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Scattered Rhymes: Christie Ann Reynolds

Ben Pease — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:06:43 +0000

REVENGE OF ALL THAT IS CAPABLE OF BEING REVENGED

Stand underneath my window
I have a piano for your head
And O sweet sunset you
Are only beautiful because
People who are finished making people
Smoke cigarettes
And those cigarettes are made in factories
With smokestacks
And those smokestacks release poison into the good sweet
Air like the mouths of the people letting out their smoking
And all of this letting out of poison marries the air
And the air marries the poison
Invisible as wind until it lifts
A skirt and a woman shows her beauties
To the entire boardwalk
How come beauty gets all the silence of eyes
And ugly is committed to the dumb of the mouth
I’d like to be so ugly
So that someone would want to let a piano
Love my head
I’d like you to be so ugly
That no one in the audience will listen
To me because they’re busy telling their love
How ugly you are and how if you were beside
Someone uglier
Or just as ugly
You would cancel out
Like the light through a prism
And both of you would become the base of all that is beautiful
And this is what I want to happen
This is what I want.

- – -

REVENGE FOR ALL THAT IS FRESH

I’m on a mission to do nothing but rise up inside of myself
To plant flowers inside my brain
And deny them a prairie
And once upon a time this solution
Was an easy A
Until I loved a man so well
I killed him with my breath
I was so much about beating
The air between my lips
And hovering around him like he was the last
Delicate fawn in the forest
I made him believe he was a god
Then our neighbor drove up with a dead Irish Setter
On his leather car seats
Because he hit the dog trying to make a left
And my man saw he wasn’t the only god
He was just another heartless handsome
In a pyre of desperate fires
Which means he was wanted by many
But only I had him
And he realized he was only a drug
I sometimes took to feel sane
About myself to prepare the world
For people who didn’t want to know what a woman
In a black dress looks like when she’s alone
Fuck the first tree that sprouted in a treeless field
And called itself the only of its kind in that part
I will have to reinvent the rectangle
So that it falls somewhere between a cube and a square and a parallelogram
And a placenta when it still has a baby

- – -

REVENGE FOR REVENGE

Just like you
I am alone in the world
I am alone just like you although no one is really ever alone
I only said that so I could enter
What it means to be alone
In the world
Even if no one
Ever is
No one ever finds a way to be
Entirely alone
Even when you are dead you are the most
Unalone even when you are sleeping you are the most
Unalone because so many are dead and sleeping at the same time
Even when you are the only person in the planetarium
There are all those stars
And planets without names
That have the possibility of life
Even if that possibility is in the inkling of a paramecium
And the paramecium with its almost-brain
Has a millennia or a thousand millennia until it has
To consider that being alone is a lot like
Being in a crowd of people you don’t know
Yes I think that is closer to being alone
Being with so many people
And not one knowing
If you believe in a god
Or if your dining room is bright and welcoming
With comfortable wooden chairs
Or if you are really a woman who sometimes feels
A little bit like a child
Trapped inside of her mother still

- – -

from I am going to save your life

Be my sister and spit into me.
Or spit into me so you can be my sister.
I’m hollowed out and its high time the coyotes hauled
out from the woods and gave mothers a good run for their babies.

They smell the way I smell between.

It took eleven minutes for me to lose my virginity.

He said thank you.

—

If I were a zombie, you would not be a zombie.
You would be the first time I touched myself
on a bicycle. Or the dynasty in China with all the white
and blue vases. I keep fucking up in love and not even by fucking.
I think of friends, O my good and tiny friends in Nate’s seaside house.
How easily friends laugh,and their ha-ha’s slide over from the summer
into September. We watch zombie movies that show zombies touching.
We discuss relativity and space
and we beat off to the flowers
until no one knows the difference
between us and the sun.

—

Being as small as me is a very large feat.
I am small.
Smaller than you have ever imagined
even though as a woman I have very long fingers that look like it—
but will never touch a piano in a way that makes it surrender.
We are always living in the same oval. I think we are so elliptical
that religion is just a way of keeping my grandmother and all her ghosts
on the treadmill in the guest room. I sleep in that room and know its scent.
I know its scent as if a fox has come and gone.
Come and gone and into the sheets
I screamed as I was coming.
You know how small I am.
A very large scream, a scream as loud
and howling as mine is also very beautiful if you know how to get it out of me.
Get it out of me.

