Episode 660

"Poetry Month Special" with Paisley Rekdal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Anis Mojgani, Kaveh Akbar, and Kasey Anderson

This special edition of Live Wire celebrates National Poetry Month, with performances by renowned poets Hanif Abdurraqib, Anis Mojgani, and Kaveh Akbar. Plus, former Poet Laureate of Utah Paisley Rekdal chats about demystifying poetry; singer-songwriter Kasey Anderson performs a tune inspired by a poem from his friend Hanif; and host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello share some original haikus penned by our listeners.

Ep. 660: Paisley Rekdal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Anis Mojgani, Kaveh Akbar, and Kasey Anderson

Live Wire with Luke Burbank

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Paisley Rekdal

Award-Winning Poet

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, most recently, West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center. Website

Hanif Abdurraqib

New York Times Bestselling Writer

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant. His book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named one of the books of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Publishers Weekly writes his latest book, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, is "a triumphant meditation on basketball and belonging... the narrative works as if by alchemy, forging personal anecdotes, sports history, and cultural analysis into a bracing contemplation of the relationship between sports teams and their communities. This is another slam dunk for Abdurraqib.” Website • Instagram

Anis Mojgani

10th Poet Laureate of Oregon

Anis Mojgani is the 10th Poet Laureate of Oregon. A two-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam and winner of the international World Cup Poetry Slam, his work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in the pages of The New York Times. The author of six books of poetry, an opera libretto, and a forthcoming children’s picture book, his latest is titled The Tigers, They Let Me. Originally from New Orleans, Anis now lives in Portland, Oregon where he serves on the board of the organization Literary Arts and can be found making art in his studio and occasionally reading poems from out its window at sunset to others. Website • Instagram

Kaveh Akbar

Poet, Novelist, and Editor

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and has received honors such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges. His latest collection, Pilgrim Bell, explores everything from recovery from addiction as well as making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation. Website • Instagram

Kasey Anderson

Singer-Songwriter

Kasey Anderson is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer based in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. He has been both a solo act and a front man for The Honkies and toured with Jason Isbell, Counting Crows, Steve Earle, the Supersuckers, among others. His song "Like Teenage Gravity" was covered by the Counting Crows on their 2012 album, Underwater Sunshine. Described as a “writer’s writer” by his dear friend Hanif Abdurraqib, Kasey is just one of those “songwriters who tend to write as though they are building a narrative arc for a book within each song. ” His sound has been described as Americana and alt-country—garnering high praise from No Depression, Paste, The Onion AV Club, and the Pazz & Jop Critics poll. Website • Instagram

Show Notes

Hanif Abdurraqib

• This and other recordings in this episode took place at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, OR in support of the Alano Club and their Artists in Recovery program.

• Hanif reads his poem, “There Are More Ways to Show Devotion.” 

• Hanif’s new collection of essays, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, is available now.

Anis Mojgani

• Anis shares his poem, “Things I Love.”

• His latest poetry collection is The Tigers, They Let Me.

Live Wire Listener Question

• We asked listeners to write a haiku about the month of April.

• By Carla – “Ode to Taxes”

  I guess a number 

  that the feds already know.

  Go to jail if wrong? 

• By Linh –

  Halfway to summer. 

  Sun, rain, green, moist, petrichor. 

  Studded tires gone. 

• By Martha –

  Forty-four, oh no. 

  Birthday month brings more eye bags. 

  Chin up, vodka down.

Paisley Rekdal

• Paisley discusses her new book, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: on Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically.

• Luke, Elena, and Paisley discuss a portion of the poem “Thorow” by Susan Howe.

• Paisley illustrates the concept of deixis with the poem “Letter” by Langston Hughes.

Station Location Identification Examination

• This week’s shout-out goes to WNYC-FM 93.9 of New York City, NY.

Kavi Akbar

• Kavi’s new book is Martyr, a novel.

• Kavi shares “Love Poem with Lines from Jesus and Mohhamad” and “Love Poem with Euclid in Mind.”

Kasey Anderson

• Kasey plays “Leave an Echo,” a song inspired by Hanif Abdurraqib’s poetry.

• Kasey’s next album, To the Places We’ve Lived, comes out this fall.

• Full Transcript

  Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire! This week, Poets Hanif Abdurraqib, Anis Mojgani. Kaveh Akbar, and Paisley Rekdal. 

  Paisley Rekdal: And this sounds really deeply unsexy, but treating poems a bit like crime scenes, which is rather than try to force the thing to be the story you want it to be, you have to look. You have to just spend some time looking at the evidence there is.  

  Elena Passarello: With music from Kasey Anderson and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank! 

  Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much, Elena Pasarello. Thanks to everyone for tuning in from all over these fine United States. We have a really, really fun show in store for you all this week, although it's a little bit different than like our typical deal. I don't know if you've noticed this, Elena, but one of the fun things about getting to work on Live Wire is that we get to interview and hear from all of these talented poets? Yes. And I was like, well, that's a cool perk of the job. But thankfully, we have eagle-eyed producers here on Live Wire. And one of them noted that April is actually National Poetry Month. And so we got the idea, why don't we put together a special all poetry episode? And so, we did that. And that's what we're gonna play this week. Now, a little bit of context about how this all came together. A bunch of the guests that we're going to feature this week were recorded at a special event that we did. in partnership with a place in Portland. It's called the Alano Club. It's a really cool thing that they're doing over there. They also run this program called Artists in Recovery, and they do workshops and classes, and they bring in visiting artists who are connected to the recovery community in some way. The idea being that, you know, being in recovery and being someone who explores their creative side, those are not mutually exclusive ideas at all. And this is a really good example of that. So what we did was we basically recorded one of these nights. And then we included in this episode of Live Wire an interview with the renowned poetPaisley Rekdal, who's got this amazing book out where she kind of breaks down the mechanics of poetry. I think you and I were talking before the interview. We'd both read the book. As a college professor yourself, you were particularly impressed. 

  Elena Passarello: Yeah, yeah, I think it's really unfortunate when there are these barriers up in terms of people reading and understanding poetry. And Paisley Rekdal is both super smart and insightful, but she's great at kind of communicating. You know, hey, here's a plan for how you can read a poem and feel like you can get close to it, feel like it can mean something to you. So I was super impressed and ready to buy about six copies of this book for a bunch of different people. 

  Luke Burbank: Yeah, it's really, really helpful and very demystifying, even for certain public radio hosts who may sometimes be mystified by poetry. 

  Elena Passarello: Have you ever written a poem, Luke? I've always wondered. 

  Luke Burbank: Not since that roses are red violets or blue thing is that I started the show with, other than that, I've left it to the people that have talent. It's never been something that I felt like I was particularly, I don't know, talented at, or again, had a great facility with, which is why hosting this show has really put me into a world where I think about a lot more than I used to. Were you a poet at any point? Do you consider yourself a poet? 

  Elena Passarello: I took poetry classes, but I love adverbs and adjectives. There are too many parts of speech that I like, but my husband writes a sonnet a day. [Luke: Whoa!] Isn't that cool? It's a project that he started about, I don't know, four or five months ago, which means I get a lot of love poems, which is very, very, very cool. 

  Luke Burbank: Oh my gosh. All right. Let's get to our first guest. He needs almost no introduction, at least on our show. Cause he's been on so many times. Uh, and through his appearances on live wire, we've watched this guy rise to become a nationally celebrated cultural critic, poet, and essayist, a recipient of a MacArthur foundation, a genius grant, and also a national book critic circle award, which means really good criticism if I have that right. It's a big deal anyway. Hanif Abdurraqib shared this story and poem at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon. Take a listen. 

