AL FILREIS:
I'm Al Filreis and this is Poem Talk at the Writer's House, where I have the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of poetry to collaborate on a close but not too close reading of a poem, talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities and we hope gain for a poem that interests us, some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because poem talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our Penn Sound archive writing.upenn.edu/Pennsound. Today I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writer's House in our Arts Café before a live audience. And this live audience, though small, is a hearty, happy live audience, also balancing plates of food. But I'm gonna ask them to indicate their presence by putting their hands together.
(APPLAUSE)
Wow. You produced an impressive sound. I'm joined here before that live audience that you just heard and that we can now just sort of assume is there by Bethany Swann, writer, creative collaborator, fourth-year PhD candidate in the English department here at Penn, whose research focuses on the intersection of Asian diasporas and contemporary poetry and poetics, and who has recently been writing a chapter-length essay about how diasporic modes of knowing and being in Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony challenge assumptions about the so-called subject of lyric reading and who is currently the regional co-chair of Kundiman North East, and by Jonathan Dick, a doctoral candidate in English here at Penn, specializing in 19th and 20th-century literature and literary criticism, whose dissertation is about how we narrate environmental and social transition and why certain figures of speech like the pathetic fallacy, are treated by aesthetic objects and cultural criticism as an obstacle to it. And who here with us today is participating in, we think, his fourth episode of Poem Talk. And by Kate Colby, a Boston-born poet who lives in Providence, Rhode Island. A long-time friend of the writer's house and one of the co-teachers of Maude Poe, our open online course, author of a number of books of poetry, nine, I think to be exact. Among them, I Mean, 2015 and the Arrangements, 2018, and a new new new book. I think really new as of this recording called Reverse Engineer published by ornithopter press about which Rae Armentrout, in an ecstatic statement, has said, quote, "Thinking about the self and the universe, we tie ourselves in knots." A poem may be such a knot. Kate. Hello. Welcome back.

KATE COLBY:
Thanks so much.

AL FILREIS:
So happy and excited for you about this new book, which is wonderful. Congrats.

KATE COLBY:
Thank you.

AL FILREIS:
And that is ecstatic, that praise by Rae. But it is a little Kobe-esque, you know, tying yourself in knots and all. How does it feel to be praised as tying yourself in knots?

KATE COLBY:
I mean, it's right on and it's Rae Armentrout. So it's kind of a double whammy of a flattering.

AL FILREIS:
It's the knot talking to the knot.

KATE COLBY:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
Jonathan, I feel you're so good at this. Sorry to up the ante here, but you're so good at Poem Talk that I feel like it's our eighth time doing it or something.

JONATHAN DICK:
I think it is four. And I think one thing is if you go back every time I'm here, I do something different, like in terms of my research and it's really embarrassing actually. Or...

AL FILREIS:
Oh, meaning the intros are all...
(CROSSTALK). This month, this dissertation is about...

JONATHAN DICK:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, that's true. But you know what? It's fine. I mean, a podcast is not D.O.A., It's just going to be dynamic and evolving. And every time you listen to Jonathan, there's something new going on in that head of yours.

JONATHAN DICK:
That's a nice way of putting it...
(CROSSTALK)

AL FILREIS:
I don't know if it ended quite perfectly, but I think also we feel we've been in conversation a lot because one semester we taught a class together and we were just constantly playing off each other's ideas. And that's just... That was a marvellous experience. So I shall never forget that as an intellectual experience. So. And Bethany, this is your second Poem Talk. Tell us about the first one. Boy, was that good and fun!

BETHANY SWANN:
Oh, I had a great time. So we were looking at Sawako's work and it was...

AL FILREIS:
Sawako Nakayasu.

BETHANY SWANN:
Nakayasu.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah.

BETHANY SWANN:
And yeah, just a really rich conversation around some of the imagery. So it was wonderful.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. It was good.

BETHANY SWANN:
It was fun.

AL FILREIS:
It's really good. Well, we four have gathered here today to talk about a poem by Hoa Nguyen titled Long Light. The poem has been collected in the book published by Wave Red Juice Poems, 1998 2008. A recording of the poem comes from Hoa's Penn sound author page and was performed during a reading at the Saint Bonaventure Visiting Poets Series on March 22nd, 2016. So here now is Hoa Nguyen reading her poem Long Light.

