Lewis Warsh, “Polar Night”
For this episode of PoemTalk, Al Filreis convened Anselm Berrigan, Kate Colby, and Laynie Browne to talk about a poem by Lewis Warsh, “Polar Night.” The recording of this poem available at Warsh's PennSound page was made at a reading at Chapterhouse Café in Philadelphia in 2008. The recording was made by Jack Krick. The poem was published in the poetry collection Alien Abduction in 2015. (This was his first book of poems since Inseparable of 2008, so we assume “Polar Night” was written around then but not in time to be included in the 2008 book.) We make the text of the poem available here below; click anywhere on the image to see a clearer copy.
Our discussion of the poem aligns well with a comment made by Dorothea Lasky about Alien Abduction as a whole: “Warsh listens closely to everything, and in this book we find the mix of everything that makes up life... In it too we find a life that is always strange because it is living and constantly changing.”
This episode of PoemTalk was engineered in our Wexler Studio control room by Magda Andrews-Hoke and Zach Carduner, and edited as always by Zach. The next episode of PoemTalk features Rae Armantrout, visiting us from Seattle, and we’ll be discussing two of Rae’s newest poems.
The photograph of Lewis Warsh above was taken by John Sarsgard.
