← Live Wire with Luke Burbank
Live Wire with Luke Burbank
"Poetry Month Special" with Paisley Rekdal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Anis Mojgani, Kaveh Akbar, and Kasey Anderson
00:52:11
To celebrate National Poetry Month, Live Wire shares performances and conversations with celebrated poets Paisley Rekdal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Anis Mojgani, and Kaveh Akbar, with music from singer-songwriter Kasey Anderson.
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- [00:03]
Luke Burbank
Hey there. Welcome to Livewire. I'm your host, Luke Burbank. All right, this week on the show, roses are red, violets are blue. We've got a poet. Actually, no, we've got like four poets for you. That's right. It's poetry month, people, and we are celebrating in style by bringing you some incredible poetry by some of our pals who also happen to be some of the most popular poets out there today. We've got Hanif Abdul Raqib, who will read us a poem about a real ghost in his actual house. Plus our Portland friend, the former poet laureate of Oregon, Anees Mojgani will read us some poems along with best selling author Kavi Akbar. And the one time poet laureate of Utah, Paisley Rechdal will stop by to help us understand poetry even better. Plus, we've got music from singer songwriter Casey Anderson. All right, I promise that was my one and only attempt at poetry. I'm going to leave it to the professionals, starting right after this. Livewire is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states.
- [01:23]
Elaina Passarello
From PRX, it's live fire.
- [01:34]
Luke Burbank
This week.
- [01:34]
Elaina Passarello
Poets Hanif Abdurraqib, Anees Mojgani, Kaveh Akbar and Paisley Rechdal.
- [01:41]
Paisley Rechdal
And this sounds really deeply unsexy, but treating poems a bit like crime scenes, which is rather than try to force the thing to be the story you want it to be, you have to look, you have to just spend some time looking at the evidence there is.
- [01:55]
Elaina Passarello
With music from Casey Anderson and our fabulous house band, I'm your announcer, Elaina Passarello. And now the host of Livewire, Luke Burbank.
- [02:09]
Luke Burbank
Hey, thank you so much, Elaina Passarello. Thanks to everyone for tuning in from all over these fine United States. We have a really, really fun show in store for you all this week. Although it's a little bit different than like our typical deal. I don't know if you've noticed this, Elena, but one of the fun things about getting to work on Livewire is that we get to interview and hear from all of these talented poets.
- [02:33]
Elaina Passarello
Yes.
- [02:34]
Luke Burbank
And you know, I was like, well, that's a cool perk of the job. But thankfully we have eagle eyed producers here on Livewire and one of them noted that April is actually national Poetry Month. And so we got the idea, why don't we put together a special all poetry episode? And so we did that, and that's what we're gonna play this week. Now, a little bit of context about how this all came together. A bunch of the guests that we're gonna feature this week were recorded at a special event that we did in partnership with a place in Portland. It's called the Alano Club. It's a really cool thing that they're doing over there. They also run this program called Artists in Recovery, and they do workshops and classes, and they bring in visiting artists who are connected to the recovery community in some way. The idea being that, you know, being in recovery and being someone who explores their creative side, those are not mutually exclusive ideas at all. And this is a really cool example of that. So what we did was we basically recorded one of these nights, and then we included in this episode of Livewire an interview with the renowned poet Paisley Rechdahl, who's got this amazing book out where she kind of breaks down the mechanics of poetry. I think you and I were talking before the interview. We'd both read the book. As a college professor yourself, you were particularly impressed.
- [03:50]
Elaina Passarello
Yeah, yeah. I think it's really unfortunate when there are these barriers up in terms of people reading and understanding poetry. And Paisley Rechdahl is both super smart and insightful, but she's great at kind of communicating, you know, hey, here's a plan for how you can read a poem and feel like you can get close to it, feel like it can mean something to you. So I was super impressed and ready to buy about six copies of this book for a bunch of different people.
- [04:15]
Luke Burbank
Yeah, it's really, really helpful and very demystifying, even for certain public radio hosts who may sometimes be mystified by poetry.
- [04:23]
Elaina Passarello
Have you ever written a poem, Luke?
- [04:25]
Paisley Rechdal
I've always wondered.
- [04:27]
Luke Burbank
Not since that roses are red, violets, or blue. Thing is that I started the show with. Other than that I've left it to the people that have talent. It's never been something that I felt like I was particularly, I don't know, talented at or, again, had a great facility with, which is why hosting this show has really put me into a world where I think about it a lot more than I used to. Were you a poet at any point? Do you consider yourself a poet?
- [04:49]
Elaina Passarello
I took poetry classes, but I love adverbs and adjectives, and there are too many parts of speech that I like, but my husband writes a sonnet a day.
- [05:01]
Kavi Akbar
Whoa.
- [05:02]
Elaina Passarello
It's a project that he started about, I don't know, four or five months ago, which means I get a lot of love poems, which is very, very, very cool.
- [05:09]
Luke Burbank
Oh, my gosh. All right, let's get to our first guest. He needs almost no introduction, at least on our show because he's been on so many times. And through his appearances on Livewire, we've watched this guy rise to become a nationally celebrated cultural critic, poet, and essayist, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation, a genius grant, and also a National Book Critic Circle Award, which means really good criticism. If I have that right. It's a big deal anyway. Hanif Abdulraqib shared this story and poem at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon. Take a listen.
