Archive
Episode 124: Hafizah Geter & “The Black Period” (a "Reading with Rachel" / Commonplace School event and conversation)
Rachel speaks with poet, memoirist and literary agent Hafizah Geter about her recently published memoir The Black Period: On Personhood, Race and Origin. They speak one-on-one over zoom and then, a few weeks later, at the live-virtuaReading with Rachel salon. They speak about being poets writing prose, about writing to think and talking to think, MFA programs, writing classes, beauty, erasure, revision, being a craft junkie, TV, resisting “the privilege to obscure,” finding the question your book is trying to answer, writing yourself out of the shame you were given, rethinking reading and writing as solitary experiences, getting over the embarrassment of not knowing, and writing all over the walls.
Episode 123: Mary Ruefle
Rachel speaks with poet and erasure artist Mary Ruefle about menopause, thresholds, death, reading, museums, schools, podcasting, trees, wind, created violence, real violence, haiku, love, the erotics of reading, Yom Kippur, erasure, how to walk around the world two babysteps at a time, and more.
Episode 122: Reading Nicole Sealey's The Ferguson Report: an erasure (a "Reading with Rachel" / Commonplace School event)
Rachel speaks with poet and Commonplace producer Christine Larusso and then, a few weeks later, with Nicole Sealey at the live-virtual “Reading with Rachel” salon about Sealey’s recently published book-length erasure, The Ferguson Report: poems. Sealey describes why, how and when she erased this document and how the erasure and lifted poems became a book.
Episodes 120 + 121: Fred Moten and Ronaldo V. Wilson
In this two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Fred Moten about poetry as performance, influences and teachers, open field poetics, finding space for listeners and audience to feel welcome, how to define the limits—or lack thereof— of a book and, specifically, the performance they gave the night before at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church on May 24, 2023. Part one (ep 120) is a conversation about the performance. Part two (ep 121) is a recording of that performance.
Episode 118: Laurel Snyder
Rachel talks with long time friend and writer for children, Laurel Snyder. They talk about the Iowa Writers Workshop, Laurel’s path from poet to children’s book author, money, the novice brain, labor, being “messy and extra but not totally batshit,” the relationship between poetry and picture books, the experimental nature of picture books, world building, getting things out rather than getting things down.
Episode 117: Charif Shanahan & Safia Elhillo with Isaac Ginsberg Miller
Poets Safia Elhillo and Charif Shanahan talk to Isaac Ginsberg Miller, a poet and PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern, about their friendship, kinship, seeing and being seen by others, their intended audiences and ideal readers, inherited/received forms, and experimentalism.
Episode 116: The Gathered Congregation
Poets Jason Schneiderman, Cate Marvin, R. A. Villanueva, Lynn Xu and Rachel Zucker consider the pleasures, challenges, eccentricities and value of live, in-person poetry readings. These musings are followed by excerpts of the June 6, 2023 reading in Bryant Park (hosted by Jason and featuring Cate, Ron, Lynn and Rachel) and comments from the audience.
Episode 114: Live & Embodied: Conversations with Hope Mohr & Alyssa Harad about dance, performance & Alice Notley's Descent of Alette
Host Rachel Zucker talks with choreographer Hope Mohr about her dance Horizon Stanzas (inspired by Alice Notley's feminist epic the Descent of Alette) and with writer Alyssa Harad about performance, dance, Mohr, Notley...