  Hanif Abdurraqib: I want to read one poem about a ghost who is in my house. And before I do that, I will talk very briefly about death and loss, if that's okay. I lost a friend a couple of weeks ago, and it was hard. I chose not to come off the road that much, and I chose to kind of be in my home, and I choose to be in front of people, and I choose to do all the things that I would do while moving through grief and loss in any other way. I have begun to think of my life as improbable as it is to say I at one point did not imagine myself living beyond 25, which means that every moment that I get beyond 25 is kind of stolen time. I think I've been living on about 15 years of time that I've stolen and I have to make the most of that stolen time, right? But that also means that every bit of time I steal puts me at odds with the reality that there is someone I love who will. outlive me and what that does for me in another way is to say that when I am suffering through loss and I am asking myself every morning. I ask myself the question how do you how good do you feel about being alive today right and fortunately at this point in my life most days the answer is pretty good but on the days the answers not that great then I start to kind of shrink the time and say okay well how good you feel up being alive in the next hour in the half hour in the 20 minutes in the 10 minutes and countless times in my life, the thing that has been tethering me to the 10 minute at a time moments until I can get to an hour, until I get to half a day, until I could get to a full day, is something that Kaveh has told me or something that I've heard from him or something Kasey has told or something in the group chat that we have laughed about that puts me in a position where I just am eager to see what is next in the life that I get to share with these people I love. And that's a really lucky thing. I think one exchange of genuine affectionate friendship for me is the exchange of, even without people knowing it, by having loved you well, they are propelling you to the next hour that you might not otherwise make it to without them, and they are doing that even not knowing that they're doing it, right? That is what I think loving someone well amounts to, is that it kind of just has a residual effect, and so I'm grateful for that. Now, there's a dead woman in my attic. She, I live in this old, historically black neighborhood in Columbus, and the short of it is, this old jazz singer, the neighbor has a history to it, so I did all this research, and she died in my attic in 1920-something, and no one found her for a month. It was pretty, yeah, it was pretty gnarly. More for her, certainly, than me. The attic is haunted in such an aggressive way that when I moved in, like there was rustling in the attic to a level so intense that I called the exterminator and I was like, man, I think there's like raccoons up in there. And he went up there and he came back down. He said, Oh, no, there's nothing up there, man. I was, like, my boy, there is there's something up there. There's certainly something up. And now we share this house and she rustles at night and she, you know, like things echo through the house. And I think that in some kind of romantic way. She and I are in some kind of sense of companionship where neither of us get to be alone, which is sort of nice. I don't think of ghosts as, anyway, I wrote a poem about it. And this is like the National Gallery of Art asked me to write up in like an ekphrastic poem. And they sent me a painting. I was like, please write a poem about this and I wrote this poem and I gave it back to him. You could tell it was one of those things where they're like, ooh. You know how sometimes you go out with your friends and there's that one friend who takes it too far and you're like, I came out tonight because I wanted to party, but not like this? That's the vibe the National Gallery of Art Curators have where they're like we wanted a poem, buddy. But the joke is on them because it was so far beyond the timeline. I submitted the poem so late that they had no choice but to put it, you know what I mean? Anyway, here's a poem about the dead ghost in my attic and what it means to love someone. There are more ways to show devotion. A heavy gray cloud unlocks its doors and the moonlight stomps off behind it, a petulant child leaving behind smudges of darkness in its wake. And that leaves us with nothing to speak about except the brutalities of feeling. I don't think I want to make it to the end of the world this time. Thanks for watching! This one ain't my type of apocalypse. I want a meteor, a sky black with sudden arrows. I wanna know exactly how much time is left. to see the numbers on the clock descending. I might be in love, after all. I might slide a love letter across the table and take one last delight in watching a lover read whatever I've scrawled across paper while some fire consumes us, where a rising ocean holds us patiently in a waiting palm before making a fist. To believe in the reality of one single soulmate is to believe that every lonely life exists because someone didn't travel towards someone else. For example, a child dies somewhere, and then, decades later, Someone else lives a series of unsatisfied days, watches game shows alone, and goes to bed early, each day its own small apocalyptic orchestra of near-silence. The woman who lived in my house years before me is dead, but not gone. The arrogance of the living suggests that the dead rattle windows, that they nudge old glasses off edges of counters because they want us to be afraid, as if the dead have any use for our fear. The woman, who died in the house that is now our house, was alone in the attic for a month before she was found. Her mother found her, surrounded by mirrors. There are mirrors everywhere in the house that is now ours. On the landing between floors, in the hallways, and some of them, I am divided into several smaller cells, each of them wrecked by their own individual longing. From the attic, I hear moans while the sun is out, lashing the highest windows with its heat. But at night, It is always laughter that echoes down through the vents, trembles the walls, runs its hands along my back until I fall asleep. And it's like being held in this way by a lover from a world that has already ended, a different lover for every reflection in the room. And yet, when I wake, someone I loved once is still alive somewhere else. 

  Luke Burbank: That was Hanif Abdurraqib, who just while you were listening to that has won three more literary awards. It's been a huge year for him. This was Coming Your Way, thanks to the Tomorrow Theater and the Alano Club of Portland, who we've been collaborating with on this week's episode of the show. By the way, Hanif's latest book of essays, There's Always This Year, on basketball and ascension, is available right now. You're tuned to Live Wire from PRX, we've got to take a very quick break, but stay with us. When we come back, it's basically poet laureate palooza. We've got the 10th poet laureate of Oregon, Anis Mojgani. We've also got the former poet laureate of Utah, Paisley Rekdal, helping us demystify poetry a little bit. It's all coming your way in just a moment here on Live Wire. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right, we are celebrating Poetry Month on the program this week. And our next guest was the 10th Poet Laureate of the great state of Oregon and also the winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam. He's performed all over the world. He's authored several collections of poetry, including his latest, The Tigers, They Let Me. Anis Mojgani took the stage at the Tomorrow Theater. in support of the Alano Club of Portland. Take a listen.

