Episode 92: American Literature
b'This episode is about allusions, Slushies. How do poems gain dimension by relying on references? Where is that ekphrastic sweet spot?\\xa0 Listen in as we focus on the poems of July Westhale. Under the influence of her work, we talk glass flowers, ghost towns, road trips, and snow. Here are links to a few of the references and allusion we make on the show, inspired by Westhale\\u2019s way of seeing the world:\\xa0 This is America; \\u201cMy Mother is a Fish\\u201d; Teresa Leo\\u2019s Junkie; and ee cumminings [i carry your heart with me]\\n\\xa0\\nWith thanks to one of our sponsors, \\xa0Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song \\u201cSpaghetti with Lorraine\\u201d now opens our show.\\xa0\\nAt the table:\\nSamantha Neugebauer, Alex Tunney, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, and Marion Wrenn\\n\\xa0\\nJuly Westhale is an essayist, translator, and the award-winning author of Trailer Trash, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called "stunning" in a starred review. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney\\u2019s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden\\u2019s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. She also has an inventively-named collection of salty chapbooks. When she\\u2019s not teaching, she works as a co-founding editor of PULP Magazine. www.julywesthale.com\\n\\xa0\\n\\n\\xa0\\nRotten Apples Return to Harvard\'s Glass Flowers Exhibition\\n\\xa0\\nWhat you have heard is true\\u2014\\nsomething rotten once got us\\nfrom our houses, from our beds\\nwhere what was there may\\nor may not have been.\\n\\xa0\\nRemember, my darling, my sweet,\\nthat a blistered and blackened\\nthing, a thing representing life/\\nsin itself, was a cause for art.\\nGave a man, many men,\\na lineage of pride.\\n\\xa0\\nThe moon rose tonight as usual,\\nno spore-filled scab. As ivory\\nas the cut belly of an apple\\nsliced to share. Nothing noxious\\nto point to, say you.\\n\\xa0\\nThe world of museums and love\\nare, as it turns out, through the machinations\\nand designations of man-made things,\\ndefined by abstractions: Security,\\nbeauty, even, in our worst days.\\n\\xa0\\nOne day, Blaschka told his son, yes\\u2014\\n\\xa0\\nAmerican Literature\\n\\xa0\\n for Joey\\n\\xa0\\n\\u201cthe silver lamp,--the ravishment, --the wonder--the darkness,--loneliness, the fearful thunder\\u201d John Keats\\n\\xa0\\nThere\\u2019s a billboard with the route 66\\u2019s version of June Cleaver, holding a pie underneath block letters HO-MADE PIES, which is how dry towns get their jollies, I guess.\\n\\xa0\\nWe buy coffee in cups so thin the joe becomes us and we never regain our human shapes, and I say to you I wonder where they keep the half-bull man and you shotgun back I\\u2019ve spent my life asking that like the sharp shooter you are.\\n\\xa0\\nWho wouldn\\u2019t want to be the son of a bull and a damned woman\\nwe are all sons of bull and damn\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0you\\u2019ve gone West to find everything or me\\n\\xa0\\nand look at girls the way I look at girls who are bad for me. Like a desert\\nthrough slatternly windows. This is America: the big-pricked statues statuary in their old-growth knowing:\\nin the end--spoiler alert--we\\u2019re both after the wrong bandit, the bank gets robbed, the two women who should be lovers but aren\\u2019t arc their Caddie like a rainbow into the lavish vaginal canyon at the last moment, the whale gets away, Faulkner\\u2019s pretend mother doesn\\u2019t get the burial she deserves, we have to choose between Liz Taylor in a kerchief or James Dean with his shirt stuttered open, and we can\\u2019t---\\n\\xa0\\nmoon moon\\n\\xa0\\nNow there\\u2019s snow on the ocean, which is meant to confuse us\\nand does, though not because we are unprepared for it\\nbut rather because the sight of it reminds us\\nof the static-hearted parts of our bodies as they prostrate\\nthemselves in years-over-yonder: exploratory attempts\\nto find warmth\\u2014not unlike a surefooted expedition\\u2014,\\nin the disappearance of everything ripe\\u2014now covered\\nwith snow\\u2019s annihilating speeches\\u2014, in the blank stares\\nof our children as they amputate themselves\\nfrom us, in the cloudscape of come forgotten to be enjoyed,\\non the snow of a down comforter at which we\\u2019d first begun\\n(circle back to exhibit A), in the cold expanse following\\nt'