- [05:47]
Hanif Abdurraqib
I'm gonna read one poem about a ghost who is in my house, and before I do that, I will talk very briefly about death and loss, if that's okay. I lost a friend a couple weeks ago, and it was hard. I chose not to come off the road that much, and I chose to kind of be in my house, and I chose to be in front of people, and I chose to do all the things that I would do while moving through grief and loss in any other way. And I have begun to think of my life as improbable as it is to say I at one point did not imagine myself living beyond 25, which means that every moment that I get beyond 25 is kind of stolen time. I think I'm living on about 15 years of time that I've stolen, and I have to make the most of that stolen time. Right? But that also means that every bit of time I steal puts me at odds with the reality that there is someone I love who will not outlive me. And what that does for me in another way is to say that when I am suffering through loss and I am asking myself every morning, I ask myself the question, how good do you feel about being alive today? And fortunately, at this point in my life, most days the answer is pretty good. But on the days the answer is not that great, then I start to kind of shrink the time and say, okay, well, how good do you feel about being alive in the next hour, in the next half hour, in the next 20 minutes, in the next 10 minutes? And countless times in my life, the thing that has been tethering me to the 10 minute at a time moments until I can get to an hour, until I can get to half a day, until I can get to a full day, is something that Kaveh has told me or Something that I've heard from him or something that Casey has told me or something in the group chat that we have laughed about. That puts me in a position where I just am eager to see what is next in the life that I get to share with these people I love. And that's a really lucky thing. I think one exchange of genuine, affectionate friendship for me is the exchange of even without people knowing it, by having loved you well, they're propelling you to the next hour that you might not otherwise make it to without them. And they are doing that, even not knowing that they're doing it right. That is what I think loving someone well amounts to, is that it's kind of just has a residual effect. And so I'm grateful for that. Now there's a dead woman in my attic. She. I live in this old historically black neighborhood in Columbus, and the short of it is there's this old jazz singer. The neighborhood has a history to it. So I did all this research, and she died in my attic in 1920 something. And no one found her for a month. It was pretty. Yeah, it's pretty gnarly. More for her, certainly, than me. But the attic is haunted in such an aggressive way that when I moved in, like, there was rustling in the attic to a level so intense that I called the exterminator, and I was like, man, I think there's, like, raccoons up in that. And he went up there and he came back down. He said, I don't know. There's nothing up there, man. I was like, my boy, there's something up there. There's certainly something up there. And now we share this house, and she rustles at night, and she, you know, like, things echo through the house. And I think that in some kind of romantic way, she and I are in some kind of sense of companionship where neither of us get to be alone. Which is sort of nice. I don't think of ghosts as. Anyway, I wrote a poem about it, and the National Gallery of Art asked me to write an ekrastic poem. And they sent me a painting and was like, please write a poem about this. And I wrote this poem and I gave it back to them. You could tell it was one of those things where they were like, oof. You know how sometimes you go out with your friends and there's that one friend who takes it too far, and you're like, I came out tonight because I wanted to party, but not like this. That's the vibe. The National Gallery of Art curators had where they were. Like, we wanted a poem, buddy, but the joke is on them because it was so far beyond the timeline. Like, I submitted the poem so late that they had no choice but to put it. You know what I mean? Anyway, here's a poem about the dead ghost in my attic and what it means to love someone. There are more ways to show devotion. A heavy gray cloud unlocks its doors and the moonlight stomps off behind it. A petulant child leaving behind smudges of darkness in its wake. And that leaves us with nothing to speak about except the brutalities of feeling. I don't think I want to make it to the end of the world this time. This one ain't my type of apocalypse. I want a meteor, a sky black with sudden arrows. I want to know exactly how much time is left to see the numbers on the clock descending. I might be in love after all. I might slide a love letter across the table and take one last delight in watching a lover read whatever I've scrawled across paper while some fire consumes us where a rising ocean holds us patiently in a waiting palm before making a fist. To believe in the reality of one single soulmate is to believe that every lonely life exists because someone didn't travel towards someone else. For example, a child dies somewhere, and then, decades later, someone else lives a series of unsatisfied days, watches game shows alone, and goes to bed early each day its own small apocalyptic orchestra of near silence. The woman who lived in my house years before me is dead but not gone. The arrogance of the living suggests that the deep dead rattle windows, that they nudge old glasses off edges of counters because they want us to be afraid, as if the dead have any use for our fear. The woman who died in the house that is now our house was alone in the attic for a month before she was found. Her mother found her surrounded by mirrors. There are mirrors everywhere in the house that is now ours. On the landing, between floors, in the hallways, and some of them I am divided into several smaller selves, each of them wrecked by their own individual longing. From the attic I hear moans while the sun is out, lashing the highest windows with its heat. But at night it is always laughter that echoes down through the vents, trembles the walls, runs its hands along my back until I fall asleep, and it's like being held in this way by a lover from a world that has already ended, a different lover for every reflection in the room. And yet, when I wake, someone I loved once is still alive somewhere else.
