Callie Gardner, "Culture Warrior"
From left: Laynie Browne, Julia Bloch, Iain Morrison
Julia Bloch, Laynie Browne, and Iain Morrison joined Al Filreis in KWH’s Wexler Studio to talk about a poem — or rather two versions of a poem — by the late Callie Gardner. One version, titled “when will my love return from the culture war?,” is 6-quatrains long. A second, for which we have a recorded performance, is four quatrains; there’s a variation on the second that seems to invite us to call it a sonnet. Callie added a version — organized in the quatrains — to their blog on May 1, 2020. On November 19, 2020, Callie read the shorter version of the poem as part of a live-streamed reading given by eight poets. Callie was the fifth to read. We link the YouTube recording HERE , and PoemTalk listeners are invited to watch and listen to our poem at 53 minutes into the group reading.
December 24, 2024
The MLA does not support the variable foot
By the time we got to the long, apologetic love poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower in the Williams class, I was beginning to worry about the relatively short amount of time we had spent on the variable foot.