In anticipation of the Collingswood Book Festival, we thought it might be nice to have some of our senior editors and a couple of festival participants sit down for a proper chat about poetry and community, the anonymity of sending work out into the void and the anonymity of masks, and of course, bears and bathrobes. Enjoy and let us know what you think! Has the pandemic made writing more universal or melted our minds so terribly that our relationship to literature has changed? Will readings stay virtual and/or can we find a happy relationship between Zoom and IRL? This episode includes these special guests: Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, The Rumpus, PANK, Guernica, ESPNW, and elsewhere. In collaboration with Philadelphia Contemporary, Friends of the Rail Park, and Asian Arts Initiative, her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia from July to August 2021. She has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and is a 2021-2022 Poet in Residence at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, MA. She is originally from Bali, Indonesia.  Rogan Kelly is the author of Demolition in the Tropics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in New Orleans Review, The Penn Review, Plume, RHINO, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Night Heron Barks and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. We thought we’d include our bio’s here, since we never do: Jason Schneiderman is the author of four books of poems, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen 2020) and Primary Source (Red Hen 2016). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, VQR, The Believer, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet; he is a co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile. His awards include the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is an Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  Kathleen Volk Miller has written for LitHub, NYT Modern Love, O, the Oprah magazine, Salon, the NYTimes, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Family Circle, Philadelphia Magazine and other venues. “How We Want to Live,” an essay, was chosen as the penultimate piece in Oprah’s Book of Starting Over (Flat Iron Books, Hearst Publications, 2016). She is co-editor of the anthology, Humor: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is co-editor of The Painted Bride Quarterly and co-host of PBQ’s podcast, Slush Pile. She has also published in literary magazines, such as Drunken Boat, Opium, and other venues. She holds “Healing through Writing” and “Writing and Neuroplasticity” workshops, and other memoir classes. She consults on literary magazine start up, working with college students, and getting published in literary magazines.  She is a professor at Drexel University.  Marion Wrenn is Director of the Writing Program; Senior Lecturer of Writing and Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. Marion C. Wrenn is a media critic, cultural historian, and literary editor who writes essays and creative non-fiction. She earned her PhD from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and has received grants and awards from NYU, the AAUW, and the Rockefeller Archive Center.  Recent work on satirical news and citizen audiences have appeared in Poetics. Her essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, South Loop Review, and elsewhere. She co-edits the literary journal Painted Bride Quarterly (pbqmag.org) and has taught writing at NYU, Parsons, and the Princeton Writing Program.  This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist  A.M.Mills, whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile

Episode 93: Go Away & Come Home

This episode is about allusions, Slushies. How do poems gain dimension by relying on references? Where is that ekphrastic sweet spot?  Listen in as we focus on the poems of July Westhale. Under the influence of her work, we talk glass flowers, ghost towns, road trips, and snow. Here are links to a few of the references and allusion we make on the show, inspired by Westhale’s way of seeing the world:  This is America; “My Mother is a Fish”; Teresa Leo’s Junkie; and ee cumminings [i carry your heart with me]   With thanks to one of our sponsors,  Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” now opens our show.  At the table: Samantha Neugebauer, Alex Tunney, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, and Marion Wrenn   July Westhale is an essayist, translator, and the award-winning author of Trailer Trash, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called "stunning" in a starred review. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. She also has an inventively-named collection of salty chapbooks. When she’s not teaching, she works as a co-founding editor of PULP Magazine. www.julywesthale.com     Rotten Apples Return to Harvard's Glass Flowers Exhibition   What you have heard is true— something rotten once got us from our houses, from our beds where what was there may or may not have been.   Remember, my darling, my sweet, that a blistered and blackened thing, a thing representing life/ sin itself, was a cause for art. Gave a man, many men, a lineage of pride.   The moon rose tonight as usual, no spore-filled scab. As ivory as the cut belly of an apple sliced to share. Nothing noxious to point to, say you.   The world of museums and love are, as it turns out, through the machinations and designations of man-made things, defined by abstractions: Security, beauty, even, in our worst days.   One day, Blaschka told his son, yes—   American Literature   for Joey   “the silver lamp,--the ravishment, --the wonder--the darkness,--loneliness, the fearful thunder” John Keats   There’s a billboard with the route 66’s version of June Cleaver, holding a pie underneath block letters HO-MADE PIES, which is how dry towns get their jollies, I guess.   We buy coffee in cups so thin the joe becomes us and we never regain our human shapes, and I say to you I wonder where they keep the half-bull man and you shotgun back I’ve spent my life asking that like the sharp shooter you are.   Who wouldn’t want to be the son of a bull and a damned woman we are all sons of bull and damn        you’ve gone West to find everything or me   and look at girls the way I look at girls who are bad for me. Like a desert through slatternly windows. This is America: the big-pricked statues statuary in their old-growth knowing: in the end--spoiler alert--we’re both after the wrong bandit, the bank gets robbed, the two women who should be lovers but aren’t arc their Caddie like a rainbow into the lavish vaginal canyon at the last moment, the whale gets away, Faulkner’s pretend mother doesn’t get the burial she deserves, we have to choose between Liz Taylor in a kerchief or James Dean with his shirt stuttered open, and we can’t---   moon moon   Now there’s snow on the ocean, which is meant to confuse us and does, though not because we are unprepared for it but rather because the sight of it reminds us of the static-hearted parts of our bodies as they prostrate themselves in years-over-yonder: exploratory attempts to find warmth—not unlike a surefooted expedition—, in the disappearance of everything ripe—now covered with snow’s annihilating speeches—, in the blank stares of our children as they amputate themselves from us, in the cloudscape of come forgotten to be enjoyed, on the snow of a down comforter at which we’d first begun (circle back to exhibit A), in the cold expanse following the question am I like winter to you, in the unspooling that happens when we, I, I mean I play a memory over again for the too-many-ith time, in the television’s convex and prudish eye, in the snowy sound of over-use, in the way empty feels like brain-freeze, in the brilliant and nearly-neon white of the sign which mourns vacancy even if everyone around us says off-season, says they love   the snow, the way it makes well-conquered land possible again.   earthling   You’d never guess it (oh, good, a game!), but here we are many days without our bouncing blue ball, our terrestrial ball and chain, our baby planet—not even a note as it slipped from the rearview. Now a footnote in a book that, were we on said earth, a man would walk door to door to sell as a collection: The History of Aquamarine, Abridged. But we are not earthlings any longer, with no taxonomical replacement in sights. Stars coronate the endless black, winging it, and here we are: the most select, the most tourist. The most inclined to shoot the earth for the moon’s moon, to go nil, to bankrupt because it is the most American thing to do, though America was left behind, no matter nationality— only the home, the journey to and from.   Let us not seek solace from the callousness of quietude, for it is what exiled us.