- [12:12]
Luke Burbank
That was Hanif Abdurraqib, who just while you were listening to that, has won three more literary awards. It's a huge year for him. This was coming your way thanks to the Tomorrow Theater and the Alano Club of Portland, who we've been collaborating with on this week's episode of the show. By the way, Hanif's latest book of essays, There's Always this Year on Basketball and Ascension, is available right now. You're tuned to LIVEWIRE from prx. We've got to take a very quick break, but stay with us. When we come back, it's basically Poet Laureate Palooza. We've got the 10th poet laureate of Oregon, Aneese Mojgani. We've also got the former poet laureate of Utah, Paisley Rechdal, helping us demystify poetry a little bit. It's all coming your way in just a moment here on livewire. Special thanks to our sponsor, upup Books, a Portland bookshop specializing in diverse authors, local writers and independent presses. They're located across from Revolution hall in the Buckman neighborhood, and they offer a space for book clubs, workshops and events. Check out their website and grab a book@upupbooks.com welcome back to Livewire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right. We are celebrating Poetry Month on the program this week, and our next guest was the 10th poet laureate of the great state of Oregon and also the winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam. He's performed all over the world. He's authored several collections of poetry, including his latest, the Tigers. They Let Me. Anisse Mojgani took the stage at the Tomorrow Theater in support of the Alano Club of Portland. Take a listen.
- [14:14]
Anees Mojgani
I'm going to share this poem called Things I Love. And, you know, I was saying to my friend Bo the other day that, like, you know, monks like all this stuff that's swirling around many of us as we bear witness to this, like, crazy amount of sorrow and pain and strife happening around the globe and in our own country as well, that there's also this aspect where I feel grateful to get to exist in a time where I am not so much that I desire to be forced to bear witness to suffering, but if I'm being forced to bear witness to suffering, that I get to bear witness with other people who are also most affected by this bearing of witness, you know. And so it's like, that's a really, really beautiful thing. So surround yourself by people who love humanity as much as I hope you love humanity. You know things. I love the blues a night sky makes, the bowls it holds for the stars to shine inside of. The sound of a fire moving its tongue against the wood. Riding bicycles with friends, learning of the lives of others, getting to know our best and worst birthdays. I love a holy sunset which feels like the sky is praying to me, to us, asking us to look at it and know the fierce colors that lay in its clouds that even the sky needs but the right hour, the right persons looking up at it, knowing what beauty the sky holds inside itself just waiting to pour forth. I love the crows en masse. They're crossing inside of this prayer, bunched together in their loudness at day's end, their flight looking like the sky breaking apart to spread itself farther. I love a spreading further in order to come closer, to see what we all might arrive at. A wandering with intent. I love not making plans and making plans, scheming schemes, building the idea of an art like it was a boat that becomes bigger upon being greeted by the water. It asks to touch its hull. How the ocean wants to hold us but doesn't always know how. I love that even the ocean does not know things. Even the ocean struggles to move against its nature and in this way maybe become something more. I love colors, how they lay on us and hold us when they make an object but a plane of their shade, the way they solid and smooth and spill and wash pale or so deep. I love colors so much. How do I love a thing that has no form, nothing to touch? Simply is. Though, I suppose is this not what all love is? Even an object holding our love is but a placeholder for us to try and with our palms touch the intangible. How the body too is. Is like this. I love writing love poems, more so the living of them. I love writing in ink a scrap of a note even as my desk becomes flooded by scraps of notes. Whether they say fuzzy rhythmic vocals or a sunflower taught me a poem or the emptiness a missing or are simply measurements for my sleeves when the sun lands on one spot. I love this. Eating fruit off a bush on a street or pulled from a tree or fallen from a branch like an offering hugging friends goodbye. Even though I hate goodbyes. When full houses become empty. But for me, when an emptied house becomes full again. Learning something new. The thought of sewing a quilt with a friend and their mother. Taking February to begin piano lessons. The piano. I love the piano. I love when someone plays the piano when you didn't know they could play the piano when they don't feel they know how to play the piano. But there they are in this soft quiet that kisses the two of you playing it. And my heart in this soft quiet, is going from bud to bloom to petals on the floor in one breath. I love that people want to share things with each other, even when sometimes we do not know how to do. Is this not too what love itself is? You sharing, you and me sharing, me and us sharing and being shared with each other back and forth for whatever length always may be. Thank you.
- [18:56]
Luke Burbank
That was one time Oregon poet laureate and longtime friend of Livewire, Anees Mojgani, recorded live at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon. His latest poetry collection is the Tigers They Let Me, and it is really, really worth the read. Hey, special thanks this episode to members Ann E. Mulia of Potomac, Maryland, and Lindsey Mazer of of Portland, Oregon. They are part of the Livewire member community and they are generously supporting us with a donation each month. And we are so grateful for that because it's how we can continue doing this radio show and podcast. And honestly, we like doing it and we're amazed that we get to continue thanks to the help of people like Ann and Lindsey. So thank you so much for keeping Livewire going. This is Livewire from prx. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right, as we like to do each week, we have asked the Livewire listeners a question. Now, this is inspired by the fact that it's Poetry Month, which you might have noticed, what with all the poetry going on around here. Elena, what did we ask the Livewire audience?
- [20:22]
Elaina Passarello
We asked them, this is a big ask to write us a haiku about the month of April. So a poem about the month that National Poetry Month is in.
- [20:33]
Luke Burbank
Do you know that I tried to write a haiku recently just like it was a joke with a friend. I wanted to just like say something in haiku, and it was really challenging. It's not a lot of syllables. Five syllables. Seven syllables. Five syllables.
