windows open, Jade started playing her saxophone and I sat in front of the typewriter to write fresh omens for the luck-hungry public.
The foot traffic in South Beach is perfect for a project like this. Someone walks by every four or five seconds. We ignored those who were engrossed in technology and focused on people who had the capacity to receive.
Someone who took an omen asked if he could write one about “Trumpski,” but we said that sounded more like a bad omen, not a good one. Another group, interested in the sax, told us they felt like they were in New Orleans. We handed them omens. They didn’t seem particularly interested, but graciously accepted them anyway.
We distributed omens to tourists, locals, security guards, runners, dog walkers, fellow poets, beach-goers, people carrying many bags, friends, museum staff, and several sets of parents and children.
We communicated through the universal language of poetry in many dialects: French, Spanish, English, and rough hand signals. Jade did most of the talking. After heavily medicating myself with copious amounts of slippery elm tea, I even got my voice back (a little).
One person said that Friday the 13th was her late mother’s favorite day. She lifted her good omen to us as if to “cheers” and said, “This is for her.”
Another told us about his “death app,” which reminds you five times a day to contemplate death. He said, “When you’re mad or jealous of someone, think about where they’ll be in 300 years. They’ll be dust. You’ll be dust, too! None of it matters! It’s great!” He showed us the most recent reminder, a Philip Larkin quote. Jade and I dually noted that we want to look into getting this app for ourselves.
We handed out close to 100 good omens. Before we left, we taped several unclaimed omens to the windows. Should you find yourself walking in South Beach over the next few weeks, I invite you to take a look.
When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a booth similar to Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help, 5 Cents” in Peanuts, except instead of therapy, I’d be giving the public “Information.” Who knew that all I had to do was become a poet?
I love the delicious possibility in public writing projects. Community poetics explodes the notion of creative writing as a solitary act. It’s always good for writers to meet our readers face-to-face, and projects like O, Miami’s afford us the opportunity to think outside the bookstore, bar, or art gallery. Poetry readers and writers are everywhere. Should we be so lucky to encounter each other on the sidewalk.
Thank you to all the poets of the week for filling the Tender House with creative energy. Special thanks to Heather Cook, the Wolfsonian, O, Miami, and to Jade. Your support of poetry is a good omen for all of us. To learn more about O, Miami, visit http://www.omiami.org/.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, Huffington Post, and Sundress Press’s anthology Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity. Freesia lives in North Miami.
07 Saturday Apr 2018
Episode 309 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s show, I talk to the poet David McLoghlin about the pains and joys of being a third culture kid, the aesthetic fun of the poetic sketch, the importance of travel and being present even when home, and the importance of saving everything one writes. I read a poem from the ARC that got cut from the published version of the book, and David maybe has second thoughts about its omission…
BOOKS DISCUSSED
NOTES
Check out David reading Rilke’s “Presentiment” back on episode 275.
Check out the surf rock of The Intoxicators.
Episode 309 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
03 Tuesday Apr 2018
Posted in Buzzed Books, Poetry
Buzzed Books #60 by Amy Watkins
Gregory Orr’s A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry
Why do we write poetry?
As an experienced poet, I’m supposed to have an eloquent, compelling answer to this question. I’m supposed to acknowledge that the reasons for writing poetry are various and all valid. I’m supposed to quote Neruda. However, if I asked any of the earnest, inexperienced poetry writers in my English 101 class why they write poetry, I’m fairly certain they would all give some version of the same answer: We write poetry to express ourselves. As an experienced poet, I know I’m supposed to find that answer shamefully unsophisticated, but I don’t.
In his new craft book, A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2018), the great lyric poet Gregory Orr posits that poetry is ideally suited to meet the human need for self-expression because of the way it balances order and disorder. This, he says, is why so many people, even non-writers, feel compelled to write poems in moments of crisis. The disorder of emotional extremes–grief, love, rage, desire—welcomes the order of craft, and vice versa.
This is true to my own experience. I began writing poems in middle school, first for a language arts assignment then for the fun of making the world rhyme. I kept writing poems as a way to process disorderly emotion. At that time, my family life was chaotic; grief, addiction, and poverty imposed disorder on my life, to say nothing of the prosaic disorder of adolescence. Like many children experiencing trauma, I craved the control poetry offered. In a poem, I could choose what to tell and how to tell it. I could contain and shape troubling memories. I could let in only as much disorder as I could manage, using the rules I had established.
More available than therapy and ideally suited to my personality, poetry became a way to compartmentalize and impose order on my emotions. While my reasons for writing poetry have become more sophisticated over the years, I still respond to Orr’s paraphrase of Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry: the source of poetry is “emotion remembered from a place of safety.” For me, the poems themselves–my own and those I read–continue to be meaningful, if temporary, places of safety.
As Orr explicates and complicates the sources, tools, and craft of lyric poetry for his readers, he never loses sight of poetry’s basic initiating impulse: We write poetry to express something, often something we can’t express any other way. We make poetry to remake the world or imagine a new world in words. If this sounds a bit fluffy and vague, never fear. Orr is a great teacher, and he balances the emotion and mystery inherent in discussions of poetry with concrete explanation, analysis, and wisdom, delivered in the warm, intelligent voice of a kind, slightly dorky uncle. His approach to teaching language, rhythm, and other elements of craft leaves room for poets to work in a variety of styles.
The book is clearly aimed at a less experienced audience. If you’ve studied poetry for a long time, many of the ideas and exercises are not brand new, but I think it does us good to remember how and why we began to write, and to revisit some of the lessons that shaped our understanding of our craft. In that way, I read this book side-by-side with my younger selves. I underlined passages I doubt I would have understood at 15, passages that would have blown my mind at 25, and passages I desperately want to share with my students now. I wrote in the margins, “If only you’d learned this sooner,” and, “When you grasped this, everything changed!” I worked through the poems and exercises with gratitude for my teachers and hope for my students.