HOA NGUYEN:
Long light. Long light. Super Bowl Sunday, 2006. Do to escape the present. Lying on a recycled plastic outdoor carpet near profuse clover and the water meter. In the dream, Heather marries a heart surgeon in heaven. We need to empty the ash from our chiminea. Peely bark on the sycamore tree. Waxing gibbous moon. There are rhetorical happenings written directly on a flower. Can love everyone?

AL FILREIS:
Jonathan, how do the parts, that stands the sections interoperate? I mean, one way to read this obviously is extremely para tactics. So each one is a new scene. We were just talking about Rae Armentrout. This one reminds me in the sense of the way Rae Armentrout handles her sections, often by putting an asterisk or something. Is that the right way to read it? It is obviously not the only way, but is that how you read it?

JONATHAN DICK:
That's not how I read it. And for the audience, parataxis is a rhetorical feature in language that refers to things said one after another without any grammatical connectives, or in a quotation that I really like, parataxis like history is one damn thing after another. And we can read Long Light like that. Insofar as each clause seems to be separate from the clause that both precedes and follows it. But I'm actually thinking about this poem more as an occasional poem, which is to say a poem that's written in commemoration of a specific event. The event named in the first line, Super Bowl Sunday, 2006. There are certain points across Long Light that orient the perspective at a particular moment in time, a moment in which the speaker is lying. For instance, outside looking at the water meter, looking at various things that sort of catch their attention. So I think you could read it paratactically, but for me, it's all one continuous narrative commemorating this moment on Super Bowl Sunday, where the speaker collapses outside and sort of looks at the things around them. That's at least how I was...

AL FILREIS:
Very cool. No, great way to start. Bethany, do you want to respond to that? Did you read it at least some of the time as a paratactic, separate sections. Different scenes?

BETHANY SWANN:
You know, actually, just listening to Hoa read it, I heard something that I hadn't noticed before. And I think that the way she sort of like almost added Long Light and then Super Bowl Sunday 26, it almost like occurred to me as an enjambed title, the whole thing and the way that I formally read this poem, at first I looked at it and I was like, Oh, there's a quatrain. And then there's some sort of like couplets, but is it a sonnet? Because it is 13 lines, it's missing one. To me, Long Light is being deflected here, and that's evident formally. And some of the ways that there are (INAUDIBLE) throughout the kind of like formal units of the poem stanzas. And so I liked kind of thinking about like where is that light refracting, you know, where is it deflecting, what is interrupting that light. And so I like what you said about the kind of discursiveness of paratactic reading.

AL FILREIS:
Kate, our two colleagues here who, your predecessor speakers have just done what I love about spending a lot of time on a poem, because if you're trying to write or talk about an entire book or a range of years of poetry is this book is Red juice, you're never really going to get to do what we've already done in the first 5 minutes. I mean, basically what's been said is, especially what Bethany just said, is this poem does formally what it's saying. And that's amazing that we got to that so quickly. And I would say I would insist to anybody listening to this thinking, oh, those academics, they sure do that form stuff. I actually would insist that it's not academic at all. It is the way that one would read and experience a poem like this, no matter how experienced you are. Anyway, I'm turning to you for another thought on this. It really is trying to do formally what it's saying. And what would that be? What would it be saying, therefore?

KATE COLBY:
Well, I'm going to read it atomically. Light is not in fact continuous, even though it appears that way. It consists of photons which are discrete packets of energy, and the poem's form replicates that effect of both continuity and discrete moments. And she moves back and forth between images of timelessness and location in time. And that's all wrapped up in the title as well, which, you know, captures how the poem exists that wildly different temporal and physical scales.

AL FILREIS:
So I didn't. I should have looked up Long Light in my, you know, dictionary of physics. But is it a... What is it referred to in a physics sense.

KATE COLBY:
Well, light is not in fact continuous, so it can appear to extend as in time and space, but it is made up of smaller pieces. And I also think in the poem it refers to the long shadows of winter. And we're located here on Super Bowl Sunday. We know what time of year it is. The light lengthens as we perceive it.