- [20:47]
Elaina Passarello
That's right. Seventeen total. My favorite one that I ever heard, my friend Patrick wrote, and it was this haiku. Haiku. I do not like you, haiku. You are too hard to do.
- [21:00]
Luke Burbank
That's good.
- [21:01]
Paisley Rechdal
Shout out, Pat.
- [21:03]
Luke Burbank
All right, let's hear what the Livewire listeners came up with on the month of April. What are we seeing?
- [21:07]
Elaina Passarello
Okay, here's one from Carla. Owed to taxes is the title of this haiku. I guess a number that the feds already know. Go to jail if Wrong question mark.
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Paisley Rechdal
Sure.
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Luke Burbank
Now here's the question. Could that legally be considered premeditation? Might they be in more trouble for writing that haiku because it means that they were kind of like they were going in with a thought they might end up in jail.
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Elaina Passarello
Let's just hope Carla is a pseudonym then.
- [21:36]
Luke Burbank
Yes, that's right. All right, what's another haiku from one of our listeners?
- [21:40]
Elaina Passarello
I like this one from Lynn Lin's haiku. Halfway to summer, sun, rain, green, moist, petrichor, studded tires gone.
- [21:51]
Luke Burbank
Oh, that's great. That is like, you know what's. That's like that baby shoes hardly used.
- [21:57]
Elaina Passarello
Or something like that.
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Luke Burbank
Tells a whole story.
- [22:00]
Elaina Passarello
I think if I remember correctly from elementary school poetry class, it's awesome if your haiku can mention nature. And that one totally does.
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Luke Burbank
Okay, another haiku from one of our listeners.
- [22:09]
Elaina Passarello
Okay, this one is from Martha, and I think Martha must have a birthday in April. Martha says 44. Oh, no. Birthday month brings more eye bags. Chin up, vodka down. Now this is a great poetry lesson because there's a sort of implicit thing in that last line when she says, chin up, vodka down. Is she putting down the Vodka because at 44 she wants to drink less or is she downing the vodka because she's 44?
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Luke Burbank
Question.
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Elaina Passarello
Thank you. Nice ambiguity there, Martha.
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Luke Burbank
Yeah. Here's what I would say about turning 44. As a person who has now turned 48, any age that you arrive at is the youngest you will ever be for the rest of your life. And it is so hard to remember that until you are older than that in your life and then you are like, what I wouldn't give to be 44. Anyway, well, so congratulations, Happy birthday. And in whatever direction that vodka's going, we salute you.
- [23:07]
Elaina Passarello
Congrats.
- [23:08]
Luke Burbank
Well, thank you so much to everyone who reconnected with their fifth grade homework and wrote us a haiku. We really appreciate you. This is Livewire from prx speaking of poetry. Our next guest is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry. She's the one time Utah poet laureate. Her latest book is called Real Imaginary Gardens on reading and writing poetry forensically. And I really got to say, this book kind of changed my life on reading and understanding poems. And I'm very excited for all of you to get to hear about it as well. This is Paisley Recdoll, recorded live at the Patricia Research center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon.
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Paisley Rechdal
Hi.
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Luke Burbank
Hello, Paisley. Welcome to the show. I really enjoyed this book and the structure of it. And I was wondering, though like, what were the kinds of conversations that were happening for you that prompted you to want to write a book like this? Was it people saying, I don't like poetry, or I don't understand poetry, or what was it that had you wanting to write this?
- [24:14]
Paisley Rechdal
All those things. And actually, as poet laureate, I would go into classrooms, and I thought it was there mostly for the kids. And kids are fine. You throw anything at them, and they just want to talk about it and play. And you don't tell them that they're poems. You tell them they're games. But every teacher would have me back afterwards and sort of say in a panicked voice, like, I don't know how to teach poetry. I don't even know how to read poetry. Why are we doing this? Why are you here? And also, I teach creative writing for a living. I have graduate students. A lot of them love poetry. But then they get in a classroom and they start freaking out. And so then it really struck me that a lot of people like poetry, but they don't know why, and they don't know how to talk about it, and they don't feel comfortable necessarily going on their own and trying to find other. Other poems. And teachers are also, like, they would love to talk about poetry, but they are too intimidated. So I thought, oh, this is maybe helpful for a lot of people. And then also, as a writer, no one ever really explained poetry to me, which is a strange thing to say. I mean, I studied it all my life, but no one ever talked about, like, the nuts and bolts, like, why do poems do the things they do and how could I reproduce that on my own? So I thought, well, this would be useful for writers, too.
- [25:27]
Luke Burbank
I feel like it would be useful for public radio hosts who do a lot of interviews over books of poetry. And there are times when it kind of immediately, I guess, makes sense to me, and that's not a value judgment about the writing, but where I connect with it initially and then times when it's a little mysterious. And what this book lays out are so many different ways to kind of approach something. And, I mean, is one of the failures of imagination on my part, this idea that you should understand it?
