Big Sonny

The queens defy Big Sonny and play an associative game that leads to a lot of poetry love -- and some hot dish.

Please support the poets we mention in today's show by buying their books! You can shop indie at Loyalty Bookstores, a Black-owned DC-area independent bookseller. 

Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself" ends with these lines:
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
{....}
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

 Mark Doty has a great book on Whitman called What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (Norton, 2021). In My Alexandria, there is only one “Days of….” poem and it is “Days of 1981,” as James correctly said. 

 Benjamin Garcia’s Thrown in the Throat was selected for the National Poetry Series by Kazim Ali and published by Milkweed (2020). Read more about Garcia at his website here.

 You can learn more about Darnell Arnoult and her fabulous work on her website. 

 Maggie Smith kicks off the 16th Palm Beach Poetry Festival in this video (~20 min).

 Rebecca Morgan Smith is the editor of Memorious, and you can learn more about her own writing at her website here.

 Learn more about Jacques J. Rancourt’s fabulosity by visiting his website (and ordering his latest book, Brocken Spectre). 

 Read Olena Kalytiak Davis’s poem “Sweet Reader, Flanneled and Tulled” here.  

 Susan Mitchell is not the highest paid professor in American poetry. Her salary is searchable since public universities publish salary information.

 sam sax’s poem we mention is “Ode to the Belt,” which was published in The Nation in 2018. You can read it on sam’s twitter feed here. 

 Read James Tate’s “Goodtime Jesus” here. James also likes “The Lost Pilot,” which you can read here.