  Anis Mojgani: I'm going to share this poem called Things I Love. And I was saying to my friend Bo the other day that amongst all this stuff that's swirling around many of us, as we bear witness to this crazy amount of sorrow and pain and strife happening around the globe and in our own country as well, there's also this aspect where I feel grateful to get to. exist in a time where I am not so much that I desire to be forced to bear witness to suffering, but that, but if I'm being forced to bear a witness to a suffering, that I get to bear witnessed with other people who are also most affected by this bearing of witness. You know, and so it's like, that's a really, really beautiful thing. So surround yourself by people. Who love humanity as much as I hope you love humanity, you know? Things I love, the blues a night sky makes, the bowls it holds for the stars to shine inside of, the sound of a fire moving its tongue against the wood, riding bicycles with friends, learning of the lives of others, getting to know our best and worst birthdays. I love a holy sunset which feels like the sky is praying to me, to us, asking us to look at it and know the fierce colors that lay in its clouds and even the sky needs but the right hour, the right persons looking up at it, knowing what beauty the sky holds inside itself, just waiting to pour forth. I love the crows en masse, they're crossing inside of this prayer. bunched together in their loudness at day's end, their flight looking like the sky breaking apart to spread itself farther. I love a spreading further in order to come closer to see what we all might arrive at, a wandering with intent. I love not making plans and making plans. Scheming schemes, building the idea of an art like it was a boat that becomes bigger upon being greeted by the water it asks to touch its home. how the ocean wants to hold us but doesn't always know how. I love that even the ocean does not know things. Even the ocean struggles to move against its nature and in this way maybe becomes something more. I love colors, how they lay on us and hold us when they make an object but a plane of their shade, the way they solid and smooth and spill and wash pale or so deep. I love color so much, how? Do I love a thing that has no form, nothing to touch, simply is, though I suppose is this not what all love is? Even an object holding our love is but a placeholder for us to try and with our palms touch the intangible, how the body too is like this. I love writing love poems, more so the living of them. I love riding an ink. A scrap of a note even as my desk becomes flooded by scraps of notes Whether they say fuzzy rhythmic vocals or a sunflower taught me a poem Or the emptiness, a missing, or are simply measurements for my sleeves When the sun lands on one spot, I love this eating fruit off a bush on a street or pulled from a tree or fallen from a branch like an offering hugging friends goodbye even though i hate goodbyes when full houses become empty but for me when an emptied house becomes full again learning something new the thought of sewing a quilt with a friend and their mother taking February to begin piano lessons the piano i love the piano I love when someone plays the piano when you didn't know they could play the piano. When they don't feel they know how to play the the piano, but there they are in this soft quiet that kisses the two of you playing it, and my heart in this quiet is going from bud to bloom to petals on the floor in one breath. I love that people want to share things with each other even when sometimes we do not know how do this. Is this not too what love itself is? You sharing you. and me sharing me and us sharing and being shared with each other back and forth for whatever length always may be. 

  Luke Burbank: That was one-time Oregon poet laureate and longtime friend of Live Wire, Anis Mojgani, recorded live at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon. His latest poetry collection is The Tigers, They Let Me, and it is really, really worth the read. Live Wire is brought to you by Powell's Books, a Portland institution since 1971. Powell's offers a selection of new and used books in stores and online at Powells.com. This is Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right. As we like to do each week, we have asked the Live Wire listeners a question. Now, this is inspired by the fact that it's poetry month, which you might've noticed, what with all the poetry going on around here. Elena, what did we ask the Live Wire audience? 

  Elena Passarello: We asked them, this is a big ask, to write us a haiku about the month of April. So a poem about the month that National Poetry Month is in. 

  Luke Burbank: You know that I tried to write a haiku recently, just like it was a joke with a friend. I wanted to just like say something in haiku and it was really challenging. It's not a lot of syllables. 

  Elena Passarello: Five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables? That's right, 17 total. My favorite one that I ever heard my friend Patrick wrote, and it was this. Haiku, Haiku. I do not like you, Haiku. You are too hard to do. That's good. Shout out, Pat. 

  Luke Burbank: All right, let's hear what the Live Wire listeners came up with on the month of April. What are we seeing? 

  Elena Passarello: Okay, here's one from Carla. Ode to Taxes is the title of this haiku. I guess a number that the feds already know go to jail if wrong? Question mark. 

  Luke Burbank: Now, here's the question, could that legally be considered premeditation? they be in more trouble for writing that haiku because it means that they were kind of like they were going in with a thought they might end up in jail. 

  Elena Passarello: Let's just hope Carla is a pseudonym, then. 

  Luke Burbank: Yes, that's right. All right. What's another haiku from one of our listeners? 

  Elena Passarello: Oh, I like this one from Lynn. Lynn's haiku. Halfway to summer. Sun, rain, green, moist, petrichor. Studded tires gone. 

  Luke Burbank: Oh, that's great. That is like, you know, what's that's like that, uh, baby shoes hardly used or something like that thing tells a whole story. 

  Elena Passarello: I think if I remember correctly from elementary school poetry class, it's awesome if your haiku can mention nature and that one totally does. 

  Luke Burbank: Okay, another haiku from one of our listeners. 

  Elena Passarello: Okay, this one is from Martha, and I think Martha must have a birthday in April. Martha says, 44, oh no. Birthday month brings more eye bags. Chin up, vodka down. I know this is a great poetry lesson because there's a sort of implicit thing in that last line when she says chin up, vodka down, Is she putting down the vodka? Cause at 44 she wants to drink less or is she downing the vodka because she's 44? What a great question. Thank you. Nice ambiguity there, Martha. 

  Luke Burbank: Yeah, here's what I would say about turning 44. As a person who has now turned 48, any age that you arrive at is the youngest you will ever be for the rest of your life. And it is so hard to remember that until you are older than that in your life and then you are like, like what I wouldn't give to be 44. Anyway, you know, well, so congratulations, happy birthday and in whatever direction that vodka is going, we salute you. Congrats. Well, thank you so much to everyone who reconnected with their fifth grade homework and wrote us a haiku. We really appreciate you. This is Live Wire from PRX Speaking of Poetry. Our next guest is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry. She's the one time Utah poet laureate. Her latest book is called Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens on reading and writing poetry forensically. And I really gotta say this book kind of changed my life on reading and understanding poems, and I'm very excited for all of you to get to hear about it as well. This is Paisley Rekdal, recorded live at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. Hello Paisley, welcome to the show. I really enjoyed this book and the structure of it and I was wondering though, like what were the kinds of conversations that were happening for you that prompted you to want to write a book like this? Was it people saying I don't like poetry or I don't understand poetry or what was it that had you wanting to write this? 

