Episode 156: The Challenge/Pleasure Ratio

Kathy puts the kibosh on our introductory weather ramblings, Slushies. Instead we’re sharing what makes us grateful. Seems like, with our combined love of coffee, we’re keeping the baristas in business. Aside from java, Tobi’s thankful for poetry podcasts (not just ours), including Poem Talk from Penn Sound. Lisa’s grateful for the public library that gives her free access to novels like The Copywriter by Daniel Poppick. Eric appreciates his students. And we reveal the secret behind why we’re not on YouTube. Of course we’re thankful to YOU for listening, Slushies, and to the writers who allow us to discuss their work, like today’s featured poet, Sarah Brockhaus.

 

In the first poem, “Still Here,” Eric notes the honest intertwining of the writing and teaching life. And Tobi remarks how the flexible nature of the English language, with its ability to shift nouns into verbs, is on display in the poem. The poem’s nimble leaps reminds Jason of Richard Siken’s valuable advice to “focus less on the lyric leap and more on the lyric landing.” The second poem challenges us with its frequent use of enjambment and caesura, but the ratio of challenge to pleasure is high. We end with Jason’s sage advice on how to structure a submission. Thanks, as always, for listening, Slushies!

 

At the table: Eric Baker, Tobi Kassim, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (Sound Engineer)

 

Author Bio:

Sarah Brockhaus is an MFA student at Louisiana State University. She is a co-editor of The Shore Poetry. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and her poems are published or forthcoming in Guernica, The National Poetry Review, American Literary Review, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere.

Website: sarahbrockhaus.com

Social Media: 

 

Instagram: @sarahb._23

 

Blue Sky: scbrock.bsky.social

 

Still Here

 

I try to teach 

my students to exist outside 

themselves and they email about double 

 

spacing and panic apologize for 12:01 submissions 

and I want to see them and say we’re real 

people, all of us, we’re real. Do you see? But I stare 

 

at my wall for hours and it means nothing. I’ve been losing 

things in dreams, each shape afterimages on my lids 

and I can’t see the space around enough 

 

to place them. Perhaps there never was

a hairbrush, a magnet in the shape 

of Louisiana, a letter written springs ago. Fingers trace 

 

the handwriting by heart like revision, 

same stories and script but the wrong 

heart. I’m translating farther and farther

 

from the origin. My nails grow too long. I imagine 

myself bodiless, avoid reflections. I hold still 

and myself. 

 

There are eight taxidermied ducklings

at the craft fair. So like life and so 

still. I want to break 

 

them from the cage, find a way 

for their bodies 

to hold again.

 

Phonagnosia

 

A wasp taps again against 

the window. I imagine the hollow 

clunk communicating other causes: an acorn 

 

slouching from a branch into a pool. A man’s 

head, drunk, hitting the wall lullabically, my hand 

slid into the space between skin and cinder

 

-block, how one might protect a baby’s soft 

skull from a corner. I try to tell the wasp I am not 

home and everything from my body sounds 

 

human. To sleep I make lists on the uselessness 

of language: the phrase how are you? and how your

doing well is a wall I trace my own name 

 

on like tally marks, how the sea swallows 

song and estranges it, how without air I am voice

-less, how I haven’t trained my ear to echo locate, 

 

and can’t even vibrate some signal through a        pane 

of glass, can’t replay what you said years ago in any voice 

 

but the one inside me, that won’t go, won’t sound 

like anyone I know.