Episode 92: American Literature

Daydream Believer   Listen in as pop culture, nostalgia, and formal craft converge in a discussion of poems by Jeff Royce. As of this recording “we are not the epicenter,” but it feels as if we have all the time in the world as the pandemic spirals on just outside the sound of our voices. Royce has us remembering The Monkeys and Lava Lamps, recalling Larkin’s famous insight that “They F&^% you up, your mum and dad,” and imagining angel trumpets and panthers (both Rilke’s famous panther poem and Teju Cole “On The Blackness of the Panther”). It’s all about resonances and craft, slushies. (Or resonances and interventions:  Dear Queer Eye crew, Kathleen needs a home-office resurrection!). If you are looking for more fabulousness, Kathleen recommends two podcasts, Jonathan Van Ness’ “Getting Curious” and Sam Sanders’ “It’s Been a Minute.” Samantha suggests the film Now and Then. Jason is loving Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.    This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist A.M.Mills. The song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” opens our show.  BIO Jeff Royce lives and teaches in South Florida. He is elaborately married with two refreshingly complicated daughters, though he is less enthusiastic about the two dogs and fat lizard who also live with him.  Jeff was social distancing before it was cool.   At the Table:  Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Kathleen Volk Miller, & Marion Wrenn     WATCHING A PANTHER AT THE PALM BEACH ZOO     Her chirps and caterwauling are the echoes of an empty sanctuary. She lowers her stare, pulls back the fat of her mouth, but the growl   rumbles in from another pen. Thunderheads build on backs of roseate spoonbills, restless in the next enclosure.   Their pink shadows and the stink of flamingo shit are enough to remind me my heart is a muscle.   Near the reptile house, wooden manatees drift on an ocean of organs. The music is coming from somewhere else.     LINEAGE   Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf.                                                    --Phillip Larkin   It began with horseradish in her mashed potatoes, her father slipping it in before dinner. (It began much earlier I suppose.   But this is my mother we’re talking about, younger and thinner and unaware that fathers can be cruel.) She dove in without sniffing, and since that day something within her   grew guarded and deep. They met in high school-- my father and she, I mean. She let him kiss her breasts only through her shirt, so he imagined each one a jewel.   Think of the let down when he saw them undressed, not cut as he’d expected them to be, not flawless as the ones he had caressed   under her blouse. He learned to live with them, though; he learned how not to ask for very much, to ignore her responsibly.   Her body arched, in dark, under his touch. They fumbled dutifully until it hurt. My brother soon was born, a crutch   to hold my mother up. But he wouldn’t wear a skirt. She cried until her shoes were damp, and my father taught him how to play in dirt.   Let’s try again, she begged--words pressing like a stamp on my brother’s soft head--and I, too, was pushed into this world like a rudderless tramp.   I’ll never know for sure if this is true.     ANGEL TRUMPETS   I have this 1960’s sitcom desire to frolic on the back lawn. Our shirts will be fashioned after white sides of ranch style houses. Our hearts will take shapes of plastic Adirondack chairs. The kids can blow bubbles that’ll satellite the shed like little acrylic space shuttles. In the linen-scented afternoon, the backward-stumbling sunlight will brighten angel trumpets, drooping polished shuttlecocks swinging like clean sheets in the here-&-there breeze. & I’ll pick one for you, & you’ll remark that the day has smelled just like a fresh haircut, then you’ll kiss my cheek with the same precision with which you clip coupons & the girls, giddy from so much Frisbee, will roll their eyes & mock our tenderness, & we’ll chase them & they will feign terror & scream like they mean it, & we’ll prolong their terror by pretending to just miss them, but eventually we’ll tackle them & splash onto the lawn which has always been just weeds. We’ll lie there breathing for a while, the four of us, our heads forming a circle in a way I imagine might have made an excellent cover for a Monkeys album, before one of us, probably me, will spot the vultures circling, not menacingly, but in a shiftless, existential sort of way, drifting on lava-lamp currents, & I’ll note how they resemble jets, not in shape but in the way how we feel about them flies out in front of our voices. & then someone, probably you, will say, We are, after all, sitting in weeds, & I’ll say, What? & the girls will squeal & scramble to the badly cracked patio where they’ll pick beggar ticks from one another’s backs, & by now it’s dusk dark & a fat tarantula moon is crawling up over purplish clouds. Then, Shit, what’ll we do about dinner? &, Papa, I still have homework to finish! & Goddamnit, why are you crying? Stop crying! & you tell me we don’t even have an angel trumpet tree, & your breath smells like sparklers, & the sparklers, in the black air, are scrawling something that vanishes before I can get it. I don’t get it, I say, & you say, You never get it, & I say, Just go to bed, you can do it in the morning. & I put a movie on so we can all sleep & we eat popcorn & freezer pops for dinner, & I tell the kids, That’s life, & they’re like,                                        Great!