  Paisley Rekdal: All those things. And actually, as poet laureate, I would go into classrooms, and I thought it was there mostly for the kids. And kids are fine. You throw anything at them, and they just want to talk about it and play. And you don't tell them that they're poems. You tell them they're games. But every teacher would have me back afterwards and sort of say in a panic voice, like, I don't know how to teach poetry. I don't even know how read poetry. Why are we doing this? Why are you here? And. And also I teach, you know, creative writing for a living. I have graduate students, a lot of them love poetry, but then they get in a classroom and they start freaking out. And so then it really struck me that a lot people like poetry, but they don't know why, and they don't know how to talk about it, and they feel comfortable necessarily going on their own and trying to find other poems. And teachers are also, like they would love to talk about poetry, but they're too intimidated. So I thought, oh. This is maybe helpful for a lot of people. And then also as a writer, no one ever really explained poetry to me, which is a strange thing to say. I mean, I studied it all my life, but no one every talked about like the nuts and bolts, like why do poems do the things they do and how could I reproduce that on my own? So I thought, well, this would be useful for writers too. 

  Luke Burbank: I feel like it would be useful for public radio hosts who do a lot of interviews over books of poetry, and there are times when it kind of immediately, I guess, makes sense to me, and that's not a value judgment about the writing, but where I connect with it initially, and then times when, it's a little mysterious. And what this book lays out are so many different ways to kind of approach something. And I mean, is one of the failures of imagination, on my part, this idea that You should understand it. 

  Paisley Rekdal: It's not a failure of imagination. I actually think it's a failure of how we teach in general. Like we throw a poem in front of a kid or an adult and then we're like, if you don't get it in five minutes then you're stupid. And that's really frustrating because I mean, there are poems that I, I mean I read poetry for a living and there are problems that are mysterious to me. So the question is like, how can we start to approach something that we're not necessarily immediately drawn into and sort of find our way into the world of a poem? Have a great weekend. and not making it a value judgment. I mean, I think we also treat poetry like this super, super special thing. And I think that that making it precious is also a kind of weird value judgment, it's sort of like, well, this is a high art and so there's something wrong with you if you don't appreciate it. But poems do so many different things. They make us laugh, they make us cry, they make us hungry. They make us hate people, they make us love people, and we should be able to have all of those different kinds of emotions. So there's not one way of reading poetry. 

  Luke Burbank: is part of the challenge too, and you kind of get into this at the beginning of the book, that it's hard to decide what is and is not a poem. You know, like there are so many things that might move you, but is that a letter? You give some examples of things that might not seem like a poem, but then you decide that they are. What is your criteria for what is and is a poem? 

  Paisley Rekdal: A poem is basically a piece of writing that tells two or more stories at the exact same time, using the exact the same language. And yeah, I love that little hmm, right? It's a nice take away, it's like, it was for you. 

  Luke Burbank: That was somebody who still has some student loan debt. That is an extremely public radio audience response. 

  Paisley Rekdal: Welcome, now your BA degree finally comes to completion with that, yeah. But I do think that that's a way of reminding people that the work of poetry is when the figurative and the literal are equally important to our understanding of what's happening. And so there are lots of moments of poetry that we're encountering all the time and to remind students that in fact you have to not just describe the world but understand that when you're describing the world, you're usually telling... another story besides the thing that you're looking at. Why is this shell reminding you of, say, your mother or something like that, right? How do these two things snap together? Her name is Shelly. Her name's Shelly, yeah, this is her sister. Yeah, that one's not exactly graduate level. Yeah, well, oops, sorry, yeah. Why does this dog remind me of my horrible ex-boyfriend? I don't know, like, I don't know. 

  Luke Burbank: You start the book with a poem that is almost more, I guess, a piece of visual art as much as it is a poem. Is it by Susan Howe? And I think you say something like, you might be one of the people when seeing this poem who wants to throw this book across the room. Well, that's one way to start the books. Why did you start there? 

  Paisley Rekdal: Because it's so confusing. I know it sounds like really counterintuitive, but I'm just trying to make poetry as accessible as possible. So I give you one of the most conceptually difficult, traditionally conceptually-difficult poets ever, Susan Howe. But what Susan How's work taught me is you have to step back and just look. That's why I have the title like Reading Forensically, which is to sort of, and this sounds really deeply unsexy, but treating poems a bit like crime scenes, which is rather than try to. force the thing to be the story you want it to be, you have to look. You have to just spend some time looking at the evidence there is. And with Susan Howe, there's no narrative, there's no obvious imagery in the ways that we conventionally imagine there to be imagery in poetry. There's no rhyme, there is no meter. The poem doesn't even stay on the margins of the page. It's all over the place. Yeah, it looks like a magnetic poetry kit. It just exploded, exploded, right? So. So, but I teach this with high schoolers and it goes really well because I just say, don't tell me what you think. Don't tell what you, you know, you think this poem's trying to tell you. I want you to tell me you see. And so then they start saying, well actually these lines kind of go in this direction and that direction and actually there's a lot of repetition and some of these lines sound that they, like they're written by, I don't know, like, you don't, Daniel Boone and some others sound like they are written by my mother or something. And so we get to talk about diction, we get to talk about pattern and imagery and stuff like that that isn't just descriptive language, but how can you make a poem and a material experience? And in that sense you start to realize like, oh, I'm in a map. I'm actually experiencing a battle of a map and no one's telling me about the battle. I'm living it. It's a really wild poem. 

