200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.
October 11, 2024
The resonance continues: From the constellation of Diana Arterian
If you work with words anywhere within a thousand miles of Los Angeles, you're likely familiar with the extraordinary force of literary citizenship that radiates from poet, editor, scholar, and translator, Diana Arterian. Her generous presence here shimmers in a sequence of conversations compelled by the wonders of strangeness. How is it age-old questions spiral into new responses? How is it that from the crashing of steel triangles to supernovas, new resonances arise? From one week to the next, a silent mystery of the universe revealed?