the Prairie Schooner blog

The Chattering Blogosphere

Nowadays, one is likely to find podcasts concerning everything from cat care to car repair, but discussions of poetry and poetics have always been a bit thin on the World Wide Web. 

That is until now.

The Joe Milford Poetry Show on Blog Talk Radio features both established and emerging poets reading from their work and discussing all things poetic with the show’s titular host. In the show’s archive, you will find readings and interviews from Prairie Schooner contributors Stephen Dunn, Russell Edson, and Bob Hicok, just to name a few. Shows are typically broadcast live on Saturdays at 5 pm Eastern time (unless otherwise noted). Listeners may even call-in and address questions related to poetry to the featured poet. Upcoming shows will feature Gregory Orr and C.K. Williams.  

                    -Cody Lumpkin

 

Extra Resources

Every year at some point (or multiple points) I find myself surfing the internet from one small magazine’s website to the next, compiling a list of journals for my next round of submissions, collecting writer’s guidelines, checking up on various contests, etc. Invariably I turn to sites that sport massive indexes of literary mags like newpages.com, an old favorite. But more and more, I find myself going to LitList, a relative newcomer to the world of online writer-aids. The site has an attractive design and is incredibly easy to navigate. In addition to indexes of journals—both print and electronic—LitList also hosts a submission tracking tool, book reviews, a list of contests, and links to small presses. This is a webpage to keep an eye on; launched less than a year ago, it can only continue to grow, both in depth of content and as a hub for the writing community.

-JD Wiley

Listening to Jericho

Listening to Jericho Brown’s podcast recording for the NYC Teachers and Writers Collaborative is as inviting an experience as reading his work in the Spring 2008 edition of Prairie Schooner. His careful attention to voice, to rhythm, and to the complexity of the persona’s point-of-view is arresting at times.

What charms me about Brown’s poem “Pause,” is its tension between the title and the opening word. “Pause,” as a title, suggests the reader take care in entering the language while the opening in media res “From bed to dresser drawer,” reliant on the preposition, and other such lines as “I want to ask / If they ever heard of slavery,” which answers the preceding lines’ implications and the speaker’s reference to his habit of humming, suggests otherwise. “The work song,” were told “Is made of subtraction,” and we are asked to understand of this loss that “The singer seeks an exit from the scarred body / And opens his mouth / Trying to get out.”

Engaging the reader from these lines to the last, Brown invites us into this speaker’s reality, and by this reality I mean the grittiness of American life. Near the end of the poem, the speaker shares “If I had known the location of my own runaway / Breath, I too would have found a blues,” alluding seemingly to the delta blues guitarist. It’s this gritty quality that speaks, too, to Americans, lest we forget poetry’s social function. And if for some reason we have forgotten poetry’s function, here’s a poet and a brilliant voice, capable of waking us to ourselves, to our lives, with both a robust and poignant voice in poetry.

                                                      -John Chavez