Julia Bloch

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During a visit to the Writers House during which she joined an interactive ModPo webcast and gave a poetry reading, Rae Armantrout also joined Al Filreis, Laynie Browne, and Julie Bloch in our Wexler Studio to record an episode of PoemTalk. We talked about two poems in Rae’s book Go Figure. The poems are “Here I Go” and “Further Thought.” Rae’s PennSound author page didn’t yet have any recordings of performances of poems from this new book, so we asked the poet to read them during the podcast session.

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.

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This episode of PoemTalk features a discussion of two poems from Maggie O’Sullivan’s book In the House of the Shaman, which was published in 1993 by Reality Street. The first piece, “To our Own Day,” was grouped with other poems under the heading “Kinship with Animals.” The second poem discussed is “Hill Figures” from the section titled “Prisms & Hearers.” For this conversation, PoemTalk’s producer and host Al Filreis convened Julia Bloch, Charles Bernstein, and (visiting from Berkeley) Eric Falci. O’Sullivan’s extensive PennSound page includes a recording made — no doubt by Charles Bernstein himself — of a reading given in Buffalo on October 27, 1993; the two poems were chosen for that performance.

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An in-person reunion of favorite colloquists after a year of planning: Al Filreis met up with Maxe Crandall (traveling from Oakland), Larissa Lai (having flown in from Calgary), and Julia Bloch (who walked five minutes through campus) — in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House. They talked about two prose poems in Harryette Mullen’s collection Sleeping with the Dictionary, published by California in 2002. The poems are “Dim Lady” and the title poem, “Sleeping with the Dictionary.” Our recordings of Mullen’s performance of these two pieces — they can be heard here and here — come from episode #92 (aired in 2005) of Leonard Schwartz’s radio show, Cross Cultural Poetics, an interview/conversation in which Schwartz and Mullen devoted the entire program to Sleeping with the Dictionary.

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Al Filreis convened Larissa Lai, Maxe Crandall, and Julia Bloch to discuss Sarah Dowling’s book Entering Sappho (Coach House, 2020), in which an abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to vexing questions of history, settlement, translation, violence, “impossible geographies,”* the idea of the “unwitting monument,” and the abusive economics of the s0-called company town. The group focuses on two passages from the book. First there’s “Clip,” the opening poem, a kind of verse preface or prelude to the recurring themes. Then there are the first three paragraphs of a prose statement (or prose poem?) at the end of the book, “White Columns.” The texts of these passages can be found HERE and HERE.

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Al Filreis gathered with Adrienne Raphel, Jennifer Firestone, and Julia Bloch to talk about Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. This book of 240 numbered prose-poem propositions was published by Wave Books in 2009. The group focuses on eleven sections, those numbered 222–232; these appear on pages 89–93 in the Wave edition. Maggie Nelson’s PennSound page includes several recordings of readings in which she performs this work. The recording we play at the start of this episode is from a reading she gave at Boise State University in Idaho on April 26, 2013.