- [25:55]
Paisley Rechdal
It's not a failure of imagination. I actually think it's a failure of how we teach in general. Like, we throw a poem in front of a kid or an adult, and we're like, if you don't get it in five minutes, then you're stupid. And that's really frustrating because, I mean, there are poems that I. I mean, I Read poetry for a living. And they're poems that are mysterious to me. So the question is, like, how can we start to approach something that we're not necessarily immediately drawn into and sort of find our way into the world of a poem and not making a value judgment? I mean, I think we also treat poetry like this super, super special thing. And I think that. That making it precious is also a kind of weird value judgment. It's sort of like, well, this is high art, and so there's something wrong with you if you don't appreciate it. But poems do so many different things. They make us laugh, they make us cry, they make us hungry, they make us hate people, they make us love people. And we should be able to have all of those different kinds of emotions. So there's not one way of reading.
- [26:53]
Luke Burbank
Poetry is part of the challenge, too. And you kind of get into this at the beginning of the book that it's hard to decide what is and is not a poem. There are so many things that might move you, but. Is that a letter? You give some examples of things that might not seem like a poem, but then you decide that they are. What is your criteria for what is and is not a poem?
- [27:15]
Paisley Rechdal
A poem is basically a piece of writing that tells two or more stories at the exact same time, using the exact same language. And, yeah, I love that little. Right. It's a nice takeaway.
- [27:27]
Luke Burbank
It's like that was somebody who still has some student loan debt. That was an extremely public radio audience response.
- [27:34]
Paisley Rechdal
Welcome. Now your BA degree finally comes to completion with that. Yeah. But I do think that that's a way of reminding people that the work of poetry is when the figurative and the literal are equally important to our understanding of what's happening. And so there are lots of moments of poetry that we're encountering all the time. And to remind students that, in fact, you have to not just describe the world, but understand that when you're describing the world, you're usually telling another story besides the thing that you're looking at. Why is this shell reminding you of, say, your mother or something like that? Right. How do these two things.
- [28:08]
Luke Burbank
Her name was Shelley.
- [28:09]
Paisley Rechdal
Her name is Shelly.
- [28:10]
Luke Burbank
Yeah, that one's not exactly graduate level.
- [28:13]
Hanif Abdurraqib
Yeah, well.
- [28:13]
Paisley Rechdal
Oops, Sorry. Yeah. Why does this dog remind me of my horrible ex boyfriend? I don't know.
- [28:24]
Luke Burbank
You start the book with a poem that is almost more, I guess, a piece of visual art as much as it is a poem. Is it by Susan Howe? And I think you say something like, you might be one of the people, when seeing this poem, who wants to throw this book across the room? I thought, well, that's one way to start the book. Why did you start there?
- [28:45]
Paisley Rechdal
Because it's so confusing. I know it sounds, like, really counterintuitive. I'm just trying to make poetry as accessible as possible. So I give you one of the most conceptually difficult, traditionally conceptually difficult poets ever, Susan Howe. But what Susan Howe's work taught me is you have to step back and just look. That's why I have the title, like Reading Forensically, which is to sort of. And this sounds really deeply unsexy, but treating poems a bit like crime scenes, which is. Rather than try to force the thing to be the story you want it to be, you have to look. You have to just spend some time looking at the evidence. There is. And with Susan Howe, there's no narrative. There's no obvious imagery in the ways that we conventionally imagine there to be imagery in poetry. There's no rhyme, there's no meter. The poem doesn't even stay on the margins of the page. It's all over the place.
- [29:35]
Elaina Passarello
Yeah, it looks like a magnetic poetry kit. It just exploded onto it.
- [29:38]
Paisley Rechdal
Exploded. Right. So. So. But I teach this with high schoolers, and it goes really well because I just say, don't tell me what you think. Don't tell me what you think this poem's trying to tell you. I want you to tell me what you see. And so then they start saying, well, actually, these lines kind of go in this direction and that direction. And actually there's a lot of repetition. And some of these lines sound that they. Like they're written by, I don't know, like Daniel Boone. And some others sound like they're written by my mother or something. And so we get to talk about diction, we get to talk about pattern and imagery and stuff like that. That isn't just descriptive language. But how can you make a poem a material experience? And in that sense, you start to realize, like, oh, I'm in a map. I'm actually experiencing a battle of a map. And no one's telling me about the battle. I'm living it. It's a really wild poem.
- [30:28]
Elaina Passarello
Well, that's one of the things I love about the book, too, is I love being told to look and observe. But I also like a little bit of scaffolding. I need a personal trainer. Just a little bit. It's kind of like when you go to the gym and you' okay, well, I know how the treadmill works. So I'm just gonna start with that. And then all of a sudden, the rest of the equipment becomes kind of available. How did you come up with the 20 or whatever kind of qualities to put in this forensic arsenal?
- [30:55]
Paisley Rechdal
I started with the most basic kind of question, which is, okay, are there any images in the poem? It sounds like a really basic thing, but when I work with students, oftentimes, again, the attention is to try to answer all the things about the poem at the same time. And what freaks people out about poetry is that you can look at line breaks, you can look at rhyme, you can look at rhythm, you can look at imagery. Then you can look at the narrative and sentences and, like, voice. And it gives you this impression that, like, poetry is infinite, but a poem exists in the confluence of all these things together. So you have to start saying, okay, well, I release you from answering it all at one time and just start with question number one. So are there images? What do the sentences sound like? What do the line breaks look like? And just walk you up bit by bit by bit by bit, until you're sort of tricked into realizing or having an entire conversation with a poem for all of its levels of scaffolding. And then by the end of it, you're like, oh, wow. Actually, I see how all this comes together. I can see why this person is writing a sonnet about their father, for instance. Or I can understand that rhythm is really important to this because it's about a particular work experience. And when I see this rhythm now, I'm actually experiencing that. The labor, the rhythm of that labor.
