Aldon Nielsen, "Tray"
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, Tyrone Williams, hosted by Al Filreis, convened in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House, before a live audience, to discuss Aldon’s poem “Tray.” There are 29 sections in the poem; the group discussed the first 6. In the book titled Tray, published by Make Now Press in 2017, the title poem takes up the first 37 pages; the sections we discussed run to page 14. Usually, of course, we play an audio recording of the poem from we’re about to discuss as archived in PennSound, but on this day, because we had the honor of Aldon’s presence we asked him to perform those sections.
November 29, 2023
The grass never stops
Lynley Edmeades on Vana Manasiadis
Vana Manasiadis’s interest and use of history and mythology — grounded in her own biography — is a welcome strain to New Zealand poetry. Her reference to Greek and classical traditions, and her borrowing of forms from her poetic forebears, lets her cultivate a poetic voice relatively peculiar to these shores.[1] She holds an MA in Creative Writing — the standard currency for emerging poets in the English-speaking world — but her work has a scope much greater than the contemporary institution’s remit.