—

November 3rd, 2001. November 4th, 2001.
I made a grave of my car and left Nick dying.
I couldn’t save him. I still can’t go to his grave, not even as a woman.
I can’t see a pile of dead flowers and know how everyone else’s
mouth touched his name. (Nick touching me in the treehouse.
Me in his velvet mouth.) The SUV hit him and fucking
is not like dying. I never wince when I run over a dead cat.
Like I’m finishing something twice.

—

There were rocks in the back of my high school
called The Love Rocks.
They were huge and wide and flat and Suzy
loves Davy and Miriam love(d)
Paul but someone came and bulldozed
the rocks when I went there to lose It
to some tall blonde boy. We decided to do it against the bricks.
It left scars where a pressing of hers into a pressing of his. His erection
was like the Empire State Building
from where I knelt and from my apartment
I can see the Empire State Building
when the leaves fall out.
I stare and stare and stare and think of you naked.

—

I stand just far away enough so I can cover you
with my thumb.

We fuck in between all the fighting.
You’re over me, hovering over me and I’m reminded of Pompeii.

Watching bulls gore men that look exactly like you.

I’ll stand just far away enough to look like a painting.

I’ll build and build and build and build and build and build, build, build, build,
build. I’ll say I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

—

You lit my cigarette and it would be years before I would bust your lip open
with a closet door. Circumstance after circumstance you misappropriated
my salute to the ocean and dropped a dinghy on top of me every time
I came with my mouth against your mouth. In the event of an emergency,
take the fire fighter and spray it all around. When I said fire fighter I meant
a transitional phase where all the pronouns associated with you will be
little smears of butterfly on the windshield.
I disguise myself in good teeth and dance moves.
I cloak myself in men I don’t care about.
Everyone misinterprets my pretty.

- – -

POSTSCRIPT

Get REVENGE POEMS
Get GIRL BOY GIRL BOY (scroll down a little)
Stain of Poetry Reading Series where Christie Ann is co-curator

Some of Christie Ann’s work online
EOAGH
La Petite Zine
ROBOT MELON
My name is mud (British online mag!)
Houston Literary Review (includes an earlier version of the first poem she read from her chapbook, Idiot Heart)

&c
More about Mercury in RETROGRADE
Remote-Controlled Kite
Jean Macpherson responds to two of Christie Ann’s poems that were in Lit. She reads one of these on the show, too!
Five stages of grief

“Prepare for Peoplery” by Christie Ann Reynolds

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Mirov

Scattered Rhymes: Ken Chen

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Fama

Scattered Rhymes: Josh Bettinger

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Fama

Ben Pease — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:22:48 +0000

Reach into the cloud
architecture, almost to the stars.
I lived where they are made
growing up as a kid.
I just wonder what people
are thinking sometimes,
or what happens to ideas
too un evil to endure.
Out there near the edge
the ferocactus has begun to bloom.
I heard once some skaters
were murdered there.
Today I would only
take advice from an angel.
She says soon you will grow
into a beautiful girl.
Soon you will become a planet,
moons and everything.
Sometimes I feel so happy
I forget I’m going to die,
then I go to the desert
with just my sticks
and wait for the shaman.
He always comes.
And raises a temple up
from the dirt, to give to my life
a gleam of delirium, that I may
accept the final results with grace.

—

Dear Mary Anne, I’m listening

This is where the world begins

When I lay on the bridge the city flattens

If we lived together I wouldn’t be bored right now, making stuff etc.

The doctor got off the couch

Said I’m not dying but he can’t be sure

I put my head in a cloud and really learn to breathe

Just in time for the wedding

The same picture in every horizon

A woman having her hair bobbed and a deserter from the navy

are the images for the full moon today

Once I lived in a place where the mountains would

glare down upon our symbolism and noise

Before you, the pattern of reality changes

A balloon ride is right around the corner from your office

Where the meaning is new but words have the same vibrations

Live a life on one

Smart people have the worst nightmares they say

To lay a pattern in order to survive a future crisis

Did you see what they did to Heather?

