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Buy Daniel’s books, and all the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 157 on Bookshop.org. Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback! (Since Daniel’s books are on backorder on the site, I’m also including links to The Police and Fear of Description here, via amazon, until they’re back in stock on bookshop.org).
Friends,
I’m so excited to welcome poet and editor Daniel Poppick onto the show.
To start, Daniel reads “Rumors” which is in the style of a haibun (in the style of Bashō), which blends prose and haiku. Here’s an excerpt: “Back at Kristen’s house, staring into this oceanic jigsaw piece, I wondered how or if my friends would recount this evening to one another at some later date: who would remember things correctly as they happened, and what we would all get wrong, if we would ever verify it accurately among one another, being our only witnesses, before we slowly melted down to be sipped up by worms, the whole scene as we remembered or forgot it blown away and buried in the architecture of our dust.”
He also reads “Paradise” and “A Rubber Lion” as well as an excerpt from “The Hell Test (Seven Springs)“
ON THIS EPISODE
- Poetry as concussion
- How do images become words?
- How poetry allows for many many worlds and reincarnation helps us solve problems
- Why a robot pterodactyl matters
- How a podcast is like a poem
- The poems we don’t get and why we still read them
- Experimental poems as threatening generosity
- Why poets are always writing poems about poetry
- Hell as a technology for understanding the world
- Two thoughts exercises on how to live
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Daniel, here’s his website, which has links to lots of great stuff – interviews, poems, essays – on it. • Some more AEWCH episodes with poets:
- AEWCH 40 with Zachary Schomburg
- AEWCH 73 with DA Powell
- AEWCH 95 with Maggie Nelson
- AEWCH 145 with Stephen Sexton
• Here’s an intro to Bashō, the 17th Century Japanese travel poet who was a huge influence on Daniel’s book, Fear of Description.
• If you didn’t catch the wheelbarrow reference Daniel dropped, it was to William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” which you can read (and read about) here.
• “I write poetry because I want to be alone and I want to talk to people.” – Allen Ginsburg
• Since Kathryn Davis’s novel, Hell, isn’t available on bookshop.org currently, here’s a link to it.
• “Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind’s feelings, you’ll survive.” – Richard Eberhart
Until next time pals,
CH
Conner Habib 