Just Keep Going (interview w/ Maureen Seaton pt. 1)

The queens are joined by Empress Maureen Seaton to discuss pushing the envelope....

Buy Maureen's books from Loyalty Bookstore, a DC-area Black-owned indie bookstore.

Maureen Seaton earned an MFA from Vermont College in 1996. She is the author of the more than 25 poetry collections, some of them authored in collaboration with writers like Samuel Ace, Denise Duhamel, and Neil de la Flor. Seaton, Duhamel, and David Trinidad edited an anthology titled Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (2007). Seaton is author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning memoir Sex Talks to Girls (2008), in which she addresses motherhood, sobriety, and sexuality. Her most recent books are Undersea and Genetics, which she published in 2021. 

Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk called “Your Elusive Creative Genius" confirms the story about Ruth Stone visualizing a poem as a sort of weather system. You can hear the whole talk here. 

Read a poem by Maureen's teacher Mark Cox here. 

 A triolet is an eight-line poem, French in origin, with only two rhymes used throughout. 

A rondelet's basic structure is:

• Line 1: A—four syllables
• Line 2: b—eight syllables
• Line 3: A—repeat of line one
• Line 4: a—eight syllables
• Line 5: b—eight syllables
• Line 6: b—eight syllables
• Line 7: A—repeat of line one

The refrained lines should contain the same words, however substitution or different use of punctuation on the lines has been common.

In 1965, Jack Spicer gave a talk on poetry as "dictation." The poet Michael Peterson, whose online post I'm linking to below, writes: "By Spicer's theorem, the poet was not a kind of inspired genius, but rather a "medium" for a psychic, spiritual, poetic message. The poem, in turn, was like a radio which picked up the transmission. This lecture became the stuff of poetry legend, the recording passed from person to person until it was finally made available online almost fifty years later. This is an early recording which I have edited down from almost three hours to just under thirty minutes."

You can watch Levine read Lorca's poem "New York (Office and Denunciation)" at the New York Public Library here (~5 min).

Marilyn Hacker read and discussed her career at the National Book Festival in 2016, and you can watch it here (~40 min).