Episode 91: Daydream Believer

This episode is all about craft and connections:  literary craft and professional connections. In the notoriously small world of poetry and creative writing, should editors recuse themselves from making editorial decisions? Things get wonderfully complicated when you know a poet— be it from grad school, from a workshop, from a conference. Or from dressing up in potentially crass Halloween costumes. (Listen for further confirmation that Jason and Kathy are soul mates via their 90s -era matching Princess Diana getups, complete with steering wheel as accessory and pals playing paparazzi). In addition to the nuances of professional ethics in poetry land, we talk sonnets and the divided self as we discuss 2 poems by Charlie Clark. Clark’s archive of references ranges widely—from Death Grips to inept gladiators to the power of grammar and etymology to charm readers. At one point we’re making rock n’ roll hand gestures to indicate his poem’s caesuras; at another we’re mesmerized by the way Clark works within the confines of  14 lines right under our noses. If you like what you hear, Clark’s new book of poetry The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin will be published by Four Way Books later this year.   At the table: Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Alex Tunney, Kathleen, and Marion Wrenn   This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” now opens our show.    Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in New England Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and other journals. A 2019 NEA fellow, he is the author of The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2020). He lives in Austin, TX.   You can find him on Facebook. The Beast I Worship     I light my torch and burn it. I am the beast I worship. —Death Grips, “Beware”     The beast I worship doesn’t blame   the tree for its lithe, expanding   glamour, yet beneath a sky full of blue   kingfishers crying tears from the tree   the placard with its Latin name   laid out in a lush calligraphy   and as many as he can reach   of the narrow green articulations of spring   starting to feel their way into the air;   before he finally takes leave completely,   the beast I worship climbs in and sets the whole thing   burning down. The beast I worship   offers meek relief. What sometimes feels like   beauty sometimes feels like grief.     Address To That Inept Gladiator Timorous     Supposing the Futility of Language as a Means of Protecting Oneself from Harm     Your armor amounts to the skin of some very large dead beasts,   yet you retain such glamour. If you don’t know the word,   that’s because the Scots hadn’t yet invented it. There wasn’t enough   enchanting mist strewn on even a rainy Roman summer morn   to veil the parts your opponent hoped to hack from you. Had there been,   had a cloud become the air around you, had you survived and done it in this way,   had the poets seen this and gone crazy, probably you still would have been   stuffed back into your cage, fed no more gruel than usual by the mulch-   hearted man who ran the place before next week’s show where he’d charge double   for all the people eager to see some new brute cut your meek gray swarm in two.   Pardon, please, these aimless suppositions. Did you know glamour   is only a corruption of grammar ? This proves nothing but the impossibility   of any word’s use to the dead. No word will build a door out of air   and let you step safely through it before it grammars shut.     Concerning the Awfulness of Audiences Across Time     Should you somehow fast-forward through millennia, it would likely be   the sons of paper-product scions laughing at your harm. They will be no less noxious   than whoever watches you now. before I waste our time trying to explain the value   of flowered vines embroidered on what people wipe up grape-juice spills and urine with,   let me just call them rags. It is a sound so plain I hope it makes sense no matter what   the tongue or age. It’s rags the audience throws at you, not that they want to offer salves   or congratulations; they simply want to throw things at you and rags are the cheapest thing   on hand. Were I to acknowledge that the word audience existed in your tongue,   what would that matter, except for how it meant something more like listening then,   which means irony existed then too, as some hack-eared opponent hollowed out your mouth   and to slow the bleeding you filled it with the audience’s rags, the loosened red thread-ends   of some drifting in the wind from your mouth toward the lords drunk at center court,   who hear only their own voices naming which next portions of your body they have   paid good money to see your rivals cleave?     Cataloging Some of what Awaits Him After the Morning’s Dogs Are Done     Heaven is an archive full of friends   whose legs have been restored. You can walk   with them through the ever-longing haze and regather   the other parts both they and you had scattered,   heads and brains and arms and tongues and eyes,   the eyes most especially, because there is so much   now that you are out of the arena’s daily dust and blight,   out of the darkness of its catacombs; there is so much now   for you to gaze at, it is worth acknowledging   the Norseman who would, drunk at sea some mist-   decked century hence, invent the verb to gaze as a variant   of to gape, what does not describe a wound exactly   but does suggest a body breached as well as it does awe,   which in this heaven’s tongue is infinite.