AL FILREIS:
So we want a poem that does the painterly thing of suggesting vision imagery, but we also really need a poem that talks about duration of time. So Jonathan, would you just point out a few durational references here other than the fact that Super Bowl Sunday is always incredibly long? That was meant to be as a joke, but really not?

JONATHAN DICK:
Well, I mean, I will say something briefly about Super Bowl Sunday, and then I'll say something about the form that that sort of creates this illusion of length. I like the Super Bowl Sunday reference also because it's such a nice joke insofar as Super Bowl Sunday 2006 was the 40th Super Bowl, the Roman numeral of which is XL. And so right in that first line, we have long white XL. There's like an embedded joke there that I think would be would be... Did you find like...

AL FILREIS:
I know, I really like that. I tried to figure out whether the Steelers versus the Seahawks was relevant. It was the first Super Bowl, I think, in Detroit. Why is in Canada? I'm not sure that Hoa cared much about the location, so I didn't do anything.

JONATHAN DICK:
It's just like XL. It just seems like a funny joke. And but anyways, that the thing that I would say about length is one thing that I was quite interested in this poem is its assonance and its consonants or its repetition of particular vowel or consonant sounds. You know, Super Bowl Sunday is one of those examples. But the big one for me is, you know, in the dream, Heather marries a heart surgeon in heaven. These, you know, repetitive sounds increased the length of a line, even when the line itself is relatively short or truncated. And so, you know, when it comes to marking length, the level of form, that is one way in which it happens, because the poem is itself quite skinny. I'm technically avoiding the question you're asking. But that's...

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. You have every right to do that. This being your fourth poem talk. It's doing this so much as to help me avoid my question. Yeah. Because I mean, let the record show that I barely have a mark on this page. I have not prepared any questions, nor do I ever prepare questions. And nor do the poem talkers expect to have questions prepared in advance. Right, Bethany? So here's my question to you. We need to empty the ash. We is a very domestic we, it feels like. And the poem actually is amazingly domestic. There's stuff happening around the house. Is that right? And how does that help you with this fairly abstract idea of light having a duration?

BETHANY SWANN:
You know, I hadn't thought about the juxtaposition between that line about emptying the ash from the chimenea and the long light. But ash certainly suggests the afterlife of a fire or the afterlife.

AL FILREIS:
Why would anybody put an ash in the chimenea? Is that is that a way of helping that plant? No. Is it that they have a wood stove and they should not be putting the ash in a potted plant? What's going on there? Something's malfunctioning.

BETHANY SWANN:
I think the ash is central to the poem in that it's an object that barely exists in the presence. It's the aftermath or the upshot of a fire in the chimenea. But here it also betokens a future in which it will be emptied and it echoes. There's a lot of afterlife in the poem. There's heaven. There's the evanescence of the flower that, you know, will still carry these marks of rhetorical happenings, and that an afterlife is both a thing that comes after life and a life after death. It's kind of a two-way word that holds so much of the activity of this poem, which keeps two very different kinds of balls in the air at all times.

AL FILREIS:
Wow. Jonathan, what are you thinking? You're obviously thinking of something.

JONATHAN DICK:
I'm actually thinking about something that Bethany mentioned earlier, which is, like, speculatively, what would happen if we treated this poem as a sonnet? You know, it does have 13 lines while it does right sonnets elsewhere with 13 lines. And, you know, speculatively, if we want to run with that, this line would be where the Volta in the sonnet hits. And for readers of Volta is the moment of a sonnet, either English or Italian, in which the argument switches, or we become more philosophical. And it's making me sort of conscious of the fact that after this turning point, when something happens to the ash in the chimenea, which I don't think is actually a plant, I think it's one of those like... I almost described it in a way that I don't think would be conducive to people listening to this in the future, because I think it might be a bad joke, but it looks like a gourd and it's like an outdoor fire pit. And so, you know, something is being emptied out of there.

AL FILREIS:
Well, that helps.

JONATHAN DICK:
Yeah. And there's a...

KATE COLBY:
Terracotta.

JONATHAN DICK:
Yeah. This is like...

