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Commonplace Podcast
A series of intimate and captivating interviews by Rachel Zucker with poets and artists about quotidian objects, experiences or obsessions, Commonplace conversations explore the recipes, advice, lists, anecdotes, quotes, politics, phobias, spiritual practices, and other non-Literary forms of knowledge that are vital to an artist’s life and work. One feels, when listening to Commonplace, the pleasure of eavesdropping on the kind of unexpected, intriguing connections that only happen when interesting people sit together in a small room and talk about their real concerns and ordinary lives.
Episode 128: Hey, It’s Me Feed Drop from KTCO
Welcome to a new podcast by Mike Sakasegawa and Rachel Zucker: Hey, It’s Me. In this feed drop from Keep the Channel Open, Mike asks Rachel: “What are we going to talk about? And are we really doing this?” We hope you enjoy this strange, relatable, meta meta meta conversation on friendship, social media, relationships, and beyond.
Episode 127: Hanif Abdurraqib with Stuti Sharma
Stuti Sharma, a student of Hanif Abdurraqib, interviews him as a guest-host for Commonplace and they discuss writing communities, traveling to US cities, and music as a vessel for connection. They also talk about cultivating literary friendships, vulnerability, and memory—in the context of loss, and in the context of loving someone in many stages of their life. After the interview, you will hear audio footage from Hanif’s reading at Smith College in Spring 2023, where he gives a preview of the now-released book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension.
Episode 126: D. A. Powell
While on a trip to San Francisco, Rachel checks in with her longtime friend, poet D. A. Powell. The two discuss what D. A. is working on and what has changed for him since the two recorded episode 13 of Commonplace back in 2016. This episode contains excerpts from a listening party that Rachel and Doug attended the night before curated by Gabrielle Civil and featuring a recording of poets Judy Grahn and Pat Parker. Doug and Rachel talk about their friendship, optimism and hopelessness during times of political tension and the pandemic, how poetry is a transfer of energy, and prioritizing the writing of individual poems over the making of a book. Doug reminds Rachel to give herself a vacation from words and talks about the pleasures of making art that he gives away.
Episode 125: The Poetics of Motherhood
The third of five episodes featuring the lectures that became Rachel Zucker’s newest book, The Poetics of Wrongness. After an introduction from Rachel this episode contains archival audio of “Why She Could Not Write A Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood” presented at the UC Berkeley English Department on November 15, 2016 and the introduction to the event given by poet Robert Hass. In this lecture, Rachel Zucker—while teaching and mothering and preparing to record a conversation with poet mother Alicia Ostriker in the months leading up to and in the days following the 2016 presidential election—discusses the difficulty of writing a lecture on the work of poet mothers Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Toi Derricotte and others, and what might or might not constitute a poetics of motherhood.
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.