Patti Smith arrived in New York City at the end of the Age of Aquarius in search of work and purpose. What she found—what she fostered—was a cultural revolution. Through her poetry, her songs, her unapologetic vocal power, and her very presence as a woman fronting a rock band, she kicked open a door that countless others walked through. No other musician has better embodied the “nothing-to-hide” rawness of punk, nor has any other done more to nurture a place in society for misfits of every stripe. Why Patti Smith Matters(University of Texas Press, 2022)is the first book about the iconic artist written by a woman. The veteran music journalistCaryn Rosecontextualizes Smith’s creative work, her influence, and her wide-ranging and still-evolving impact on rock and roll, visual art, and the written word. Rose goes deep into Smith’s oeuvre, from her first album,Horses, to acclaimed memoirs operating at a surprising remove from her music. The portrait of a ceaseless inventor,Why Patti Smith Mattersrescues punk’s poet laureate from “strong woman” clichés. Of course Smith is strong. She is also a nuanced thinker. A maker of beautiful and challenging things. A transformative artist who has not simply entertained but also empowered millions. Caryn Rose can be found onTwitterand you can read her work in hernewsletter. Rebekah Buchananis a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
Today’s guests are Dennis Austin Britton and Kimberly Anne Coles who have co-edited a special issue ofSpenser Studiesin 2021, on “Spenser and Race.” Dennis is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia; his previous bookBecoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance,was published through Fordham University Press in 2014. Dennis is the former board president of the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire. Kim is Professor of English at the University of Maryland; she has publishedReligion, Reform and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England, with Cambridge University Press in 2008; andBad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, with the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. We will be discussing the impetus and contributions of this special issue, which features brilliant scholarship by Tess Grogan, Anna Wainwright, Ayanna Thompson, Melissa Sanchez, Eric Song, Urvashi Chakravarty, Ross Lerner, Andrew Hadfield, Thomas Herron, and Benedict Robinson. John Yargoholds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published inStudies in Philology,The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, andShakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
Mark Kyungsoo Bias speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem “Adoption Day,” which appears inThe Common’snew spring issue. Mark talks about the inspiration and process behind the poem, which looks at issues like memory, immigration, and racism in post-9/11 America, all through the lens of a family experience. Mark also discusses his approach to language, sound, line breaks, and more, and the methods and techniques he’s found helpful in revising poetry. He reads two additional poemspublished inThe Common: “Meeting My Mother” and “Visitor.” Mark Kyungsoo Bias is the recipient of the 2022 Joseph Langland Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the 2020 William Matthews Poetry Prize. A semi-finalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize, he has been offered support from Bread Loaf, Kundiman, and Tin House. He is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has work published or forthcoming inThe Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, The Common, PANK, Poets.org,andWashington Square Review,among other journals. Read Mark’s poems inThe Commonatthecommononline.org/tag/mark-kyungsoo-bias/ Read more from Mark atmarkkyungsoobias.com, or follow him on Twitter at@mk_bias. The Commonis a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages,The Commonfeatures established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine atthecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter@CommonMag. Emily Everettis managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter@Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
Manan Kapoor talks about the Ghazal, the medieval Arabic poetic form which travelled to the Indian subcontinent in the 12th century and flourished there ever since. He focuses on the work of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet who perfected the art of the ghazal in the English language. Kapoor’s biography of Shahid,A Map of Longings, was published earlier this year. Particular references are made to the poem “In Arabic” from Shahid’s collectionCall me Ishmael Tonight,the ghazals sung by Begum Akhtar which greatly influenced Shahid’s work, and English ghazals written by poets like Adrienne Rich which he critiqued. Manan Kapooris an Indian writer and translator.A Map of Longings:The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali (Vintage, Penguin Random House India) is his latest work. His debut novelThe Lamentations of a Sombre Skywas shortlisted for Sahitya Akademi’s Yuva Puruskar 2017. In 2019, he was a writer-in-residence at Sangam House Writers’ Residency. His writings have appeared inThe Caravan Magazine, Boston Review, The Hindu, Stockholm Review of Literature, Scroll, The Wire,andFirstpostamong others. He lives in Chandigarh. Image: “Gazelle” 2021 Saronik Bosu (The word ‘ghazal’ and ‘gazelle’ share a root in Arabic, the poetic form compared originally to the lament of a wounded gazelle). Music used for promotional material: “Raga Kirwani” on the Sarod by Ustad Ali Akbar Khan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