AL FILREIS:
So, it's not killing a plant.

JONATHAN DICK:
But, you know, there's a fire that has ended and, you know, there's a moment here that something is happening to sort of change the context of the poem. And I guess I'm just. I'm running with Bethany's suggestion and wanting to notice how after this moment, the poem becomes increasingly philosophical, we move from like, grounded descriptions about, you know, the place, the time, the space to questions about like love, which sneaks in unsuspected with like a particular rhetorical force, and then also...

AL FILREIS:
It get's like 80% toward Hallmark Cardy even though it doesn't because the grammar is all off. So we don't know what the agency is going on there. Can I ask any or all of the three of you let's go back to Super Bowl Sunday, because what's happening here is that there is an escape from presumably Super Bowl Sunday and from that indoorsness which is really oppressive for those of us who've done Super Bowl Sunday earnestly. It's a long indoor day on a short day of the year. And it's cold and it's going to be cold in Canada. But there seems to be a lot of outdoorsness. Maybe the outdoor carpet is not indoors or even in a porch, but outdoors. And then we have the chimenea. We've just learned that it's probably outdoors. And then, of course, the sycamore, which is a London plain, which is a city tree, an urban tree outdoors. So am I on to something at all, Kate? The do is, in quotes, do to escape from the present. What's happening? Is there a motion outward?

KATE COLBY:
Well, I think there's an indoor-outdoor binary, certainly. But the whole thing puts me in mind of Zeno's paradox, where we have the suspended moment with all this incremental movement inside of it, and it does move between indoors or outdoors. You know, momentary information and eternity. Heather... I just assumed Heather was Locklear or more like some kind of Soap Opera.

AL FILREIS:
Wait, you have to explain that reference, though.

KATE COLBY:
Well, I can't really.

AL FILREIS:
Super soap operas.

KATE COLBY:
Maybe like...

AL FILREIS:
The 80s, 90s.

KATE COLBY:
Melrose Place.

AL FILREIS:
Yes.

KATE COLBY:
Some show like that. I think he was also on soap operas.

AL FILREIS:
Cop show, too.

KATE COLBY:
I could be wrong. That's a question for Hoa one day.

AL FILREIS:
In the dreams. Not Heather's dream, but someone else's dream of Heather.

KATE COLBY:
Well, we don't know if Heather is having the dream or the poet is having the dream.

AL FILREIS:
But that's, Haha, right? That's just funny.

KATE COLBY:
It is and is it...

AL FILREIS:
She is marrying a heart surgeon, that's like everybody's mother's dream, I think.

KATE COLBY:
Sure. But there's some perceptual confusion in here. Who is having the dream? Where is the world? Which of us are in which worlds?

AL FILREIS:
And if we don't read it paratactically, Jonathan, then there may be a connection between the urgency, the hidden urgency of this Haha, not so funny, You know, marrying a heart surgeon. Maybe because there is a heart problem and then there is this sudden need to empty the ash. You know, those things are connected in a kind of beautiful and haunting way. No?

JONATHAN DICK:
Well, I mean, it goes back to a point that you mentioned earlier, which is that domesticity sort of sneaks into this poem in its middle. But, you know, between either extremely ordinary reflections about, you know, the place and the Super Bowl Sunday and, you know, extremely philosophical meditations about what can be written on a flower, which is something quite interesting to think about that I'm sure we'll return to. But one thing that I sort of started to think about with respect to Heather and the heart surgeon is that in some respects there's a wish or desire in that moment for someone who can heal her heart which gets brought back up. And when love is questioned as something that people can have, that people can have equally. And so, you know, Heather, who marries a heart surgeon, her heart's going to be just fine. But other people's hearts may not. And I think that that, to me, is a really... That to me is a way of grounding what would otherwise be paratactic references in something that is, you know, fixed.

AL FILREIS:
Bethany, I'm going to ask you and Kate to listen to Hoa read the poem and speak to how it sounds. Do we get any kind of hint as to how to read even some of the slightly ridiculous lines like what a dream will do can always be funny and the way the voice voices the poem. So let's hear it.