Yes I understand completely

Hot wind untangles complicated worries of the day

And blows all the tarot cards off of the table

Am I wasting my life?

Watching the leaves go like that toward the sky

What is the river doing?

Staring up at the bright ass sun

I want to make something two thousand people like

Daylight blankets what’s cared for and not cared for

Shitfaced, I demand human touch

Dreaming, I cosmically rule

The doctor’s a surfer

He rides from the window to my room

I filmed it in Seattle

At night I return to the sea

The facts in this case haven’t changed

Moon in Aquarius pushes us forward into our vision of the future

This morning they mowed the lawns

All day the breeze blows sweet

Here I made a memory

You can have it

Shake out the quilt of everyday talk

To get at a vision of light and pleasure

Where on water each ship is a promise

White sails of white satin sorrow

Roll your neck to the left and the right

To receive a change in headspace before a funeral

Or a mystical gift like a polka dot dress

A nap drifted in and out of my mind

All things for santeros, but forget all that

Here I am brand new

Lush as a dream, too punk for a sad heart

If you see the doctor tell him I said happy birthday

Tell him the panther caps are in the mail

And the black candles I never burned

Tell him my palm lines say wherever people go people are in love

Tell him I’m in the countryside with all my sorry breaths

Tell him I’m on my knees with my hands to the sun

Tell him he’s trapped, sure to make a tragic move

Tell him about the tulips with the pistils made of crystal

Tell him inside me there is an unsunny afternoon

Tell him to take his eyes out of my neck

Moon in Gemini squares Jupiter making today for releasing things forever

Like a fraying black cape or unreliable refrigerator

There’s a light outside that is too bright to bring in

And a Chevrolet wrecked at the edge of the trees

Before wet weather bird cries come quick on the air

Grope at the sky and pull down black clouds

In them sew the last days

Here becomes worshipped what is easy to understand why

A death prophecy everyone always will never talk about

My first friend died in another country while I slept

The second left the note: Yes, this is exactly how it feels!

She is, I’ve heard, still alive, combing down snows from the side of a mountain

It melts into a creek where the farm kids bathe

Their symbols are all the rainbows

They grow into music

Then they get birds and the behavior of birds

The old get public parks

Let the dying have a view of the mountains

Stars are for later

Pull me through a dream

Every idea, of course, is a spell

Mix four ounces of rosewater and pour it into a bowl

Carve one side of a thick white candle with a quick portrait of yourself

Rub a layer of amyris oil around the side of the candle and inside the grooves

Place equal parts frankincense and copal resin in a cauldron

Slowly light the edge of the mix in a crescentic circle

Light the candle

Insert the end of the blade into your hand

If you see light stop immediately

Cut past remorse and future trepidation

Tilt your palm toward the center of the bowl

A turn in weather provokes emotional rush

Memorize the shapes as the drops touch the water

Memorize the sounds

This is what you own

Reach through the sunny dust of day

To ripple the still with your exorbitant limb

Farther out than earth ships could be

Lean out the scene of a moving car

To go into it means to make a mark in the dirt

Moon in Aquarius pushes us forward into a vision of the future

An entire forest just for you

—

This world repeats a soft etc.
Invisible wind,
open up and feel.
It must be a part
of the daily breezes
that roar down the mountain,
the mountain you prefer.
I live inside a crystal ball
that only sees behind me.
Once I was a teen king
thundering over the peasants.
I was born in the image of Steve.
Once I was a farm boy
on the level of clouds.
Float me back to those heights.
I remember yellow heat
in my yellow clothes and
an idea like a campfire
telling me it wasn’t sure
I’ve ever done the right thing.
Now when it asks for cures
I retrieve an amulet from a secret
altar of things that make me calm
to look upon, and when it asks
Fama, where is your love now?
I think about eating poutine
from the small of her back.