If you teach writing, this is an ideal textbook. I can imagine both introductory and advanced undergrad poetry classes using this text. In the introduction, Orr admits that his Primer does not include a wide variety of poems, and I appreciate that he acknowledges this limitation. If I were using this as a textbook, I would want a really good anthology to go with it. On the other hand, by foregoing a bunch of expensive rights, Orr and his editor have kept the book very affordable: $15.95 is cheaper than any craft book I used in undergrad more than 15 years ago.
If you’re a young poet, Orr’s Primer will offer you meaningful insights into the craft of poetry, without belittling your reasons for attempting it in the first place. If you’re more experienced, it will offer you a chance to reflect and maybe even rediscover the energy of your younger poetic self.
Amy Watkins (Episodes 124, 161, 164, 192, and 209) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and the art editor for Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.
24 Saturday Mar 2018
Episode 306 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s show, I share my interview with poet Sean Patrick Mulroy,
plus I chat with my veteran friend Joshua Dull (on the right) about his plans to do more mission work in Costa Rica.
NOTES
If you can, throw a few bucks into the can to send Joshua back to Costa Rica to work on clean water projects.
The Kerouac Project of Orlando is accepting applications for its 3-month residency program until April 16th.
Episode 306 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
27 Tuesday Feb 2018
Posted in Buzzed Books, Poetry
Buzzed Books #58 by Amy Watkins
Review of Sherod Santos’s Square Inch Hours
I read Sherod Santos’ collection of prose poems, Square Inch Hours (Norton, 2017) during a rainy cold snap—what amounts to bleak midwinter for a Floridian—and the poems were perfect for the weather. Not perfect like a warm cup of cocoa to comfort me through the cold, but perfect like standing on the corner in the rain with no coat, letting the chill soak into my bones. Square Inch Hours chronicles an emotional breakdown and recovery. It’s hard to imagine a collection more detached yet emotionally impactful.
The poems are mostly devoid of emotional language. Instead, the physical details build to psychological meaning, which is, itself, mostly unspoken.
Across a lightless landscape, a passenger train travels past, its eight airless, earth-colored cars trailing a loosening plume of smoke that thins into vapor behind them. Idling at the crossroads, I can see the blank faces staring out at the winter fields…
This is not the loneliness of human connection stretched too thin, but the loneliness of being utterly disconnected. Santos’s speaker is detached even from himself. In a later poem, he says the word “childhood” has lost its meaning except as a series of images attached to “him.” Even his younger self seems like a stranger he watches voyeuristically, without engaging.
The sense of the speaker watching himself is repeated throughout the book. Many of the poems use cinematic language that contributes to a sense of emotional distance. In fact, the feeling that his life is “like some Hollywood film” is an acknowledged symptom of his breakdown. He writes, “I began to doubt the truth of my perceptions.”
At the same time, the physical details included in the poems and the sharp turns from observation to memory hint at powerful feelings just under the surface, suppressed but ready to bubble up at any moment. That poem about the train suddenly veers into the memory of a news story about a young girl’s murder. A poem about gardening turns out to be about avoiding his mother’s funeral. In context, a section of travel poems reads like a dangerous manic phase before Section 4, in which Santos writes about other artists’ and writers’ hallucinations, strange intellectual exercises, and troubling emotional detachment, before switching back to first person point of view for a handful of poems about the speaker’s own hospitalization.
Those poems about other writers raise an interest question: whether or not art is a comfort in this narrative or even if it should be. So much of what artists and writers do looks “crazy” to an outsider, and the idea of the unstable genius is deeply ingrained in our culture. Ironically, writing–so often the art of engaging with powerful memory and translating it into words and imagery–can be another way of separating oneself from emotion. I’m speaking here from my own experience as a person who writes poems instead of going to therapy. Poetry has often been my way of compartmentalizing emotions that are too big or dangerous or crazy-making for daily life. A poem gives shape and order to even the most painful or confusing experience, but making art out of painful experience takes a lot of energy. In the extremes of anxiety or depression it is impossible to simultaneously engage the emotion and distance yourself from it.
Santos acknowledges this difficulty by including a final section that is a long series of fragments, single sentences, and incomplete poems. After all the carefully crafted pieces that have come before, these fragments feel authentic, vulnerable, and strange. I can imagine this section as a notebook full of false starts collected during a psychological low, and I can imagine the writer saying, “I can’t write this yet. I’m too close to it.” It’s as if the preceding poems are the ideas and experiences Santos’ speaker has been able to process and these fragments are the raw materials.
Square Inch Hours is an extremely compelling collection, not for its grand gestures but for its restraint. A sensitive reader is likely to find its emotional distance heartbreaking.
Amy Watkins (Episodes 124, 161, 164, 192, and 209) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and the art editor for Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.
27 Saturday Jan 2018
Episode 298 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On January 19th, 2018, Dianne Turgeon Richardson hosted an evening of protest poetry at Milk Bar in Orlando, Florida!
The readers included on this recording are Talor Carr, Rachel Fox, Lana Ghannam, Drew Weinbrenner, John King, Dianne Turgeon Richardson, Lisa Roney, Troy Cunio, Laurie Uttich, and Sean Patrick Mulroy.
Lana Ghannam.
Lisa Roney
Bar dogs.
NOTES
Episode 298 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
20 Saturday Jan 2018
Episode 297 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s program, I talk to poets Paul Muldoon
and Patricia Smith!
Texts Discussed
NOTES
Please subscribe to my youtube channel, and leave a review of the show on iTunes.
Episode 297 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