HOA NGUYEN:
Long light. Long light. Super Bowl Sunday, 2006. Do to escape the present. Lying on a recycled plastic outdoor carpet near profuse clover and the water meter. In the dream, Heather marries a heart surgeon in heaven. We need to empty the ash from our chiminea. Peely bark on the sycamore tree. Waxing gibbous moon. There are rhetorical happenings written directly on a flower. Can love everyone?

AL FILREIS:
Bethany, what's the tone of the reading? I mean.

BETHANY SWANN:
I mean, I think it's... I think it's speculative. And I think that there's an earnestness that is sort of underscoring that question at the end. And I notice that the penultimate couplet, there are rhetorical happenings written directly onto a flower that when Hoa read that, she slowed down. And I think that kind of asking, like, what are the rhetorical happenings? And for me, rhetoric always implies an audience. And so what? What is that kind of like, relationship? How how is that dynamic apparent even when it's not narrative or when it's not overtly narrative? Explicit.

AL FILREIS:
Interesting? Kate, what's your response to the tone or to the reading?

KATE COLBY:
It has a meditative quality, the way she repeats the title. Feels like she's she's really working in and with a moment that she's forcing herself to stay within. And I hear that in the reading that she's, there's some kind of like a practice happening here where she's experiencing a moment and all of the associate of information that that comes with it.

AL FILREIS:
I guess we should turn to the rhetorical happenings and then the writing on a flower. And then, of course, this question of love. Before I do that, I want to just... I pick somewhat randomly from this collection. From Red Juice from a poem nearby. It's called Drippy. And I'm just going to read it to you at the risk of being such a terrible reader of Hoa's poem. But I'm going to do that. And then I'm going to ask the three of you just to hear some of the similarities in the shifts, the transitions, the domestic humor. It's going to be hard because you're not seeing the poem, and I'm reading it probably badly, so this will be fun. Drippy. Drippy. What does this say about my emotional state? Cry at the joke about Kmart. Cry at the photo of the woman crying. Baby born dead, held in her arms. Life penetrates life. I am free form today. Fermenting a loaf of bread. The oven is warm. I need to bake a chicken. Raining again.

WHITE:
So you have drippy is the drippy of the rain. But it's also the drippy of the crying. And then there's a crucial for those who know Hoa's work there's this crucial, traumatic original experience of presumably a Vietnam era setting of a baby in the arms of a woman. So there's all kinds of stuff going on. Who wants to start to react to that? That's a very similar strategy to this, to our poem, I think. How so, Kate?

KATE COLBY:
Well, she takes very specific momentary information from her day and projects it onto life of the world's humankind. So it becomes philosophical. She casts it out into the universe and the experience of her whole life and all of human life. And putting chicken in a poem is always hilarious. It's the funniest word in English.

AL FILREIS:
And K-Mart might be the second funniest.

KATE COLBY:
It's up there.

AL FILREIS:
You know, like so crying, not just emotional and counter crying, but also crying about all kinds of big things. On a rainy day where maybe the dripping can disguise your own crying. Anyway, Bethany, what do you think about this? Can we start to generalize about what Hoa does in a poem like Long Light?

BETHANY SWANN:
I think the line that stood out to me was, I am free form today. And I think like that long light is also sort of benchmarking a kind of freeformness. And I like what you said earlier about the way that y is choosing a moment to meditate on and not to kind of meditate in a way where all of the associated ambiance becomes part of that meditation. And this urge to kind of like move to something else is kind of is sort of like reined in. And I'm interested in the kind of collage I think of associations and the way that both of those poems rub kind of against each other. And Drippy, I feel like, has much more of a strong first-person like narrative.

AL FILREIS:
That's true. Yes.

BETHANY SWANN:
Assertive dominance. And so yeah, I but I'm interested in the way that choosing to focus on an event or to dilate on a happening or on the light, what that reveals in terms of affect.

AL FILREIS:
Jonathan Free form. Does this get us to rhetorical happenings?

JONATHAN DICK:
Maybe. I mean, rhetorical happenings is such an ambiguous. Well, I mean, no one can really agree on what rhetoric is. And historically people define it in very different ways. It means anything from persuasive speech to beautiful ornamental speech, to effective speech to later in the 20th century, how speech can be corrected. And so, you know there are a lot of different ways and I guess...

