Ha ha suckers. This is a post about poetry. I dare you to read it.
The Library of Congress recently added about a million new podcasts of poets reading their work, so it you’re into that shit, you should probably check it out. The Poet and the Poem podcasts consist readings and interviews. The interviews are actually very good.
And these aren’t your tweed sports jacket, community college-teaching poets. There are some real heavy hitters, such as:
- W.D. Snodgrass
- Billy Collins
- Rita Dove
- Henry Taylor
- Claudia Emerson
- Nick Flynn
- Stanely Kunitz
- Heather McHugh
- E. Ethelbert Miller
But my favorite so far is the very first one, Peter Klappert. He was my adviser at George Mason when I did my MFA there, and a hell of a guy. Great poet. Funny. Brilliant. Surly. All of it. And his podcast is representative of all of that.
Here’s a stanza from a poem of his called “After Listening to Landscape Poetry”:
I found it diffiult to be
sentimental about deposits
of sediment
Check it out. I also heard they are going to reissue The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty, which ran into an epic publishing SNAFU when it first was released.
[Download Podcast- PK starts 29:50 in]
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