Personal Anthology

The queens discuss the ICONIC poems that are near and queer to their hearts.

Please consider supporting the poets we mention in today's show! If you need a good indie bookstore, we recommend Loyalty Bookstores, a DC-area Black-owned bookshop.

You can read Carl Phillips's poem, "X," from In the Blood, here.

Listen to Louise Glück read "The Mirror" here and read the text here.

Read "Satan Says" by Sharon Olds here.

In an October 2022 NY Times profile of Sharon Olds, she declares she has a "real simile brain,” explaining further:  “My brain sees in similes.” According to Sam Anderson (who wrote the profile), Olds "has never been comfortable saying definitively, as metaphors do, that something is something else. She ascribes this to her terrifying childhood experience of religion, the idea that blood was wine, that body was bread. To this day, she clings to the comforting distance of that “like.” Blood is like wine, yes; body is like bread, sure — in the same way that a poem is like a real experience but not the thing itself. In the same way that death is like birth, sorrow is like joy, a poet is like a host, an ending is like a beginning. To have a simile brain, as Olds does, is to live in a world of radical interconnection, a world in which nothing stands alone, nothing is ever only itself. And yet everything, in that vast network of mutual meanings, is allowed to remain exactly itself." You can read the whole profile here.

Also, we reference it enough in this show that here's a recording of Sharon Olds reading "I Go Back to May 1937."

The lecture of Linda Gregg's I reference is a craft talk she gave at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. It is titled "Craft of the Invisible." Listen to it here (~30 minutes).

Laura Kasischke's poem "The Ugliness" appears in Prairie Schooner  (Vol. 76, Issue 1, 2002). You can watch her interviewed on a hometown vlog called "Around Town with Linda" here (~35 min).

Watch Rita Dove read "After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed" here (~3 minutes).

You can read Thomas Centolella's “The Orders” here.

Read Denis Johnson's “Now” here.

If you'd like to read more about Christopher Bursk, go here.

Len Roberts's poem "The Problem" appeared with 8 other poems in American Poetry Review, Vol. 30, No. 2 (MARCH/APRIL 2001).

Read Etheridge Knight's incredible poem “Feeling Fucked Up” here.

You can read two of Jen Jabaily-Blackburn's poems in Couplet Poetry here.