Corey Ichigen Hess is an ordained Zen monk and body therapist. He lived a monastic life for many years at Sogenji Zen Monastery in Okayama, Japan. He teaches meditation classes and works with individual clients doing private embodiment process coaching sessions, Sourcepoint Therapy, Structural Integration, and Biodynamic Craniosacral therapy at his home on Whidbey Island in Langley, Washington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
Walt Whitman knew a great deal about democracy that we don’t. Most of that knowledge is concentrated in one stunning poem,Song of Myself. InSong of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy(Harvard UP, 2021),esteemed cultural and literary thinker Mark Edmundson offers a bold reading of the 1855 poem, included here in its entirety. He finds in the poem the genesis and development of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Whitman broke from past literature that he saw as “feudal”: obsessed with the noble and great. He wanted instead to celebrate the common and everyday.Song of Myselfdoes this, setting the terms for democratic identity and culture in America. The work captures the drama of becoming an egalitarian individual, as the poet ascends to knowledge and happiness by confronting and overcoming the major obstacles to democratic selfhood. In the course of his journey, the poet addresses God and Jesus, body and soul, the love of kings, the fear of the poor, and the fear of death. The poet’s consciousness enlarges; he can see more, comprehend more, and he has more to teach. In Edmundson’s account, Whitman’s great poem does not end with its last line. Seven years after the poem was published, Whitman went to work in hospitals, where he attended to the Civil War’s wounded, sick, and dying. He thus became in life the democratic individual he had prophesied in art. Even now, that prophecy gives us words, thoughts, and feelings to feed the democratic spirit of self Jonathan Najarian is Lecturer of Rhetoric in the College of General Studies at Boston University. He is the editor of Comics and Modernism: History, Form, Culture, a collection of essays exploring the connections between avant-garde art and comics. He is also at work on a biography of the visual artist Lynd Ward, titled The Many Lives of Lynd Ward. He can be reached atjoncn@bu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
Since the original airing of this episode in June 2021, Roger Reeves' second bookError! Hyperlink reference not valid. was published by W.W. Norton, and the paperback edition of David Ferry's translation ofThe Aeneidwas published by the University of Chicago Press. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way. In conversation with Elizabeth for this episode of Recall this Book, originally broadcast back in 2021, poets Roger Reeves and David Ferry join the procession through the underworld, each one leading the other. They talk about David’s poemResemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave ...
This intricate, yearning work from award-winning poet Alison Calder asks us to think about the way we perceive and the ways in which we seek to know ourselves and others. InSynaptic(University of Regina Press, 2022)each section explores key themes in science, neurology, and perception. The first, Connectomics, riffs on scientific language to work with and against that language’s intentions. Attempting to map the brain’s neural connections, it raises fundamental questions about interiority and the self. The lyric considerations in these poems are juxtaposed against the scientific-like footnotes which, in turn, invoke questions undermining authority and power. The second section, Other Disasters, explores ways of seeing or and being seen, from considerations of folklore to modern art to daily life. Sine Yaganoglutrained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...
The collapse of the Soviet Union forced Russia to engage in a process of nation building. This involved a reassessment of the past, both historical and cultural, and how it should be remembered. The publication of previously barely known underground and émigré literary works presented an opportunity to reappraise "official" Soviet literature and re-evaluate twentieth-century Russian literature as a whole. Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith's bookCanonicity, Twentieth-Century Poetry and Russian National Identity After 1991(Peter Lang, 2020) explores changes to the poetry canon – an instrument for maintaining individual and collective memory – to show how cultural memory has informed the evolution of post-Soviet Russian identity. It examines how concerns over identity are shaping the canon, and in which directions, and analyses the interrelationship between national identity (whether ethnic, imperial, or civic) and attempts to revise the canon. Canonicity, Twentieth-Century Poe...
Drawing inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Parker-Ohene's poetic narratives follow a historical arc of consciousness of Black folks: mislaid in potters' fields and catalogued with other misbegotten souls, now unsettled as the unknown Black denominator. Who loved them? Who turned them away? Who dismembered their souls? In death, they are the institutionalized marked Black bodies assigned to parcels, scourged beneath plastic sheets identified as a number among Harriets as black, marked bodies. These poems speak to how the warehousing of enslaved and somewhat free beings belies their humanity through past performances in reformatories, workhouses, and hospitals for the negro insane. To whom did their Black lives belong? How are Black grrls socialized within the family to be out in the world? What is the beingness of Black women? How have the Harriets--the descended daughters of Harriet Tubman--confronted issues of caste and multiple oppressions? The poems inDaughters ...