AL FILREIS:
Happenings next to rhetorical that...

JONATHAN DICK:
Yeah, well this is where I was going. One of the things that I think is really interesting about Hoa is that for readers or for listeners who are maybe reading along with us, the poem has very clear formal markers in the shape of big gaps, for instance, between long light and Super Bowl Sunday or peely bark on the sycamore tree and waxing gibbous moon, or even the parenthesis in which written directly onto a flower is couched. But Hoa when reading basically ignores all of these rhetorical happenings and it creates a very different effect for the poem, like reading it versus hearing it, you get a very different sort of feeling. The quickness with which she moves past a lot of these breaks almost dismisses them. There was something about hearing long light in the first stanza that the sort of domestic image made me... The way that she read the domestic image made me feel like she was dissatisfied with it. And so these are all things that I think are unique to the act of performing a poem. But, you know, again, I'm just avoiding your question. This is actually what rhetorical happenings mean. Well, one of the ways that we can mean it's avoiding people's questions.

AL FILREIS:
Oh, that was such a good meta-statement to get out of the problem. Kate, it's one thing to assert there are, which is a very sort of faux passive way of constructing this line. There are rhetorical happenings. And then parentheses written directly onto a flower. What kind of writing is that?

KATE COLBY:
What strikes me about rhetorical happenings is it's pretty... I mean, it can be read as an oxymoron. And to make a meta-statement. A poem is a rhetorical happening. It's an action that is taking place on the page. And, you know, in some way in the world, but not physically, actually. And the idea of writing on to a flower. We you know, we writers like to imagine that our words are immortal. But a flower is so very mortal and is going to fade any moment. So that line there, there are rhetorical happenings written directly onto a flower captures so much of the process of writing a poem and one's thinking about it. It's... It's life in the world. And it's longevity.

AL FILREIS:
A longevity. That's a perfect word for this moment. So, Bethany and everyone, I'm going to say I feel some tension here, not among us, in the poem, possibly among or between the we, the elements of the we, the people of the we, the peopling of the we. There is something going on inside and there is an escape. And that escape is the occasion for a poem. So rhetoric does happen when it is going away from something on this late Sunday in January. And the last two lines, which we're going to turn to now are plaint. I think maybe I'm going to overread this, Bethany, and I think that there is a problem that has to be solved or addressed by the poet on this particular day in this particular short day. And do is reminds us of all the things that people say about poetry in the negative. Like what does poetry fucking do? It doesn't do anything. Poetry doesn't make anything happen. You want to do go back inside and the Steelers will win. That's real. And what you're doing is not real. Alright. I'm overreading that, but I want to get to the last line. The question is, what's the answer to the question if there is this tension? If I'm right about this escape. If I'm right about where writing happens, it doesn't happen inside on that particular day. It's going to happen between and among the things that one sees, thinks, dreams of and worries about. I think peeling bark on the sycamore is something one... Sycamore in London plants they peel. I see tension here.

BETHANY SWANN:
I see tension. I also see urgency in the immediacy. We need to empty the ash from our chiminea. And I wonder...

AL FILREIS:
Stuff we have to do that we're not doing.

BETHANY SWANN:
Yeah. And there's something about the need for that to be clean or empty or that space to be open that I wonder if that sort of like emotion or urgency can apply to that last in that last couplet, can love everyone? And I don't think that there's a resolute answer and I think part of the play with rhetorical happenings is not about definitive questions and answers, but just about kind of meandering and not resolving things. And so, can love everyone?

AL FILREIS:
Nice move there at the end. Kate, OK. Can love anyone. Everyone. Here's a question for you. If someone were to read this poem, maybe a student or, you know, some eighth grader that you know, would say, OK, I understand everything, but can you paraphrase that those last two lines, how would you do it?

KATE COLBY:
I can't, but I can observe a few things.

AL FILREIS:
Remember, it's your eighth grader who's asking.

KATE COLBY:
Yeah, well, this poem has kind of an corporative spirit, so it is both literally asking the question, Can one love everything? Even the ugly plastic carpet and the ash and the, you know...

