In this second conversation with Michael Franco we explore the notions of delight and generosity in poetry. Without the constraints of a 27 minute live broadcast, we were able to dive into the deep waters of sound and meaning, community and experience, and much more.
Kythe Heller is a poet, essayist, performer, filmmaker, and scholar.In mixed-genre poems, essays, and pieces for collaborative and solo performance, Heller experiments with a grounding of poetics in textual, spatial and performative practices that re-orient art-making as a practice of consciousness: In what ways can our writings become sites of resistance, sites of evolution, parts of an array of realizing new social and ecological relationships by considering how to use language to radically change one’s way of being in the world? She is the author of the poetry collection Firebird (Arrowsmith, 2020), and two chapbooks, Immolation (Monk Honey) and Thunder (WICK: Harvard Divinity School). Her recent poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Tricycle, The American Poetry Review, POOL, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from Harvard University, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, The Mellon Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Laurels Foundation. Her recent film, performance and multimedia work has been staged at the Harvard Film Studies Center, SEEDS Festival, Sonoma State University, WAXworks (NYC), BAX (NYC), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and in various collaborations and street performances in NYC and elsewhere. Her performance work is often collaborative and uses a combination of media (text, music, performance, and video). She has received degrees from Reed College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Harvard Divinity School and has taught literature, religion, media, and art at Coachman Family Homeless Shelter, Harvard University, Bayview Correctional Facility, Bard College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Hofstra University. Currently she is a poet on the faculty of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College while also pursuing a doctoral degree in Comparative Religion at Harvard University.
Sam Cha was born in Korea. He earned an MFA from UMass Boston. A winner of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a St. Botolph’s Club Emerging Artists Grant, his work has appeared in apt, Anderbo, Better, Best New Poets, Boston Review, decomP, DIAGRAM, Memorious, Missouri Review, Rattle, RHINO, and Toad. He’s a poetry editor at Radius. He is the author of a chapbook, American Carnage, that was published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs in 2018, and of The Yellow Book, a full-length collection of cross-genre writing, forthcoming from [PANK] Books in 2020.
Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory and has often collaborated with musicians. Her most recent book, Ask Anyone (Pressed Wafer), is accompanied by musical settings—see her website, ruthlepson.com, and received the Phillip Whalen Award from Chax Press. Her other books of poetry are Dreaming in Color (Alice James Books), Morphology (blazeVOX), and I Went Looking for You (BlazeVOX). She edited Poetry from Sojourner: Feminist Anthology (Illinois). She has just put together a book of her new & selected poems. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including spoKe, Ping Pong, Let the Bucket Down, Agni, Ploughshares, and The Women’s Review of Books, and she has given many readings, including in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in Barcelona, as well as on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” She grew up in the D.C. area and lives in Cambridge.
Oliver Strand is a visiting lecturer in Studio Foundation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Wood Shop Coordinator at Harvard University’s Dept. of Art, Film, and Visual Studies. He received an MFA from Brown University, where he received the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing. His poetry has appeared in Entropy, The Fanzine, Poor Claudia, Burning House Press, and the Spoon River Poetry Review.
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