Dear Listener,
For this, our 99th episode, Rachel welcomes poet, interdisciplinary artist, and professor Douglas Kearney to Commonplace. This conversation, recorded in early November 2021, has been a long time coming. And even before then, Rachel had been hoping to talk to Douglas Kearney for years. Did you know he’s also one of our most devoted listeners?
Kathryn interviews Author Kim Dower. Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, Kim Dower’s poems about motherhood are some of her most moving and disarmingly candid. Culled from her four collections as well as a selection of new work, these poems, heartbreaking, funny, surprising, and touching, explore the quirky, unexpected observations, and bittersweet moments mothers and daughters share. These evocative poems do not glorify mothers, but rather look under the hood of motherhood and explore the deep crevices and emotions of these impenetrable relationships: the love, despair, joy, humor and gratitude that fills our lives. Her poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” and by O Magazine as “unexpected and sublime.”
In 2003, I was a pre-med undergraduate at UC Berkeley majoring in philosophy and taking poetry classes on the side—totally scattered, that is to say: lost, alive, lonely, and away from my Fresno home and family (in a real way) for the first time. I was waking up. I wandered a lot, probably with a Walkman (!) in my tote bag, hiking the campus’s Eucalyptus groves and roaming Telegraph Avenue with its jewelry vendors and tables of tarot cards.
Bill welcomes poet Kim Dower to the show. Kim, the City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood (October 2016 – October 2018), has published four collections of poetry: Air Kissing on Mars, described by the Los Angeles Times as, “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” Slice of Moon, called “unexpected and sublime,” by “O” magazine, Last Train to the Missing Planet, “poems that speak about the grey space between tragedy and tenderness, memory and loss, fragility and perseverance,” said Richard Blanco, and Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, winner of the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Award Gold Medal for Poetry. Her fifth Collection, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom, (April 19, 2022) is “Deftly constructed, inherently interesting, impressively insightful, thought-provoking, and truly memorable,”Midwest Book Review.Kim’s work has been featured in numerous literary journals including Plume, Ploughshares, Rattle, The James Dickey Review, and Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac.” Her poems are included in several anthologies, notably, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles. She teaches poetry workshops for Antioch University, UCLA Extension Writer’s Program, West Hollywood Library and the Los Angeles LGBT Center. www.kimdowerpoetry.com
If patience is a virtue, then fans of award-winning gay writer John Weir are among the most virtuous people you will ever find. Weir won a Lambda Literary Award for his remarkable 1989 debut novel The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket and then had his readers wait 17 years for his second novel, 2006’s devastating What I Did Wrong.
Elizabeth Bradfield, professor of creative writing, is the author of five poetry books. When she isn’t publishing her stories or encouraging students to write their own, she can be found outside, leading whale watches or interpretive walks on Cape Cod (or not found at all).
Kim Stafford’s archive at Lewis & Clark College isn’t about him. It’s about everyone else.
In curating the collection of his life’s work — poems, essays, stories, songs, letters and much more — Oregon’s ninth poet laureate and the founder and director of the college’s Northwest Writing Institute “tried to think of what would be useful to others,” he said during the recent opening of a new exhibit about the archive.
Here’s the latest World Wide Work update on films, books, and music you may have missed.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Gary Lemons to talk about his quartet series, Snake. Check out our first interview, where we talk about Gary’s background and book one in the series, and then stay tuned for part two coming soon!
Poetry Moment on WPSU is a program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Host Shara McCallum is this year’s Penn State Laureate.
Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s poems were selected as part of the Poetry in Sound project from Navier records, a monthly contest that invites musicians worldwide to make a song inspired by a recent poetry publication.
THIS IS THE 56th in a series of dialogues with artists, writers, and critical thinkers on the question of violence. This conversation is with Carol Becker, professor of arts and dean of Faculty at Columbia University School of the Arts.
My first memory of kindergarten is when I’d made an airplane by crossing two thin cylinders of modeling clay. As I “flew” my plane around the room, a bigger boy with a much sturdier airplane rushed up and slammed his into mine, smashing mine into a blob. He then raced away, laughing as I wailed. If he’d enjoyed smashing my plane, he enjoyed my distress more.
