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
Sounds outside of English
Sonnet L'Abbé's 'Ghazals for Zahra Kazemi'
Earlier this week, I received an email from a friend of mine, the poet Sonnet L'Abbé. She sent me one of her poems, "Ghazals for Zahra Kazemi," which appears in her book Killarnoe (2007). The occasion for the gift of this poem was the deaths of two Canadian soldiers in two separate incidents: when I received Sonnet's email, I was listening to a news report in which the two incidents — which took place in two separate provinces, on two different days — were blended together and blamed on radical Islam. Sonn, it emerged that the shooter in the second incident was Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a person with an apparent "Arabic-sounding" name.