No Good Poetry

Past guest Brendan Lorber rejoins us this week to talk about ghosts and his ghost story novel he's been working. We talk about ghosts and how they relate to relics of the past in city's, lost love ones, and creativity and the subconscious.

No guest this week, so we recount what's been going on with poetry in our world the past couple weeks, talk about Steve Dalachinsky and read a couple of his poems, the intersection between jazz and poetry, music and poetry in general, about bringing the historical into poetry, and we look at a Vice article about someone faking it as an instagram poet.

This week poet and novelist Travis Nichols talks about poets writing auto-fiction, the artifice-sincerity polarity, Ashberyists vs. O'Haraists, how Twitter has changed what makes poets popular, David Berman, and how poetry can gesture towards another world. 

This week we met up on the 4th of July, read some poems about America and got philosophical about the disappointment in the promise of America's beginnings that run through literature.

This week poet/writer Tracey Anne Duncan joins us to share some poems & talk about advice columns, whether poets should date poets, personal ads, famous poets who got good poems out of their relationship.    

Musician Joseph Darensbourg joined us this week to talk about the Creole poetry of Les Cenelles, his string ensemble inspired by it, and the intersection of poetry, music, language, and the ancestral past.

The day after New Orleans Poetry Fest we sat down with poets Joseph Lease and Mark Statman and had a wonderfully sprawling conversation about poetry. Some topics include: the poetry scene in the '80s, "words you can't use in poems, Creeley. Koch, & Ginsberg, how Joseph "used to be a hard critic but he softened up," reading Beats in teh time of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Joseph and Mark read some of their incredible poems.

This week poet Lisa Pasold joins us to talk about poems that use questions. We look at poems by Catherine Barnett, Pablo Neruda, Terrrance Hayes, C.D. Wright, and Lisa herself.

It's episode 100! We have 4 guests over for a Vispo Workshop, and we talk to them about their experience making visual poetry, and we look back at our experience of the podcast so far.

This week poet Vincent Cellucci joins us to talk about his course on film and poetry, how the two mediums intersect, videopoems, and how to make interactive poetry that makes use of current technology and shares some poems from his new book Absence Like Sun.  

This week we are talking about writing poems in a persona, and what it shows us about how poetry and identity work in general. We read poems by Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, James Tate, and Andre Breton.

It's carnival time, and we are thinking about Mardi Gras poems this week. We share some of our favorite poetry about carnival and wonder why there isn't more out there, and we pontificate about how much that one Tuesday a year shapes New Orleans culture.

This week printer and poet Christ Fritton joins us to talk about visiting letterpress print shops across the country, typography's influence on poetry, the importance of constraints, and embracing the "glitch."

On January 1st, for the first time since 1998, a whole bunch of creative work entered the public domain. This week we talk about how copyrights work and if we think they really work, read some poetry that recently became public domain, and talk about how work from the 20s could be a font of inspiration for today's poets and artists.

Poet Jorge Sánchez has been contemplating how poets find the forms that they write in when the majority of poets don't use traditional forms. We talk about constraints born of choice, medium, lifestyle, chance and luck and hopefully find a way to forge some new paths through the thicket of poetic form. And the best part is Jorge shares with us a couple of his recent science-inspired poems.

This week poet Hank Lazer joins us to talk about docupoetry, his shape writing, keeping open the gateway of poetry, poetry as phonomenolgy of spiritual experience, and how we can make poetry readings less passive and more of an immersive experience.

This week poet and musician Matt Hart joined us by Skype from his basement lair, and we had a great conversation about teaching poetry writing to visual arts students, the intersection of punk and poetry, Apollinaire, translating, writing a poem every day for a year and more. Matt shares with us some of his poems and one of his obliterations of Apollinaire.