AL FILREIS:
Peeling the sycamore.

KATE COLBY:
Junk of our lives.

AL FILREIS:
Yes.

BETHANY SWANN:
But there's also a way to read it as an inversion that comes off almost like a broken English and makes love a noun or a verb, makes everyone potentially a noun or a verb so that it has it can be read in so many ways that point inward, but also incorporate everything that was abstract. But...

AL FILREIS:
No, it's not. It's what poems do. It's what poetry does.

BETHANY SWANN:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
And do is a keyword here. Jonathan, your thought on this part of our conversation?

JONATHAN DICK:
I think you did convince me a little bit with the emphasis on do, which is an action word here is described as something that takes us out of the moment.

AL FILREIS:
Except it's in quotes. So...

JONATHAN DICK:
Yeah. And so that sort of ionizes it a little bit. But, you know, I guess I want to spin a different reading about the rhetorical happenings. The way that I first read this, and perhaps this was conditioned in some respect by the fact that I Googled Long Light and read the author summary of that book. And one of the lines in that author summary, or maybe not the author summary, the press summary said that like, This is a book of eco poetry. And so perhaps it was conditioned by that. But coming to this last line in which rhetorical happenings, a word that sort of Kate nicely reminds us is something that we might say about a poem Is here something that isn't just written directly onto a flower? It seems to emerge it or emerge from it. And, you know, when we look back at the rest of the poem, the escape from that present, the turn away from the Super Bowl Sunday is all, you know, based around semi natural imagery, outdoor carpets that are plastic, but also, you know, bark on a sycamore tree and a waxing gibbous moon. And so this makes me sort of want to think about, you know, whether there's something eco-political happening here and whether, you know, against the claim. And for readers, Auden is the person who says that poetry does nothing. Against that claim that Poetry does nothing, you know, perhaps there's something here about the way that poetry does something for the environment. I don't know if that is necessarily something that this poem wants to say, but I don't think poems want to say anything specific. So I'm going to say that.

AL FILREIS:
I love it. Totally. OK. Final thoughts. Let's go, each of us. One more thing you wanted to say about this poem but didn't have a chance to yet. Kate, do you have one?

KATE COLBY:
It's a sad poem, I think. And Jonathan mentioning that the book was cast in light of eco poetry, made me realize that that Long Light happens at the end of the day in winter. And it has a longing to it.

AL FILREIS:
Long light in winter it slant light. It's not long in duration because there's less light. But it's a slant.

KATE COLBY:
Correct. I meant the I guess I meant the long shadows which is the inverse of light. What light casts. But it in both its specificity and its philosophical rigor. It's a very sad and longing poem to me.

AL FILREIS:
Jonathan, final thoughts?

JONATHAN DICK:
I think at the same time, there's... I mean, I at least was also thinking about it optimistically. We're reading this poem in... God. What day is it today, like November 12th or something like that, A day which is sort of two or three days before the clocks turn back, making the light shorter. But Super Bowl Sunday is an event that happens in February as the days, you know, the short days of winter go progressively longer. And so there's something for me about, you know, this poem being on the cusp of a daylight savings kind of thing that also makes it vaguely optimistic. But I think I think it's up in the air, especially with the last couplet and the ambiguity of its subject and the possibility for love. Whether that optimism, you know, suggested by the day is actually something that can carry out into everyday life.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you. Bethany, final thought?