Episode 90: Je Recuse! The Poems of Charlie Clark

POEMS BY KAILEY TEDESCO THREE POEMS ACCEPTED April 28, 2020 Bloomwards & Eggsome   What’s your background, Slushies? Sounds like a loaded question, right? But it’s really a reference to your choice of green-screen background Zoomery. This episode opens with a larking conversation about our current delight in Zoom’s capacity to allow us to upload virtual backgrounds for our physical spaces. (The discussion of poems starts at 8:01 if you want to skip the banter). Kathleen’s surrounded by tulips (while she’s actually holed up in her 3rd floor garret, with a dormer ceiling making her look like Alice in Wonderland). Jason is perched in front of IRL bookcases. Samantha is podcasting with her kitchen over her shoulder. Opting for a plain white wall, Marion nonetheless dons a seriously fringed top in honor of Jason’s signature leather jacket. And Alex Tunney, long-time PBQ editor inducted by our dear pal Daniel Nester a million years ago, joins the podcast for the first time and rocks a Piet Mondrian background. (Nicely done!). All of which serves as a perfect set up for an episode dedicated to poems submitted by Kailey Tedesco. Tedesco’s poems are full of magic and mysticism, shadows and spells. Her work moves across a range of styles—from an ekphrastic poem inspired by Hilma af Klint’s magnificent paintings to a reconfiguration of creepy childhood legends (like Bloody Mary) while playing with forms. We were drawn to the process-based mysticism, speculative feminism, and feminist horror coming through these poems. And Kathleen jumped in and read #7, because…#7.   THE DISCUSSION BEGINS AT 8:49   Recommended Reading: Marion’s raving about Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other https://groveatlantic.com/book/girl-woman-other/   Samantha’s loving Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House   Jason’s devouring Brenda Shaughnessy’s So Much Synth https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/so-much-synth-by-brenda-shaughnessy/   And we are supremely grateful for the poetry of Eavan Boland, who passed the day before we recorded this episode. Here is her masterful poem, “Quarantine.”    This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” now opens our show.  At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer,  and Alex Tunney Kailey Tedesco is the author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing), Lizzie, Speak, and the forthcoming collection, FOREVERHAUS (White Stag Publishing). She is a senior editor for Luna Luna Magazine. You can find her work in Electric Literature, Fairy Tale Review, Gigantic Sequins, and more.    Her Instagram & Twitter is @kaileytedesco   7 adulthood after Hilma af Klint   you’ll remember me  as a zygote scrambling towards cronehood  on its haunches; i grow bloomwards. my teeth outstretched  on the front lawn  during the violet hour, spelling spells disguised  as poems. hermit to hermit; we kiss  to form  a single nautilus, sistering divinity. tell me when was it  you last  heard from your spirit?  my guides  have abducted  me quite  violently  from the tulips i’ve found myself asleep in.  it is all but true; my eggs  have clasped in my womb  like pearls.  my intention  is not to create life, but death. though, i misspoke — my true intention is  to create life out of death.  find me in the portal  on the left, right next to the electric  fences of my  darknesses, all  clumped.  inside the beheaded apartment   the sky whispers something eggsome then breaks its rain, thick & frozen. i crave the cigarettes  i’ve never smoked; not marlboro. i picture you before the time everything could kill you, glamour   in your beehive & twiggy dress, smoke haloing the mini-chandeliers. i beckon for you  to gemstone through me, egyptology — my lipstick glyphs on the edges of your sink. there are    teeth in the walls, did you know that? whole fangs, pulled clean at the root, & toenails, too,  flaking from the ceiling. i lived with estate sale busts of nefertiti, estate sale victorian lace,    bagged & labeled with the year, estate sale chaises of green velvet. green because it reminds  me of france, where i have never been, but where the sun is a vintage wallpaper. in the window    across the way, women in mourning bonnets have st. columba hands holding tight  to the dogs in their rosary chains. the plexi glass cracks in the shape of a crown or witch hat. there    is no bathroom but the one with the freckled clawfoot. the cats have become anxious with the  roach-scroll of the floorboards. we say they perform theatrical productions  — one ophelia,    lounging in wet lavender sogging the carpet-shag, one desdemona, clawing at tissue for  handkerchiefs. something is crawling in me, teeth in the walls of boning. i wear the whole house   that used to be yours like a corset. this place is no good for us, i tell your lack of existence. all  the bodily fluids of every other tenant filth me — all the living hosts whispering in tune with the    mold water-logging my pillows. bring me my peacock & she-bear, my estate sale saints. it is time i sic them on my landlords, bring back your sight & my seeing. i shall go ahead    and make my own kingdom out of deadbolts. bloody mary x 3    there goes my top skull jack-in-the-boxing from your suzy-talks-a-lot eyelids. maybe i’ve been dead a long time. maybe i’ve been dead never ever. live with me forever in the medicine cabinet   where my limbs smoke ring doll-wards through your own reflection. spinning my head  all the way around is what i do for a pageant talent. every time you call my name,    you put a knife in it—my face wounds towards yours. i become nothing but a blood-aura  on your tooth fairy bedding. unlike yours, my wedding gown will lack knuckle-buttons & i envy.    you should have made me more opulent in the story where i’m saint-corpsed with gumball rings on every finger. let me live display-cased at the dead mall, cradling the body you’ve made us.     i’ll hold you too, if you’d like. we can lace together, spine glued to spine, a jar of our parts  now puzzled. then my head, free by comparison, can decapitate & become a locket    facing the wrong way. the backstage of night is what i’d like to see most—everything zombifying from the dirt of sky.  i see the same stars as you.   there goes my head. i’m coming back to life.     An array of relevant links:    Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/hilma-af-klint And here is the Guggenheim on No. 7 Adulthood:  https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/group-iv-the-ten-largest-no-7-adulthood-1907-by-hilma-af-klint   (Or this link, too, for more images)  https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/hilma-af-klint/group-iv-no-7-the-ten-largest-adulthood/ The legend of Bloody Mary Debunked:  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bloody-mary-story/ And scienced up: https://u.osu.edu/vanzandt/2019/04/17/bloody-mary-from-the-bathroom-to-the-laboratory/ 