  Elena Passarello: Well, that's one of the things I love about the book too is you know I love being told to look and observe but I also like a little bit of scaffolding. [Paisley: Oh yeah, like I need a personal trainer just a little bit.] It's kind of like when you go to the gym and you're like okay well I know how the treadmill works so I'm just gonna start with that and then all of a sudden the rest of the equipment becomes kind of available how did you come up with the 20 or whatever kind of qualities to put in this forensic arsenal.

  Paisley Rekdal: I started with the most basic kind of question, which is, OK, are there any images in the poem? It sounds like a really basic thing. But when I work with students, oftentimes, again, the attention is to try to answer all the things about the poem at the same time. And what freaks people out about poetry is that you can look at line breaks. You can look rhyme. You can at rhythm. You can Look at imagery. Then you can Look the narrative and sentences and like voice. And it gives you this impression that poetry is infinite. But a poem exists in the confluence of all these things together. So you have to start saying, okay, well, I release you from answering it all at one time and just start with question number one. So are there images? What do the sentences sound like? What do line breaks look like? And just walk you up bit by bit by by bit until you're sort of tricked into realizing or having an entire conversation with a poem for all of its levels of scaffolding. And then by the end of it, you're like, oh, wow, actually I see how all this comes together. I can see why this person is writing a sonnet about their father, for instance. Or I can understand that rhythm is really important to this because it's about a particular work experience. And when I see this rhythm, now I'm actually experiencing the labor, the rhythm of that labor. 

  Luke Burbank: You're listening to Live Wire Radio from PRX. We're at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton. And we're talking to Paisley Rekdal about her book, The Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens on Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically. One of the things that I found so useful about this book is that you're kind of curating all of these different poems from a lot of poets that I was not familiar with, and then kind of explaining like, okay, here's what they're doing or like, here's an idea. And here's an example of it. And it was a kind of a cool tour of a bunch of different styles of poetry and people that I might not walk into a bookstore or a library and go find a book from this particular person. But I wondered if you could give us an example of one of the concepts that you kind of mentioned. I'm going to say this wrong, even though you said it for me in the green room, but it's already left my brain deixis. [Paisley: Deixis, yeah.] You said that a lot of writing that isn't great suffers from poor or lack of deixis and then you include a poem that presumably does a good job of it by Langston Hughes called Letter. Would you mind reading that for us and kind of explaining how that concept works in action? 

  Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, so deixis is basically any kind of language that gives you who is speaking, to whom are they speaking, on what occasion are they are speaking, right? So an example of poor deixis is if you are wandering up to some sort of, I don't know, store and it just says, be back soon. And you're like, well, when is soon? Who are you? Are you talking to me? Or is this anyone? Did you leave like last Thursday? You know and a lot of poems that we consider maybe problematically not working are ones that have a really poor sense of deixis. But this is a poem by Langston Hughes that starts to answer questions of who is speaking, to whom are they speaking, and why are they are speaking on what occasion. Dear mama, time I pay rent and get my food and laundry. I don't have much left, but here is $5 for you to show you. I still appreciate you. My girlfriend sends her love and says she hopes to lay eyes on you sometime in life. And there's a page turning here. Mama, it has been raining cats and dogs up here. Well, that is all, so I will close. Your son, baby, respectfully as ever. And when you listen to this poem, if you don't know it's a poem, and I think a lot of people would be like, that just seems like something found in someone's desk, right? But Langston Hughes does a very careful job of creating a sense of deixis. We know an average Joe is speaking to his mom, and we know that they've been separated for a really long time. And what's fun about this poem for me, and also kind of sad, is that if you start to pick apart this poem bit by bit, you can see that he moves between high and low language. He's talking to her very conversationally, and then at the same time says, respectfully as ever, he calls himself Baby, as well as Joe, and he says, I might not see you sometime in this life, like my girlfriend might never see you. So you understand that they've been separated, and you start to get a portrait of what was happening in Langston Hughes's time period, which is the Great Migration, where lots of black Americans are leaving the South, they're going to the North to find better work. And he's sending all the money he can, which is $5, which may not sound like a lot to us, but it's a lot them. So you really see the financial connection to the family. You start to see the love, but you also recognize that these are people who may never see each other again in their lives. Because we don't know why he won't return, but we might be able to speculate, which is, does he wanna go back south? Can he get killed back down there? Or is he looking for a better life and he can't afford to bring his mother to that life? 