—

POSTSCRIPT

SUPERMACHINE

Brian Eno bio and a youtube
Barbara Guest’s Forces of Imagination
Twin Peaks
Scorpio Rising

Fama Links
New Waves Tumblr
Aquarius Rising
HTML write-up
Fama at notnostrums
at I am a Natural Wonder
Fama on Eno

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Mirov

Scattered Rhymes: Ken Chen

Scattered Rhymes: Josh Bettinger

Scattered Rhymes: Sarah Schweig

Scattered Rhymes: Colin Cheney

Scattered Rhymes: Brandon Kreitler

Ben Pease — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:56:00 +0000

Brandon Kreitler

Cardinality

The shotgun shines
___radiant history across the mantle.

The wind rips through a rolodex of the names of the dead.
___It could be a litany, almost
______like the registers of Audubon societies
___and the Who’s Who of West Virginia 1974
______begging for a trumpet in morning,
a waltz and then a nap
___in the hush of a million miraculously lit libraries.

And in waking,
___a waking more this time than a polite not yet to the idea of death,
the atom of speech.
___Not like an old man mumbling to himself in baseball metaphor,
______but like a drop of rain in the palm,
___reminding that above there are stars in the continual ricochet of triangulation,
______bodies positioning themselves
_________in relation to a reference for which
______we have no analog.

But one can take comfort in the miscalculation of the heights of see-saw fulcrums,
___a child running around with a gold wrestling belt,
______brave men on Massachusetts quarters,
___Silver State on silver,
______———-, American.

The wiper does not draw barren Nebraska across the windshield,
___and the merry-go-round children are not about to be
pulled from their fiberglass horses in rapture.

I am acknowledging this.

And yet the story doesn’t end.

An act is a draft for the acts that follow.
___We say forward and pinewood cars fly down their tracks.
After/at and a mother makes the wedding.
___Like a bow.

I haven’t earned this but I’m hitching myself to your kindness.

There is a photo in my living room
___on the back of which scribbled are the words
______memory is an anachronism.
In the picture a child is
___dragging a stick though the sand
in the vacuum of summer.
___And I am sure that each grain had to pick a side.

John Wayne in Municipal Projection

A movie playing on the courthouse lawn,
________________________specked light flooding
__________________the summer air.
John Wayne in a panorama of desert
______against the stone wall. Beyond this city
the actual desert stretches
for more miles
______than we have ever known what to do with.
Like the air an empty category, unthinkable
alone.
__________________Enough cannot be said of his horse
in its unfathomable redness,
______surveying the prop buffalo in the basin,
____________the rigor of the battle dead.
You said there is nothing true of love
______that is not also true of the Waffle House.

______In the real heat some kids are dancing to an unheard music
in the grass,
______in the light before image,
as though to say these, my feet,
______are the circumference
of my world,
______as if to say I.
____________Stars drown
like pills
______in a soft pink mouth.
The gold dust in the projector light
______has yet to stop falling.

In the Cordage of the Municipality

The aperture of dawn breaks
over the government lake
embalming our long apprenticeship
to dust stalled in the tertiary gloss.
The scrutiny of a man between needs.
The wanting less to be oneself
than to hold one’s place—
to insist sincerity is only
the desire to have said
what one has said.
The rooms replenish themselves
with a stable of objects:
an apple core browning in the drain,
button shirts hung in the limpid forms of bodies elsewhere,
in a stable of rooms which relay their tedium
like figurations in a language made of a single word.
The city remains and the city is grammar.

POSTSCRIPT

Paul Horn’s Inside the Great Pyramid
William Basinski’s disintegration loop
Gun on the wall
Quabbin Resevoir
Cardinality
Cardinal Numbers
Origin of looking a gift horse in the mouth

Poems

Diagram
Boston Review
Eoagh
Poem of the week here on The The!
Web Conjunctions

Articles

Brandon’s article on William Basinski
Another on Animal Collective and the like
Feature article/interview with Matt Wolf on his Arthur Russell documentary

Brandon’s blog .

Poem of the Week: Brandon Kreitler

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Mirov

Scattered Rhymes: Ken Chen

Scattered Rhymes: Evan Hansen

Scattered Rhymes: Sarah Schweig

Scattered Rhymes: Ken Chen

Ben Pease — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 13:00:59 +0000

See some of Ken Chen’s poems and find links to items mentioned in the podcast.