Episode 89: Bloomwards & Eggsome

 Courtesy of www.FridaKahlo.org Frida Khalo’s 1946 oil painting The Wounded Deer     Dear Slushies, on this episode we focus on the heart of literary editing and pose the age-old question: “What do you like when you like what you like?” We also break our own rules on this episode of The Slush Pile. Instead of flipping our thumbs at the end of each poem we’re scheduled to consider, we decide to discuss a group of poems by Shari Caplan as a suite. She submitted three poems about the female gaze, and we’re mesmerized by them. With Kathleen, Samantha, and Marion at the table, it’s an all-female crew discussing three of Kaplan’s poems, each one focusing on a powerful woman who worked in and with images: artist Frida Kahlo, psychoanalytic film theorist Laura Mulvey, and Lee Miller (check her out in “Lee Miller: In Hitler’s Bathtub.”) Listen in as we consider Kaplan’s ekphrastic project as she creates these experimental monologues. We’re flying by the seat of our collective pants, trying to muster what we know about Kahlo, Miller, and Mulvey, half recalling Maya Deren’s surrealist short film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and trying to accurately summarize Mulvey’s supremely influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” all the while recalling Dali’s three flying cats, and being serenaded by Sam’s cat Bowie while being observed by Marion’s cat Imia, who joined us at the editorial table. “Dear Pandemic Diary, Day 79, our animals want in on the editorial process. We want to call them ‘Podcats.’ Someone should intervene.”   With thanks to one of our sponsors,  Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” now opens our show.    POETRY DISCUSSION BEGINS at 4:00    Author Bio Shari Caplan is the siren behind "Advice from a Siren" (Dancing Girl Press). Her poems have swum into Gulf Coast, Nonbinary Review, Masque & Spectacle, Tinderbox, Deluge, and more. Caplan's work has earned her a scholarship to the Home School in Hudson, NY, a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and nominations for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Award. You may encounter her as "Betty BOOM: America's Sweettart" giving intimate readings as part of the Poetry Society of New York's Poetry Brothel or ring-leading the Poetry Circus, an in-character immersive event she produces.   website: sharicaplan.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shari.caplan.5 Instagram: @sharic88   Plus, Marion’s cat insists on a seat at the table.            The Works "Frida Kahlo (on Frida Kahlo) on the Female Gaze"   Comparison fragments the green-gold of my body. Nothing compares.   As a woman, I see a deer in an arrow forest with my face on and hear palpitating hooves across dry needles. As a deer, I see a woman poking her paint into my wound. What do you see, Diego?   You were called Auxochrome the one who captures (color). I Chromophore — the one who gives. Friendly reds, big blues, hands of leaves, noisy birds, fingers in. Flowers cackle at my ear. Can the female gaze grow fruit in a pick-axe climate?   As a woman, my fingers touch blood. You may have seen it undisguised in the bathroom. As a deer, my blood touches fingers and arrowheads. You might have mistaken it for paint. You may use it.   As a deer, I retain my eyebrows to express the paths of my nerves, which are yours. As a painting, I multiply into flowers and a mountain because my eyes blanket rivers and roots.   I don’t see a mountaintop. The mountain held in the veins of the sky.     "Lee Miller on The Female (Gaze)"   Don’t! melt until I’ve lit you.   Covered to the neck. A sheet to morph you, size the shine on your  - don’t!   face.   Now, topless   in the metal chair, like an uncorked bottle. Cross at the elbows, look down at the ants.   Don’t –            cavort until I’ve snapped. We’ll have some when he’s over. Come under. An object   could fall on top of you at any moment. It might be              a person.   Tar stretches like a bird’s foot. Maybe life’s a nude               picnic, then the tar comes in with the tide and I’m dyed   blue, wearing a net. I can take my own pictures, thank you. I can deal with some glare.   If you’re thinking,  it’s not my place        to guess what. Maybe this      dead coral you’re posing with   puts your father in your head. Maybe a dead pillow or a case packed. Hide it           behind your face.     "Laura Mulvey on the (fe)Male Gaze"   A bear turned to a lounging place.   Instead of unspooling story the fe/male leans in her lack /light against the paradox of phallocentrism.   Bear/er of the bloody wound. Subject by being object/ed.   To exit/exist, she must thwart the male ailment, fuck Freud.   Virgin/Vixenhood fantasies. Ropes hissing the bedframe. All the men I know want to do it. Man/ipulation.   Active/male/passive/female/active/male/passive. Act/I’ve/male/pass/I’ve/fe/male/act/I’ve/pass/I’ve Activate!   How does the bearskin rug become a bear again?

