Raw from the bellicose tumble (PoemTalk #203)

Callie Gardner, "Culture Warrior"

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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 six quatrains long. A second, for which we have a recorded performance, is four quatrains; there’s a variation on thinking about the second that invites 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 remote (lockdown-era) 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. Toward the beginning of our episode, we together listened to the audio extracted from the YouTube recording. And, with help from Iain especially, we have approximated the texts HERE.

We had indeed invited our friend, the wonderful poet and arts-happenings-maker Iain Morrison, to visit Philadelphia and to spend the better part of a week in and around the Writers House. He joined the ModPo class being held in the Arts Café. He performed part of his durational reading/reenactment of Emily Dickinson’s poems before an audience of people who came in and out of the room over its six hours. He made several new ModPo videos — including a discussion of Dickinson’s “Revolution is the Pod.” And he gave a reading from his own poetry too.

To view all of Iain Morrison’s participation variously in ModPo — during our visit to Scotland in 2023 and during his visit to the U.S. in 2024 — click HERE and HERE.

Some of Callie Gardner’s work can be found HERE. Their volume naturally it is not.: a poem in four letters (London: The 87 Press, 2018) is a book-length poem they wrote about “the wheel of the year coming loose.” During ModPo’s Scotland visit, we gathered with poets to discuss Callie’s poem “leaf person.”

This episode of PoemTalk was directed and engineered by Makena Deveraux and Magda Andrews-Hoke and Zach Carduner, and edited by the selfsame Zach Carduner.