So I had this idea for a new strand on PK called Voice Noets With Poets. An audio gratitude (delivered as voice note) to some of my favourite makers about their work. In each episode you might hear my voice-note to them, and their voice note back, accompanied by other pleasant bleeps and bloops as part of the sonic package. I did one of these with Bryony Littlefair, and then ran out of steam, but I still like this one!
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TOPICS COVERED (In Order of Appearance): Tara Miller (poem); “hooks” in songs and poems; the workings of desire (what is desire using us for?); interruption in poetic narrative; affectionate abuse / ambivalent intimacies; the (un)blemished truths about ourselves/others; long-legged vs short-legged happiness; Jane Hirshfield’s giraffes (Articulation, An Assay); many-jointed expressive structures in poetry; conceptual untidiness; Colette Bryce’s giraffes (The Hopes); random influences & unhinged delight; the post-depressive giraffe of serendipitous happiness; Tully (spoilers); suburbia (no spoilers); “I could speak and I was happy. / Or: I could speak, thus I was happy. / Or: I was happy, thus speaking." (Louise Glück; nostalgic anxiety; the joy of inconclusiveness; terrible at pub quizzes; And it was at that age … / Poetry arrived / in search of me." (Neruda poem); identification with Dorianne Laux's After Twelve Days of Rain; I have always loved too much,
/ or not enough; hatless in the rain; the freedom of writing from a place of unknowing; making it as someone who makes it simple and sad.
This episode is proudly sponsored by the poem CHANCE DARKENED ME:
Chance darkened me
as a morning darkens,
preparing to rain.
It goes against its arc,
betrays its clock-hands.
The day was a dark-eyed giraffe,
its unfathomable legs
kept walking.
A person is not a day,
not rain,
no gentle eater of high leaves.
I did not keep walking.
The day inside me,
legs and lungs, kept walking.
-Jane Hirshfield
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