Episode 88: Life on Screen, or “Podcats”

How big is an alligator heart, Slushies? Have seen the wingspan of a Sand Hill Crane (a bird once mistaken for the Jersey Devil)? And what happens when you put Mentos in your soda? Life and its peculiarities, its soaring losses and aching beauty, and its utter, utter absurdity come barreling at us in “a flood of images” in Ryan Bollenbach’s poems, 2 of which we consider on today’s episode. Bollenbach has us recalling Willem Defoe at Sgt. Elias in Oliver Stone’s Platoon and envisioning Florida’s “serrated coast.”  Cue Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Bollenbach’s second poem “My Lover Squawk Squawks and then Explodes” demands we take it on face value; the title is on point. Listen for a fabulous meta-reading and feel the way the poem wants you, too, to be Seagull.  We couldn’t resist – a la Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels”-- and spun out into our own squawking flock. Listen in as we welcome longtime member of the PBQ fam Warren Longmire to the podcast. His good work has a wide reach these days, keeping poetry thriving via The Nick Virgilio Writer's House and Blue Stoop. Poetry discussion starts at 3:30   Author Bio Ryan Bollenbach is a writer with an MFA from University of Alabama's creative writing program where he formerly served as the poetry editor for Black Warrior Review. He reads for SweetLit: A Literary Confection and Heavy Feather Review. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Timber, Colorado Review, smoking glue gun, Bayou and elsewhere. Find his tweets @SilentAsIAm, more writing @ whatgreatlarks.tumblr.com       The Works  "Adagio For Strings" No one wanted this smoke. Not Willem Dafoe or the albatross Whose wings Willem borrowed as splint for his splayed arms As if real bullets ripped through him. Not the wisteria Planting its tendrils on the ground’s sweaty palm Like the sun taking pennies as a return investment on heat. I drove my truck at forty miles per hour over the grey-blue asphalt And looked into the eyes of some Sandhill Crane Crossing the road unfazed by the wind whipping off my steel bumper. On the radio, there was a composer giving a talk about the hope he found In the last note of Sam Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” As if of body memory, Mark’s corpse rose from a bare patch of sand On the side of Interstate 75! As is of body memory, Chris’s corpse rose from the gated-in parking lot Of a pain management center in Northeast Tampa! The ground swallowed every traffic sign in immune system response After swallowing them both on the same road. I drive that interstate northbound to escape the gulf and the ocean Overtaking Florida’s serrated coasts. I keep only the smoke, The Blackhawk’s wingspan, and the violin notes Piled on top of each other like bodies to be burned. I remember The way the Sand Hill Crane did not flinch. I cannot put my tongue around that. Under the trees where I slipped into dreams, I woke skewered By what the composer said, and the question the crane’s eye’s asked in response. From my morning stomach, I pulled speakers made of the hearts of the alligators I have eaten. Placing them in between the saw palm bushes, I started them Broadcasting “Adagio for Strings” in a staggered order.  In the clearing, there were bushes of Pentas and Evolvus In the shape of soldiers kneeling to the sound. There were squirrels kneeling. Snakes bending their bodies to kneel. Bobcats kneeling. Chris kneeling. Mark kneeling. The dusk sun made shadows Of the withered tops of trees. The wind blew its violin trills And all the hearts I planted fell on their side in unison, Restarted in unison from the top. Just as the shadows started to grow, Blue smoke rose from the grasses.     "My Lover Squawk Squawks and Then Explodes" We spent the morning before just talking. He said your body is slick like construction equipment, how it can move the sand to make a runway for my unhurried strut. He said your body is like a French fry on a laminated paper plate. In the high noon sun, I said you have a survivor’s disposition. It makes you gray. Slick and survivor made us think of our own days of darkness, his coated in motor oil on the gulf coast in search of something white, mine coated in olive oil, garlic, sea salt tears and smooth jazz. I told him his gray feathers and white food made me think of marbles. I told him that it seemed odd that he prefers dark drinks when we come out to the beach like this. He sipped his diet soda and said you just don’t understand, but I saw the white shining in the furthest reaches of his black eyes, that look as if he was already gone. He walked toward me for a kiss, then changed direction. Sprinted to the white pearl beached in the sand. I yelled to him as he passed me that I could see how, after living in all that oil, the clean sand, the white, could feel romantic, but inside I was hurt.  He picked the piece from the sand with an instinctual fervor then gave a soul-curdling squawk.  He swallowed the Mentos and exploded like a fourth of July firework over Coney Island.   At the table: Warren Longmire, Addison Davis, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Samantha Neugebauer, Marion Wrenn, &  Joe Zang   This episode happy to thank sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” opens our show. 