- [32:14]
Luke Burbank
You're listening to Livewire Radio from prx. We're at the Patricia Research center for the Arts in Beaverton, and we're talking to Paisley Rechdahl about her book the Real Imaginary Gardens on reading and writing poetry forensically. One of the things that I found so useful about this book is that you're kind of curating all of these different poems from a lot of poets that I was not familiar with, and then kind of explaining like, okay, here's what they're doing, or, like, here's an idea and here's an example of it. And it was a kind of a cool tour of a bunch of different styles of poetry and people that I might not walk into a bookstore or a library and go find a book from this particular person. But I wondered if you could give us an example of one of the concepts that you kind of mentioned. I'm going to say this wrong, even though you said it for me in the green Room, but it's already left my brain. Dexis.
- [33:01]
Paisley Rechdal
Deixis.
- [33:02]
Luke Burbank
You said that a lot of writing that isn't great suffers from poor or lack of de exis. And then you include a poem that presumably does a good job of it by Langston Hughes called Letter. Would you mind reading that for us and kind of explaining how that concept works in action?
- [33:18]
Paisley Rechdal
Yeah. So Deixis is basically any kind of language that gives you who is speaking, to whom are they speaking, on what occasion are they speaking? Right. So any. So an example of poor dexis is if you are wandering up to some sort of, I don't know, store, and it just says, be back soon. And you're like, well, when is soon? Who are you? Are you talking to me? Or is this anyone? Did you leave, like, last Thursday? You know, And a lot of poems that we consider maybe problematically, you know, not working are ones that have a really poor sense of dexis. But this is a poem by Langston Hughes that starts to answer questions of who is speaking, to whom are they speaking and why are they speaking? On what occasion? Letter. Dear Mama, time I pay rent and get my food and laundry. I don't have much left, but here is $5 for you to show you I still appreciate you. My girlfriend send her love and say she hopes to lay eyes on you sometime in life. And there's a page turning here, Mama. It has been raining cats and dogs up here. Well, that is all. So I will close your son, Baby, respectfully, as ever, Joe. And when you listen to this poem, if you don't know it's a poem, and I think a lot of people would be like, that just seems like something found in someone's desk, Right? But Langston Hughes does a very careful job of creating a sense of deixis. We know an average Joe is speaking to his mom, and we know that they've been separated for a really long time. And what's fun about this poem for me, and also kind of sad, is that if you start to pick apart this poem bit by bit, you can see that he moves between, like, high and low language. You know, he's talking to her very conversationally, and then at the same time says things respectfully as ever. He calls himself Baby as well as Jo. And he says, I might not see you sometime in this life, like my girlfriend might never see you. So you understand that, you know, they've been separated. And you start to get a portrait of what was happening in Langston Hughes time period, which is the great migration, where lots of black Americans are leaving the South. They're going to the north to find better work. And he's sending all the money he can, which is $5, which may not sound like a lot to us, but it's a lot to them. So you really see the financial connection to the family. You start to see the love. But you also recognize that these are people who may never see each other again in their lives. Because why? And we don't know why he won't return. But we might be able to speculate, which is, does he want to go back South? Can he get killed back down there? Or is he looking for a better life and he can't afford to bring his mother with that, to that life.
- [35:54]
Luke Burbank
Is there something or some things that poetry can do that other forms of writing can't do? Is there something that it can accomplish?
- [36:01]
Paisley Rechdal
Blame? Yes. No. There's a lot of things that poetry can do that other forms of literature can't do. The thing about rhyme and rhythm is that it works on your body. And when a poem really moves us, it moves us not just through our heads, but really through every part of our body. We feel that rhythm. We feel like rhyme creates connections and completion, and we feel that more than we understand it intellectually.
- [36:29]
Elaina Passarello
I feel like a poem stops time better than any other literary form.
- [36:34]
Paisley Rechdal
But I think it's true, because, I mean, if you think about prose, it has to work. It doesn't always have to work, but generally it works like beginning, middle, end. So you're tied to time and its chronological waddling forth. But with poetry, it stops time because the lyric momentum of poetry means you can be in the present moment, but also in the past and in the future. And a poem, what it really does is it crystallizes through metaphor, the simultaneity of all these time periods. Like, why is it, when I'm in this moment on the beach, I'm thinking about what I might be like in 10 years, but I'm also thinking about what I was like as a child. But you're there in that moment. That's the stopping of time. You experience all of it at once. And it's really hard to do that in narrative stuff, because you have to be. Here's the backstory, here's the right.
- [37:23]
Luke Burbank
You write about some work that you did at a Washington State prison, working with some of the incarcerated people there, and that a lot of them had a very limited sort of formal educational background, but you said you didn't find that they weren't literate, but that Their literacy was different.
- [37:39]
Paisley Rechdal
Oh, yeah.
- [37:39]
Luke Burbank
And kind of explain that.