BETHANY SWANN:
Yeah, I think that just looking at this again, I'm really moved and interested by all of the abundance of images that are emergent or forms that are not whole or not complete. So like the what, the ash and like the waxing gibbous moon. And I think that there's something in those forms that are broken or not complete or fragmented in some way that the poet is kind of trying to signal. And I think it's significant the turn to see those images instead of the neat kind of reparation of a dream world in which, you know, the heart surgeon in heaven and the kind of like reparation that signals that cannot necessarily happen like in the present of this long light.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you. I, I agree that it's a sad poem and I agree that the love at the end is crucial. And I just want to riff for a second on those last two lines. It can mean, as Kate suggests, can one love everything in an almost William Carlos Williams, The world is full of junk and broken things, and I still can find something that is shining there. And it is kind of a junky. I mean, it is true that if you live in a high-end highrise, you could have the recycled plastic outdoor carpet. But I think it's meant here there's a water meter. There's there, there's ash, there's... It's kind of like not, not a beautiful and I think it's an urban place and not a beautiful urban place. And that last line could be, Is there something everyone can love here? Is love possible? Is there such a thing as love in a place like this? And the escape has something to do with it because the Super Bowl is, at least for me, sorry, the equivalent of a recycled plastic outdoor carpet, and one cannot escape it. So one must find love where one can. And it's in that we. Well, we like to end Poem Talk with a minute or two of gathering paradise, a chance for us to spread wide, our narrow hands to gather a little something really poetically good to help or command something or someone, some work, some book, some movie, some play, whatever that's going on that you like. Kate, do you have something you want to recommend?

KATE COLBY:
I do. It's hard to choose, which I've been reading and writing about a bunch of novels recently, but I'll mention one I can't stop thinking about, which is Marlin Haushofer's, The Wall. She's a mid-century Austrian writer, and the book was just rereleased by New Directions, and it takes place in an imagined post-apocalyptic future. But it's very strange and beautiful.

AL FILREIS:
Perfect. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Gather some paradise.

JONATHAN DICK:
I didn't know that we could do movies. And now I'm...

AL FILREIS:
Do whatever you want.

JONATHAN DICK:
What I want to do. But I think I'll stick with my guns and offer the thing that I was initially going to suggest, which is Olaf Bachmann's Either Or. It's the sequel to her campus novel/buildings from On the Idiot. And I just... She has such a unique voice and it's such a pleasure to revisit these novels that are, you know, published about a young girl on the cusp of adulthood and also the cusp of the Internet age, like learning about herself by reading books. I think it's quite good.

AL FILREIS:
Fabulous suggestion. Bethany, gather some paradise.

BETHANY SWANN:
I feel like for me, I have to go with the poetry collection that I'm writing the most about right now, which is Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony. And I feel like it's one of those collections that every time you go back to it and read a different section, you can see her doing something like formally and also just, you know, conceptually groundbreaking and just recreating what poetics is. And I feel so inspired by her work.

AL FILREIS:
That's great. And since you're writing about it, it's even more special in otherwise that you would still praise it because the stuff we're writing about usually isn't that exciting.

BETHANY SWANN:
That's so true.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, that's really the proof. OK, I have two. First is Dionne Brand. There's a relatively new book of new and collected poems called Nomenclature, edited by Christina Sharpe. There's a fabulous preface or introduction by Christina Sharpe. And I just want to recommend one series of poems in this book, which is relevant to the poem we're talking about today. Even though it is not, as it turns out, a poem of Canadianness, but so much of Dionne's work. Dionne Brand's work is and this is a series of poems called Winter Epigrams. And my second is to hand a book over to Kate Colby. It's Reverse Winter by Kate Colby. And I wonder if you would pick a short poem and read it for us as part of my final word.

KATE COLBY:
Sure.

AL FILREIS:
OK. Thank you.

KATE COLBY:
Alright. This is after life. Since we were talking about after life. Everything I think to say is never true anymore. The medium of thinking is thought. If all possible worlds exist and we're in the best one. Will you be awake when I get home? The day we put the dog down, I felt my room felt like anything. Admitted by emptiness accepting itself.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you, Kate. That's wonderful. Well, that's all the recycled plastic outdoor carpet we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs and Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania right here. And the Poetry Foundation, poetryfoundation.org. Thanks to my guest, Jonathan Dick. Come on, let's hear it for Jonathan Dick and Bethany Swann and Kate Colby and Poem Talks directors and engineers Paul Burke over there with the Phillies hat. Why are you wearing a Phillies hat? And Zach Carduner, who is the best at this. Do you have any applause left? And Poem Talk's editor the same amazing Zach Carduner. Next time on Poem Talk, I'll be talking with Divya Victor, Dag Woubshet, and Whitney Trettien about two poems from Doug Kearney's new book, or actually not some new book, but fabulous book, SHO. S-H-O. This is Al Filreis and I hope you'll join us for that or another episode of Poem Talk.