Episode 87: “The Speaker is Clearly a French Fry”

Dramatic tension in this episode, slushies! “There are no ties in baseball,” but what are the rules for editorial meetings? What happens when the editorial board splits?  Do we flip thumbs, thumb wrestle, or rely on another voice to make the choice? Marion joins us from her “transitional liminal space” in the Marlton Hotel in NYC, while Kathleen and Addison call in from Drexel University, and Jason from his Brooklyn home. We launch into three poems by Sarah Best, an assortment of vivid, imagistic pieces referring to everything from sonograms, vanity, Truman Capote, and “coffee served in mason jars.” In the midst of such scenes, we talk regional accents: Warsh & moisturize—the morning ablutions. We discover that “Context” is king when we mistake the poet’s reference to The Master Builder in her poem "Extended Shots and Long Takes" (27:53) for a reference to a reality TV show rather than the Ibsen play and Demme’s 2013 adaptation, A Master Builder. And we delve knee-deep into the myth of Echo & Narcissus, the namesake for the poet’s second poem Narcissus (13:07). At the end of the podcast we fall into a discussion of the seeming rule-less-ness of Gaelic rugby, marvel at the size of rugby players’ thighs, and ponder the relative legality of edibles in Texas, finally coming away with the mantra: Exfoliate and Moisturize, slushies! Especially “inna winner time.”     At the table: Kathleen, Addison, Jason, Marion, Samantha   Timestamps: 3:10 ‘Echo’  12:27 Team vote 13:07 ‘Narcissus’  26:05 Team vote 27:53 ‘Extended Takes and Long Shots’ 38:50 Team vote

Episode 86: Sonograms, Vanity & Truman Capote

Dear Slushies, have you ever heard a theremin? Visited Utah? Tried a baked Alaska? Join us for an episode dedicated to poems by Natasha Sajé, whose work explores belonging, queerness, & womanhood in a flow of humour, insight, and vivid images. In “Dear Utah,” Sajé takes us on a trip through her connection with her now-familiar state, which she “complained about for one-third of [her] life”. “Is Homosexuality Contagious?” directly addresses the reader as it contemplates homosexuality, politics, and the way other people's Baked Alaska commands our attention. Finally, “Dear Catilyn Jenner” stops the show. Listen in as the editors collectively lose it.  It’s goosebumps and tears in an episode in which the editors wear matching tunics and Jason’s thumbs cry. If you can't wait to get right into the poems, you can skip to the 4 minute mark. At the table: Marion Wrenn, Kathy Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, and Joe Zang This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” now opens our show. 

Caitlyn Jenner and Baked Alaska (or When Thumbs Cry)

It’s a rainy day in Philly, even rainier in NYC, and curiously blue in Abu Dhabi. We’re wondering whether you can OD on zinc, what’s happening on planet Saadiyat, and whether ghosts are real.  These poems are full of curious imagery, versatile movements and occasional hot-pants and sneeze-ghosts. We loved journeying through each one, which took us, “artfully all over the place.” We learned about Caroline Knox’s poems, cellist Miroslav Rastropovich’s work, and Culpeper’s Herbal. Thank you, James Grinwis!   This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Lorraine” now opens our show. 

Episode 84: Hot Pants & Sneeze Ghosts

Dear Slushies, join the PBQ crew (which includes a freshly-tenured Jason Schneiderman) for a pre-pandemic recording of our discussion of 3 poems by the wonderful Vasiliki Katsarou’s work. Be sure to read the poems on the page below as you listen.  They’ll require your eyes and ears-- and “a decoder ring.” The team has a grand old time explicating these artful poems. The muses are sprung and singing in us as we read and decide on this submission. Katsarou’s poems teach us to read them without projecting too much of ourselves and our current preoccupations onto them. We’re reminded to pay attention to what’s happening on the page. But synchronicities abound! Before we know it we’re ricocheting off of the poems’ images and noting the wonderful convergences the poems trigger -  we hear traces of Wallace Stevens “Idea of Order of Key West” or Auden’s Musee de Beaux Arts. (But first we check in with each other, cracking each other up in a pre-pandemic moment of serious lightness. We’re heard that “Science” shows Arts & Humanities majors make major money in the long run. Kathy reports that “the data on success” shows that participation in Nativity Plays is a marker for career success. Samantha confesses she played Mary Magdalene in a Nativity Play. Marion might have been a Magi. And many of us were reindeer.. Also, Donkeys do better than sheep over time (which may or may not have been claimed on “Wait, wait… don’t tell me!”).  Editing a Lit Mag shouldn’t be this much fun, Slushies. Listen through to the discussion of the 3rd poem’s deep magic and craft. And listen to our editors’ cats chime in). Addison Davis, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Kathleen Volk Miller,  Marion Wrenn, and Joe Zang

Episode 83: Goodnight, Mary Magdalene

Be warned. We love the writers who submit to PBQ, slushies. We love doing this podcast. And we love you; we love that you listen to us discuss and deliberate. In short, slushies, as Mister Rogers would say: “1-4-3.”  One. Four. Three. (I. L-o-v-e. Y-o-u). (Get it?!). We do. It’s hopeless. We’re hooked.  We discuss 3 poems by James Pollock in this episode. Join us for this wonderfully raucous discussion of craft and precision, technology and point of view, and big ass fans™. Addison is sleep deprived (too much late night coffee). Jason is in his jammies (sleeping in after hosting KGB’s open mic Monday). Marion is a cheerful maniac in Abu Dhabi, and Samantha calls in from Dubai.  Reminding us of Pinsky’s First Things to Hand, Pollock’s poems spin us around, bathe us with craft, and make us re-see things, especially the power of poetry. Yup: That sentence actually refers to all 3 of the seamlessly crafted poems Pollock shared with us--   “Ceiling Fan,” and “Shower,” and “Spectacles,”  And yup, by calling your attention to it, we just exposed our seams. (Ugh. Craft is hard. For poets and coffee roasters. “Form makes the language seem inevitable,” sayeth Jason (who is also “completely obsessed with tap water”). And great coffee should have a proper name. Ask KVM. Listen to the end of the show when she describes naming a new coffee for “Cup of Bliss” coffees in Collingswood, NJ. Spoiler: “Be My Neighbor!”). At the table: Joe, KVM, Samantha, Addison, Jason, Marion