- [37:41]
Paisley Rechdal
Well, they had memorized lots and lots of song lyrics, and they had written poems in their minds and stuff like that as well, and they would send me mixed tapes, which probably was illegal, I don't remember. But, yeah, their literacy functioned in a completely different way. But it also reminded me very much that, I mean, we are people, not first of the page, we are people first of memorization and recitation and orality. We love that. That's why we love performance poetry. It's why we're so responsive to it. And we love songs and things like that. So, you know, again, it speaks to that bodily, you know, function of poetry, that it brings you into yourself, I think, through those. Through those memorizations of poems and sharing that way.
- [38:25]
Luke Burbank
I think you've already done a really exceptional job of this. But if somebody is hearing this on the radio and they just think, like, I'm just not really into poetry or poems, is there, you know, somebody who's really made it a big part of your life's work? Is there something, a sales pitch? What's the elevator pitch on poetry? We're keeping it classy. Beaverton. Okay.
- [38:45]
Paisley Rechdal
Yeah. I think go into it with the question of, in what ways can this give me more pleasure and in what ways can this give me. Going back to the question of time, give me a second to pause. And I think we live in a culture with social media and work that we just are always running, just always running. And poetry, the one thing that poetry really does is it gives us an invitation to just sit down and look at language and just absorb it. There's almost nothing else in our lives that says, take some time for yourself. That's the pleasure that poetry can give us. And so it shouldn't be considered work. It shouldn't be considered a responsibility or duty. It should be considered a pleasure.
- [39:31]
Luke Burbank
It's like a smoke break that doesn't give you cancer.
- [39:34]
Paisley Rechdal
Not yet.
- [39:36]
Luke Burbank
Tbd. Paisley Rechdahl, thank you so much for coming on Livewire.
- [39:41]
Paisley Rechdal
Thank you.
- [39:46]
Luke Burbank
That was Paisley Rechdahl live from the Patricia Reeser center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. Her book, Real Imaginary Gardens on Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically, is available now. All right, once again, we've arrived at one of my favorite parts of the show, Station location identification Examination. This is where I quiz our esteemed announcer Elena Passarello about a spot in the US Where Livewire is on the radio and she's gotta guess the place that I am talking about. Elena, it is A poetry themed station. Location identification examination, St. Louis, Missouri.
- [40:28]
Elaina Passarello
Birthplace of T.S.
- [40:29]
Paisley Rechdal
Eliot.
- [40:30]
Luke Burbank
Very solid guess, but wrong. But a good guess and a nice flex that you know where T.S. eliot was born. Okay, here's a clue. The poet Jupiter Hammond published a poem in this place in 1761, which was the first by an African American poet. Published, published 1761. It's credited as being the first published poem by an African American poet.
- [40:57]
Elaina Passarello
It's definitely one of 13 states.
- [40:59]
Luke Burbank
Okay, hey, look, that takes out like 37 states right there. How about this? This city is home to an annual New Year's Day poetry reading marathon that's been running since 1974. Past poets include William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Yoko Ono, Amiri Baraka, and Patti Smith.
- [41:22]
Elaina Passarello
Is that New York City, New York?
- [41:25]
Luke Burbank
It's New York City, New York.
- [41:28]
Anees Mojgani
Yeah.
- [41:28]
Elaina Passarello
What an obscure location for this week's Sly.
- [41:31]
Luke Burbank
Hey, listen, we just report the places where livewire's on the radio. And yes, as mentioned a few weeks ago, we are now on WNYC radio in New York City, also the home of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, founded in 1973.
- [41:48]
Elaina Passarello
Yeah, Lower east side, that's right.
- [41:50]
Luke Burbank
So anyway, shout out to the folks tuning in in New York City on wnyc. You're listening to LIVEWIRE from prx. I'm Luke Burbank. That's Elena Passarello. We've gotta take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we return, we're going to hear some poems from best selling author Kavi Akbar and round the hour out with a song from singer songwriter Casey Anderson. More Livewire coming your way in just a moment. Welcome back to LIVEWIRE from prx. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Our final poet of the hour has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and like a million other places. He's the author of two poetry collections, Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. And his first novel, Martyr was pretty much an immediate New York Times bestseller. Here are a couple of quick poems from Kavi Akbar. This was recorded live at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon.