Ken Chen Interview

Scattered Rhymes: Colin Cheney

Scattered Rhymes: Solmaz Sharif

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Mirov

Scattered Rhymes: Deborah Landau

Scattered Rhymes: Colin Cheney

Ben Pease — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:00:15 +0000

See some of the poems Colin reads in the podcast and find links to items discussed during the interview.

Colin Cheney Interview

Scattered Rhymes: Solmaz Sharif

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Mirov

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes: Deborah Landau

Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece

Scattered Rhymes: Solmaz Sharif

Ben Pease — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 13:00:59 +0000

See the poems Solmaz Sharif reads in the interview and find links to some items discussed during the interview.

Solmaz Sharif Interview

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Mirov

Scattered Rhymes: Deborah Landau

Solmaz Sharif

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes: Josh Bettinger

Scattered Rhymes: Deborah Landau

Ben Pease — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 13:00:59 +0000

Read some of Deborah’s poems here and find links to some of the things Ben and Deborah talk about in the interview.

Deborah Landau Interview

Deborah Landau

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Mirov

Poetry Fix, Episodes 13 & 14: Mary Oliver and Keats

Scattered Rhymes: Josh Bettinger

Scattered Rhymes: Ben Mirov

Ben Pease — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 13:00:27 +0000

Click here to see some of the poems Ben Mirov reads and find some other links to items from the interview.

Ben Mirov, Part 1

Ben Mirov, Part 2

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes: Josh Bettinger

Three Poems and an Interview with Ben Mirov

Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece

Scattered Rhymes: Dawn Marie Knopf

Poetry Fix, Episode 20: Weldon Kees

Chris Robinson — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 08:00:13 +0000

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Weldon Kees’s poem “1926.”

Poetry Fix, Episode 17: Milosz

Poetry Fix Episode 11: Terrence Hayes

Poetry Fix, Episodes 13 & 14: Mary Oliver and Keats

Poetry Fix, Episode 18: More Milosz

Poetry Fix Episode 10: William Matthews

Scattered Rhymes: Morgan Parker

Ben Pease — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 13:00:34 +0000

Anthropology, publishing houses in elementary school, estrangement, ants conferencing over Frank Zappa. Morgan Parker describes herself as equipped with the eyes of a surrealist, ears of an ethnographer, tongue of a cynical comedian, and heart of a brooding sixteen-year old.

Morgan Parker, Part 1

Morgan Parker, Part 2

Scattered Rhymes: Sarah Schweig

Scattered Rhymes: Josh Bettinger

Scattered Rhymes: Dawn Marie Knopf

Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece

Scattered Rhymes: Evan Hansen

Poem of the Week: Brandon Kreitler

Adam Fitzgerald — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:36:22 +0000

Epithalamium with Rust

I remember the dream of rust on its own vague terms:
dredging the canal as though it were oneself,
hoping for trinkets that fix life to a landscape of flowers and trash,
and settling for bothering the levee with a stick,
notching my time card in the holy city.

In the margins of sky and dust––distance specific to the dream of distance––
the thought of water comes on like vanity. It is error,
as are the certainties of children, to make much of the dumb bend of sun
on copper, to heed what God writes in the sand with his pretty little feet.

Crows flood from the factory shell and out over trump ground,
into the easy marriage of actuality and nothingness that is the long patina
of days, drunk on lawn seed and disquiet.
I remember it again, but differently. Archipelagos of debris and glow,
stars fashioning what light benefits the dead…

_______________________________________________

Brandon Kreitler‘s poems have appeared in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Web Conjunctions, Indiana Review, Eoagh, Sonora Review, and Maggy. His criticism has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Proximity, and Village Voice among others. He was a winner of the 2010 Discovery / “Boston Review” award and a finalist for the 2010 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. A native of Arizona, he teaches at Queensborough Community College and is working on a manuscript of poems.