Episode 82: "1-4-3"

Well before we found ourselves in the COVID 19 pandemic, we had the sniffles on this episode, slushies. But neither head colds nor hangovers will keep us from the great pleasure of discussing Daryl Jones’ “Not Your Ordinary Doppleganger.” The poem’s gentle humor and delightful details have us in stitches:  the poem puts the “P” in poetry, the “P” in PBQ. (There is a badly delivered dad joke buried in that sentence, slushies, apologies-- trust us, the poem does it better). Listen in as: Jason reveals his mother was actively trying to gaslight him when he was 5; Samantha reveals the science of scent and stepmothers; and we trade Shakespearean puns and tips on slankets. All of which made us think about father and fatherhood, those we’ve had and those we miss.  Daryl Jones recently retired from a career in academic administration and rediscovered the passion for writing that he had set aside more than twenty-five years ago, after receiving an NEA Fellowship, serving as Idaho Writer-in-Residence, and winning the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters for his book Someone Going Home Late. Since courting the muse again, he has published poems in The American Journal of Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.

Episode 81: Dad Jokes & Happiness

Coffee: a security blanket, health-hazard, and world-tilting device. Hey slushies, today we’re discussing Frank X. Christmas’ poem “Coffee, Ice Cream.” But first! Alien business people are descending on Drexel’s cafeteria (“the place… where people eat?”) and our editors are braving malfunctioning footwear and costume parties. Much mayhem at the top of this episode, Slushies, so if you’re eager to check out the poem and the critique you can skip ahead to minute [11.35]. Frank X. Christmas’ poem is both surreal and nostalgic. Somehow it acts on us the way a good cup of coffee does: we feel a little bit separated from space and time. The editors discuss how it drags us into a reverie where everything spins and flows. We are in flux. They then debate about the age of the girl in the photograph and the ways time seems to have collapsed. There might be feelings of loss embedded in this work, but there is also warmth, comfort, and the sweetness of a vanilla scoop. After their discussion the editors lay out a few of their recent reads including The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and The Tradition by Jericho Brown.  At the table: Marion Wrenn, Kathy Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Addison Davis, and Joe Zang. F.X. Christmas, a lifelong New Englander, was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied accounting at Bentley College and journalism at Northeastern University. His poems and stories have appeared in Northwest Review, Seattle Review, Manoa, Gulf Stream, Midwest Quarterly, and other magazines. Today he is working on linked stories, longer manuscripts, and more verse. He lives in the suburbs with his wife, his daughter, and the family dog.

Episode 80: In Flux

Hello Slushies! Today, we put the “pee” in PBQ when Jason reminds us not to over-hydrate (it’s a thing!). Marion is in the Philadelphia Studio and Samantha in Portland for the Tin House Summer Workshop, which triggers an epic donut-discussion. Must-try doughnuts: VooDoo Doughnuts in Portland, Federal Doughnuts in Philadelphia, and Dough in New York City.  After daydreaming about desserts, and resisting the bullying power of nutrition Apps, we dive into three poems by Tanya Grae. These poems are included in Grae’s book Undoll (YesYes Books, 2019).  All are ekphrastic, allusive, homage poems-- and we pour over the way Grae is adapts, innovates, remixes, and recreates poems across these poems.  We’re drawn to the layered conversation and formal prosody and synchronicity she sets up-- our thumbs are flipped, our heads are spun. The first is after Lorca’s “The Unfaithful Housewife” (translated by Conor O’Callaghan). The second is an intriguing and baffling poetic rant,  “Duchess, A Found Poem.” And the final, the tripendicular “Dear Ozy,” triggers the sound of thinking from the Slush Pile crew:  we ponder maps and palimpsests, spirals and dimensions, Google searches and precarious empires. Samantha reminds us that someone, maybe Twain, said “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” Associative spirals make this conversation a joy.    Short bio: Tanya Grae was born in South Carolina while her father was stationed at Shaw, and she grew up moving to random Air Force towns like Little Rock, Minot, Tucson, Panama City, and Homestead. This survivalist training prepared her for a litany of jobs, academia, and parenting three humans, two of whom are now adulting. Her debut poetry collection, Undoll, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in fall 2019 and was a National Poetry Series finalist. Her poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and other journals. She now lives in Tallahassee with her youngest daughter who loves her despite her inability to help with advanced math, certain her mother’s attempts could bring about the apocalypse. Spotting bad store sign grammar is her superpower; kvetching about it is her weakness. Find out more at: tanyagrae.com   At the Table: Kathy, Marion, Brit, Jason, & Samantha  

Episode 79: Do it again! Do it again!

Take a seat at Painted Bride Quarterly’s editorial table as we discuss submissions, editorial issues, writing, deadlines, and cuckoo clocks.

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Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile

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