Celebration (interview w/ Denise Duhamel pt. 2)

The queens explore poetic law and rebellion with Denise Duhamel. Part 2 of their Breaking Form Interview concludes.

Please consider purchasing books by Denise and other poets we mention in this episode at Loyalty Bookstores, a Black-owned DC-area bookstore.

Denise Duhamel's most recent books of poetry are Second Story; Scald; and Blowout, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four poetry collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New). Her collaboration with Julie Marie Wade, The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, was published by Noctuary Press in 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She served as the guest editor is for The Best American Poetry 2013.

The pantoum is a Malaysian poetic form that was introduced into English literature in the 19th century. The pantoum consists of a series of quatrains rhyming abab in which the second and fourth lines of a quatrain recur as the first and third lines in the succeeding quatrain; each quatrain introduces a new second rhyme (as bcbc, cdcd). Although the pantoum was introduced into Western literature in the 19th century, it bears some resemblance to older French fixed forms, such as the rondeau and the villanelle.

Denise's poem "Terza Irma" appears in her book Second Story and was first published in The Missouri Review. You can read it here.

Watch Denise Duhamel read "Dear Memory" from Second Story here (~3 min).

Watch Timothy Berry recite "Ego" by Denise Duhamel (Poetry Out Loud competition).