“Waltz with Sticks” by Genevieve Burger-WeiserApril 19, 2010

Poem of the Week: Camille Rankine

“Via” by Amy LawlessApril 2, 2010

“The Sweetness of Herbert” by Stuart KrimkoFebruary 18, 2010

Poem of the Week Doubleheader! Colie Hoffman & Maya Funaro

Scattered Rhymes: Sarah Schweig

Ben Pease — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 13:00:58 +0000

Sarah Schweig, neighbor to airfields, estrangement, mythology, imagination, opens up about how she came to be a poet of departures. Pardon my inability to pronounce Catullus.

Sarah Schweig, Part 1

Sarah Schweig, Part 2

Sarah V. Schweig, Zachary Pace, & more!

Scattered Rhymes: Josh Bettinger

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece

Scattered Rhymes: Evan Hansen

Poem of the Week: Evan Hansen

Adam Fitzgerald — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:00:35 +0000

He’s like those children who take apart a clock in order to find out what time is

“Fog forgets. Fog is forgetting.”
This was hard for the drunk man
on the shuddering train to say
clearly, but he managed in fits
and spurts—thoughts through
a kinked hose. In a past life,

when you wiped the counters,
the dogs stared up with saucer
eyes from the hardwood floor
as if you were a cleaning deity.
I was in the kitchen, too, waiting.
You’d stare into the vacant lot

through a window on the socially
awkward sycamore disrobing amid
frozen beer bottles and losing lottery
tickets. You were your own
undocumented fog. Years pass.
I’m still an inverse of the spiritual—

still feeling merciless forgetting
can’t mean joining cosmic order.
Above, a building rakes sky
as if it were the obscure index
finger of want, losing its end
in a belly of low, concise cloud.

________________________________________________________

Evan Hansen lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a public high school teacher. He has work forthcoming in Issue 50 of The Cortland Review.

Scattered Rhymes: Evan Hansen

On Poets and Speakers

“Canopic Jars” by Samantha Zighelboim

Reciting your own poems from memory is for supernerds, or the worst project of my life

Poem of the Week: David Lehman

Scattered Rhymes: Josh Bettinger

Ben Pease — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:00:36 +0000

He’s just a west-coast boy, living in New York City, he took the express train to where good poems reside. I must be tired or going insane, but Josh Bettinger is without a doubt on his game in these five poems—five because he claimed they were all shorties, but it’s not long into the interview that we see how stocky these poems are—look at these guys the wrong way and they’ll tear your face off.

Josh mentions this movie trailer several times in part 2, he insists you watch it: It’s all about the three parts of the trick.

Josh Bettinger, Part 1

Josh Bettinger, Part 2

Scattered Rhymes is Coming! Josh Bell

Scattered Rhymes: Evan Hansen

Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece

Scattered Rhymes: Dawn Marie Knopf

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

Poetry Fix, Episode 19: Thomas Lux

Chris Robinson — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:00:58 +0000

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Thomas Lux’s poem “Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy.”

Poetry Fix, Episode 17: Milosz

Poetry Fix Episode 11: Terrence Hayes

Poetry Fix, Episodes 13 & 14: Mary Oliver and Keats

Poetry Fix, Episode 18: More Milosz

Poetry Fix Episode 10: William Matthews

Scattered Rhymes: Dawn Marie Knopf

Ben Pease — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:00:38 +0000

Of course, the first guest on the show to grow up in one of the largest wilderness preserves in the United States, Yosemite National Park, provides me with a photo of herself taken indoors. Dawn Marie Knopf’s poetry feeds off a particularly American mythos: old wives’ tales, Farmer’s Almanacs, the revered stories of American pop heroes before they made it big. Playing both sides of the coin, Knopf enjoys both the extension of these fables to a magical extreme and the reduction of them to a sorry tall tale. Does the ball ultimately land in- or out-of-bounds? Listen to the interview to find out.

Dawn Marie Knopf, Part 1

Dawn Marie Knopf, Part 2

Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece

Scattered Rhymes: Evan Hansen

Scattered Rhymes is Coming! Josh Bell

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

The Super Happy Fun Poem Challenge of the Day in Three Steps

Poetry Fix, Episode 18: More Milosz

Chris Robinson — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:00:24 +0000

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Late Ripeness.”