- [43:01]
Kavi Akbar
I wrote a book called Martyr that came out earlier this year and I've mostly been working on that for the last like half decade plus. And so even though I think of myself as a poet and I came up as a poet, the only poems that I've actually been writing are like little goofy love poems for my spouse that I just like leave sitting around the house and they read them and they're like, all right, cool. But you still gotta, like, clean the litter or whatever, you know. It's very much our vibe, but in the spirit of sharing new work, I'm gonna share a couple of those. This is called Love Poem, with lines from Jesus and Muhammad. How provincial to want to be the best living anything. How embarrassing, really. As we stand atop the innumerable faceless dead. Literally, as we boil water in the good blue pot, someone died and left us. How provincial and, frankly, small. Do not think I came to bring peace, but a sword. That's the Jesus one, by the way. Another terror in a language I'll never know. Yes, obedient instrument, remote will and the tooth biting through gold. Gold SAP in us glowing. Yes, that good gold, supple looking at our phones. After I go soft inside you, obliterate me into that forever. And forgive my puritan heart. Brittle as an Ottoman vase. Brittle as the light lies. The long shadow we thought was a wolf was only a man's hands. Yes, abstract belief finally turning into action like it's supposed to. And what comes next, of course, is all I've kept from you saying it out loud and watching it shrink like a shrinking flute. Those ye worship besides him are just names which ye have named. How ridiculous a name being just one syllable. Page. God, sword, peace, Asp. The best living noun. Flame, maybe Hymn. Yes, him. How to learn this? No, how to remember. This is called Love Poem with Euclid in mind. Euclid was a mathematician a long time ago who speculated. I mean, you don't need to know this, but he speculated that when you see something, your eye is actually shooting tiny little particles and touching that thing, which is not totally like. I mean, you're shooting ostensibly, like the photons are bouncing off the shape of the thing and returning to your eyes. So it's not, like, wrong, wrong, but. Love poem with Euclid in mine. Our eyes shoot particles to touch whatever we see. But it's hard to touch something beneath time, with its cigarettes and boats and boneless little men yield new world. It is hard to look at someone and really see them. It is hard to forgive language when it's acting this way. Something cold and steel passes from my eye to yours. That's the shovel. That's the shovel that dug the hole.
- [46:29]
Luke Burbank
I am. That was Kavi Akbar live at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon, as part of a benefit for the Alano Club of Portland. Make sure to pick up a copy of Kavi's latest novel, It's Martyr. That is after you read his books of poetry, which are great as well. All right, let's pivot from some poetry to some music. Our next guest is a self proclaimed gradually retiring songwriter and the person behind this amazing benefit at the Alano Club of Portland, which brought together many of the guests that you heard this week. He's got four studio albums under his belt and his songs have been praised by the likes of Rolling Stone, Paste, no Depression, and npr. Take a listen to this. It's Casey Anderson live from the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon.
- [47:23]
Casey Anderson
This is a song called Leave an Echo that borrows a lot of lines from one of Hanif's poems. And so there was a day in which I texted him and said, hey, I've been reading this poem of yours and I would love to like write a song around a couple of these lines. And he was like, yeah, okay. And I said, here's the demo. I've done it already, so I appreciate the consent. I really hope that you like it. So this is the one tune, you know, I wrote all the tunes on the record. This is the one tune that I co wrote kind of with somebody, but I just co wrote it in the sense that I stole some of his and used it for myself. I've come to be a witness to a murder in reverse I was living on the border between the revelry and mourners between the ocean and the thirst and I've heard enough from the people who would speak as if words of love could set anybody free and then refuse the touch of anything that might so stay long enough to leave I'm a shadow constellation I come twisting through.
- [49:02]
Kavi Akbar
The trees.
- [49:06]
Casey Anderson
For the hearts that held the worry for the feet that had to hurry for the dogs who barked at me if you get near enough maybe you can see there's just fear and love and it's a matter of degree and I'm scared to touch anything that might stay long enough to leave to leave an echo go to leave an echo to leave an echo behind I'm in the mood to be forgotten I must have apologize again I was looking for the words I was looking for some mercy I was looking for a friend Just trying to heal enough for the people who believe you got to kneel for love I've been living on my knees still I forget the touch of anything that might stay long enough to leave to leave an echo to leave an echo to leave an echo behind.
- [51:01]
Luke Burbank
That was Casey Anderson right here on Livewire, recorded live at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon as part of last fall's benefit for the Alano Club of Portland. His latest album is to the Places We've Lived. All right, that's gonna do it for this week's episode of Livewire. A huge thanks to all of our guests, Paisley Rechdal Hanif, Abdul Raqib, Anis Mojgani, Kavi Akbar and Casey Anderson. Special thanks this episode to Casey and the Alano Club of Portland, along with the good folks at the Tomorrow Theater. This episode is dedicated to the memory of Brent Knaud.
- [51:40]
Elaina Passarello
Lara Haddon is our executive producer, Heather D. Michel is our executive director, and our producer and editor is Melanie Savchenko. Our technical director is Eben Hofer. Hazik Bin Ahmad Farid is our assistant editor and our house sound is By Dee, Neil Blake and Nate Zwaneleck. Ashley park is our production fellow, Valentine.
- [51:58]
Luke Burbank
Kecht is our operations manager, Andrea Castro Martinez is our marketing associate and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house band is Sam Pinkerton, Ethan Fox, Tucker, Ben Gilmore, and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Hazik Bin Ahmad Farid.
- [52:17]
Elaina Passarello
Additional funding provided by the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Livewire was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank member Anne E. Mulia of Potomac, Maryland and Lindsey Mazur of Portland, Oregon.
- [52:33]
Luke Burbank
For more information about our show or how you can listen to the podcast, head on over to livewireradio.org I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Pass Massarello and the whole Livewire crew. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week. Wouldn't it be amazing to have a piping hot episode of Livewire delivered right to your heart and ears each week? Well, guess what? That can happen when you subscribe to the Livewire podcast feed and you'll get the joy of surprising conversation every week. So go ahead and do it. It's super easy. You click on the button at the top of your podcast app and bam, you are Livewire subscribed. And if you're still, you know, feeling the love, if you're enjoying the show, hey, maybe you could hook us up and leave us a quick review. Review that'll help more people find out about Livewire. And thank you.
- [53:45]
Paisley Rechdal
From PRX.