American Poetry

Episode 2.4 Sara Deniz Akant: Strange Making

Author of Parades and Babette, her latest book is Hyperphantasia. Her work is of a radical imagination. The reader who enters the space of her poems faces at first a slight sense of disorientation. The way one feels in a building of unfamiliar layout. Because our usual expectations are not immediately met, the reader begins to feel both anxiety and wonder. Sara Denis Akant is able to bring about conflicting emotions and ideas and hold them there in unresolved tension. Like a slow panning shot that seems to take too long until we stop anticipating the next action and we start paying attention to the details of the image, her poems are an invitation.

Episode 2.2 Kristen Case

In this episode I had the opportunity to speak with Kristen Case. She is the author of two books of poems “Little Arias” and “Principles of Economics” and has a new manuscript “Daphne” looking for a home. An editor and a professor of English at the university of Maine, she wrote a fascinating book on the connections between philosophy and poetry called “American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice”.

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Michael Franco 2.1

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.