Poetry Fix, Episode 17: Milosz

Poetry Fix Episode 11: Terrence Hayes

Poetry Fix, Episodes 13 & 14: Mary Oliver and Keats

Poetry Fix Episode 10: William Matthews

Poetry Fix Episode 16: Heather McHugh

Poetry Fix, Episode 17: Milosz

Chris Robinson — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 13:00:55 +0000

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Czeslaw Milosz’s poems “On Prayer” and “And Yet the Books.”

Poetry Fix Episode 11: Terrence Hayes

Poetry Fix, Episode 12: Baseball Haiku

Poetry Fix Episode 15: Transtromer

Poetry Fix, Episodes 13 & 14: Mary Oliver and Keats

Poetry Fix Episode 10: William Matthews

Scattered Rhymes: Evan Hansen

Ben Pease — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 07:00:31 +0000

I’ve never seen Evan Hansen wear a cowboy hat, but his pensive look in this picture displays the same concern he shows in his poetry for people and the tremendous, unspeakable burdens they carry on a daily basis. While the characters in these poems at times find solace, it is by no means permanent, and Hansen makes us wonder if a lifetime of momentary relief might be the best we can hope for. With that in mind, here’s to the upcoming long weekend providing us all with a little more time to relax our way into the summer.

Evan Hansen, Part 1

Evan Hansen, Part 2

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes is Coming! Josh Bell

Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece

Portland

Scattered Rhymes is Coming! Josh Bell

Ben Pease — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 19:32:28 +0000

The Scattered Rhymes podcast was making itself a home at THEthe. In anticipation of the coming podcast, we are reposting the old episodes from the Scattered Rhymes website.

Today we’re reposting the 3rd episode of Scattered Rhymes: an interview with Josh Bell.

Part 1

Josh Bell, Part 1

Part 2

Josh Bell, Part 2

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece

“Flesh Becomes Word” poetry podcast by Scott Cairns

WHAT’S YOUR IDEA OF A GOOD TIME?

Poetry Fix, Episodes 13 & 14: Mary Oliver and Keats

Poetry Fix Episode 16: Heather McHugh

Chris Robinson — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 13:00:39 +0000

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Heather McHugh’s poem “I Knew I’d Sing.”

Poetry Fix Episode 11: Terrence Hayes

Poetry Fix, Episodes 13 & 14: Mary Oliver and Keats

Poetry Fix Episode 10: William Matthews

Poetry Fix, Episode 12: Baseball Haiku

Poetry Fix Episode 15: Transtromer

Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece

THEthe Poetry Blog Editors — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 13:00:49 +0000

Last week we made the exciting announcement that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes podcast was making itself a home at THEthe. In anticipation of the coming podcast, we are reposting the old episodes from the Scattered Rhymes website.

Today we’re reposting the 2nd episode from Scattered Rhymes, which features an interview with Joseph Spece.

Joseph Spece, Part 1

Joseph Spece, Part 2

Note: The interview takes place at JC’s apt., so here and there you may hear mention of a picture of the Winged Victory in the living room or various trinkets on a counter in his bedroom.

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

“Flesh Becomes Word” poetry podcast by Scott CairnsMarch 2, 2010

WHAT’S YOUR IDEA OF A GOOD TIME?

SONNETS by Bernadette Mayer

TangentFebruary 17, 2010

Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe!

THEthe Poetry Blog Editors — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 13:00:48 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes podcast is going to become the official podcast of THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes is a long-form interview podcast in which poets discuss and read their work. Ben Pease has been doing the podcast for several years now and has created a back log of work that THEthe will be reposting over the next month or so in anticipation of Scattered Rhymes’ next installment. From that point on, we hope to make Scattered Rhymes a monthly endeavor. The latest episode will be posted and featured on THEthe and later archived at the Scattered Rhymes website.

The first featured poet from the Scattered Rhymes podcast is Gail Mazur.

Gail Mazur Interview, Part 1

Gail Mazur, Part 1

Gail Mazur Interview, Part 2

Gail Mazur, Part 2

“Flesh Becomes Word” poetry podcast by Scott CairnsMarch 2, 2010

WHAT’S YOUR IDEA OF A GOOD TIME?

Joe Weil on Hecht’s “A Hill”February 25, 2010

Deborah Landau

Hamlet and his (Public) Problems