  Luke Burbank: Is there something or some things that poetry can do that other forms of writing can't do? Is there is something that it can accomplish? 

  Paisley Rekdal: Blame? Yes. No. There's a lot of things that poetry can do that other forms of literature can't do. The thing about rhyme and rhythm is that it works on your body. And when a poem really moves us, it moves us not just through our heads, but really through every part of our body. We feel that rhythm. We feel like rhyme creates connections and completion. And we feel that more than we understand it intellectually. I feel like a poem stops time. better than any other literary form. But I think it's true because, I mean, if you think about prose, it has to work. It doesn't always have to work, but generally it works like beginning, middle, end. So you're tied to time and it's chronological waddling forth. And, but with poetry, it stops time because the lyric momentum of poetry means you can be in the present moment, but also in the past and in the future. And a poem, what it really does is it crystallizes through metaphor. the simultaneity of all these time periods. Why is it when I'm in this moment on the beach, I'm thinking about what I might be like in 10 years, but I'm also thinking about what I was like as a child, but you're there in that moment. That's the stopping of time. You experience all of it at once. And it's really hard to do that in narrative stuff because you have to be, here's the backstory, here's that, right? 

  Luke Burbank: You write about some work that you did at a Washington state prison, working with some of the incarcerated people there, and that a lot of them had a very limited sort of formal educational background, but you said you didn't find that they weren't literate but that their literacy was different. Oh yeah. And I kind of explain that. 

  Paisley Rekdal: Well, they had memorized lots and lots of song lyrics, and they had written poems in their minds and stuff like that as well, and they would send me mixed tapes, which probably was illegal, I don't remember. But yeah, their literacy functioned in a completely different way, but it also reminded me very much that, I mean, we are people not first of the page, we are first of memorization and recitation and orality. We love that. That's why we love performance poetry. That's we're so responsive to it. and we love songs and things like that. So, again, it speaks to that bodily function of poetry, that it brings you into yourself, I think, through those memorizations of poems and sharing that way. 

  Luke Burbank: I think you've already done a really exceptional job of this, but if somebody is hearing this on the radio and they just think, like, I'm just not really into poetry or poems. Is there, you know, somebody who's really made it a big part of your life's work? Is there something, a sales pitch? What's the elevator pitch on poetry? We're keeping it classy, Beaverton, okay? 

  Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, I think go into it with the question of, in what ways can this give me more pleasure, and in what way can this, give me, going back to the question time, give me a second to pause. And I think we live in a culture with social media and work that we just are always running, just always running. And poetry, the one thing that poetry really does is it gives us an invitation to just sit down. and look at language and just absorb it. There's almost nothing else in our lives that says, take some time for yourself. That's the pleasure that poetry can give us. And so it shouldn't be considered work. It shouldn't considered a responsibility or duty. It should be considered a pleasure. 

  Luke Burbank: It's like a smoke break that doesn't give you cancer. 

  Paisley Rekdal: Not yet. 

  Luke Burbank: TBD. Paisley Rekdal, thank you so much for coming on Live Wire. 

  Paisley Rekdal: Thank you. 

  Luke Burbank: That was Paisley Rekdal live from the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. Her book, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens on reading and writing poetry forensically is available now. All right, once again, we've arrived at one of my favorite parts of the show, station, location, identification, examination. This is where I quiz our esteemed announcer, Elena Passarello, about a spot in the U.S. where Live Wire is on the radio, and she's gotta guess the place that I am talking about. Elena, it is a poetry-themed station, location, identity, identification. Ooh, St. Louis, Missouri. 

  Elena Passarello: Birthplace of T.S. Eliot. 

  Luke Burbank: Very solid guess, but wrong, but a good guess, and a nice flex that you know where T.S. Eliot was born. Okay, here's a clue. The poet Jupiter Hammond published a poem in this place in 1761, which was the first by an African-American poet. Published. Published, 1761. It's credited as being the first published poem by an African American poet. 

  Elena Passarello: It's definitely one of 13 states. 

  Luke Burbank: Okay. Hey, look, that takes out like 37 states right there. How about this? Um, this city is home to an annual New Year's Day poetry reading marathon that's been running since 1974. Past poets include William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Yoko Ono, Amiri Baraka, and Patti Smith. 

  Elena Passarello: Is that New York City, New York? 

  Luke Burbank: It's New York City, New York. 

  Elena Passarello: What a, yeah, what an obscure location for this week's sly. 

  Luke Burbank: Hey, listen, we just report the places where Live Wire's on the radio and yes, as mentioned a few weeks ago, we are now on WNYC radio in New York City, also the home of the New the freaking poet's cafe founded in 1973.  

  Elena Passarello: Yeah. Lori's side. 

  Luke Burbank: That's right. So anyway, shout out to the folks tuning in in New York City on WNYC. You're listening to Live Wire from PRX, I'm Luke Burbank. That's Elena Passarello. We've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we return, we're going to hear some poems from best-selling author, Kaveh Akbar, and round the hour out with a song from singer-songwriter, Kasey Anderson. More Live Wire coming your way in just a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Our final poet of the hour has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, best American poetry and like a million other places. He's the author of two poetry collections, Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf, a Wolf. And his first novel, Martyr, was pretty much an immediate New York Times best seller. Here are a couple of quick poems from Kaveh Akbar. this is recorded live at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon 

  Kaveh Akbar: I wrote a book called Martyr that came out earlier this year and I've mostly been working on that for the last like half decade plus and so even though I think of myself as a poet and I came up as a poet, the only poems that I've actually been writing are like little goofy love poems for my spouse that I just like leave sitting around the house and they read them and they're like, all right, cool, but you still got to like clean the litter or whatever, you know. It's very much our vibe. But in the spirit of sharing new work, I'm gonna share a couple of those. This is called Love Poem with Lines from Jesus and Muhammad. How provincial to want to be the best living anything. How embarrassing really, as we stand atop the innumerable faceless dead, literally as we boil water in the good blue pot someone died and left us. How provincial and frankly small. Do not think I came to bring peace, but a sword. That's the Jesus one, by the way. Another terror in a language I'll never know. Yes, obedient instrument. remote will and the tooth biting through gold, gold sap in us glowing. Yes, that good gold supply looking at our phones after I go soft inside you obliterate me into that forever and forgive my Puritan heart. Brittle as an autumn in vase, brittle as the light lies, the long shadow we thought was a wolf was only a man's hands. Yes. Abstract belief finally turning into action like it's supposed to. And what comes next, of course, is all I've kept from you. Saying it out loud and watching it shrink like a shrinking flute. Those ye worship besides him are just names which ye have named. How ridiculous a name being just one syllable. Page, God, sword, peace, asp. the best living noun, flame, maybe him, yes, him, how to learn this, no, how to remember. This is called Love Poem with Euclid in Mind. Euclide was a mathematician a long time ago who speculated I mean, you don't need to know this. He speculated that when you see something, your eye is actually shooting tiny little particles and touching that thing, which is not totally like, I mean you're shooting ostensibly like the photons are bouncing off the shape of the thing and returning to your eyes. So it's not like wrong, wrong. Love poem with Euclid in mind. Our eyes shoot particles to touch whatever we see. But it's hard to touch something beneath time with its cigarettes and boats and boneless little men. Yield, new world. It is hard to look at someone and really see them. It is harder to forgive language when it's acting this way. Something cold and steel passes from my eye. to yours. That's the shovel. That's the shovel that dug the hole I am. 

  Luke Burbank: That was Kaveh Akbar live at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon as part of a benefit for the Elano Club of Portland. Make sure to pick up a copy of Kaveh's latest novel, it's Martyr, that is after you read his books of poetry, which are great as well. All right, let's pivot from some poetry to some music. Our next guest is a self-proclaimed gradually retiring songwriter. and the person behind this amazing benefit at the Alano Club of Portland, which brought together many of the guests that you heard this week. He's got four studio albums under his belt and his songs have been praised by the likes of Rolling Stone, Paste, No Depression, and NPR. Take a listen to this. It's Kasey Anderson, live from the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon. 

  Kasey Anderson: And this is a song called Leave an Echo that borrows a lot of lines from one of Hanif's poems. And so there was a day in which I texted him and said, hey, I've been reading this poem of yours and I would love to like write a song around a couple of these lines. And he was like, yeah, okay. And I said, well, here's the demo. I've done it already. So I appreciate the consent. I really hope that you like it. So this is the one tune, you know, I wrote all the tunes on the record. This is the tune that I co-wrote kind of with somebody but I just co-rode it in the sense that I stole some of his and used it for myself. 

  Kasey Anderson: [Kasey Anderson performs "Leave An Echo"] 

  Luke Burbank: That was Kasey Anderson right here on Live Wire, recorded live at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon, as part of last fall's benefit for the Alano Club of Portland, his latest album is To the Places. All right, that's gonna do it for this week's episode of Live Wire, a huge thanks to all of our guests, Paisley Rekdal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Anis Mojgani, Kavi Akbar, and Kasey Anderson. Special thanks this episode to Kasey and the Elano Club of Portland, along with the good folks at the Tomorrow Theater. This episode is dedicated to the memory of Brent Kanode. 

  Elena Passarello: Lara Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our Executive Director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our technical director is Eben Hoffer. Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our assistant editor and our house sound is by D. Neil Blake and Nate Zwainlesk. Ashley Park is our production fellow. 

  Luke Burbank: Valentine Keck is our operations manager, Andrea Castro-Martinez is our marketing associate, and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house band is Sam Pinkerton, Ethan Fox Tucker, Ben Gilmore, and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Haziq Bin Ahmad Fareed. 

  Elena Passarello: Additional funding provided by the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the state of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week, we'd like to thank member Ann E Mulia of Potomac, MD and Lindsey Maser of Portland, OR. 

  Luke Burbank: For more information about our show or how you can listen to the podcast, head on over to LiveWireRadio.org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire crew. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.

  PRX.