Rachel Zucker talks with Airea D. Matthews about her new book, Simulacra, and about (not)understanding, poems as places to show what you (don’t)know, reading, poetry as a place to ask questions and have a conversation, ordering a manuscript, getting help with a manuscript-in-progress, burning a manuscript, kicking the voices out of one’s head to find one’s voice, self as relatable through the other, representation, the connective tissue of humanity, helping a reader become accustomed to uncertainty, kitchen-sink stew, a nervous breakdown, the psychiatric ER, writing in series, strangeness, the canon, different kinds of lineage (Anne Sexton, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and others), the role of biography, not writing about race, how to signal race to the reader, not writing about motherhood, the unknowability or secrecy of motherhood, growing up with liars, the difference between lies and secrets, hunger, weakness, not idealizing mental illness, mothering yourself, worrying about being a good enough mother, gender, loving across difference or sameness, and what Airea is working on now. The first half of this episode is a recording of a question-and-answer session in Rachel’s class; the second is the conversation just between Airea and Rachel that they recorded later the same day.
EXTRA RESOURCES FOR EPISODE 43Books by Airea D. MatthewsSimulacra (Yale University Press / Yale Series of Younger Poets, 2017)
Other Books and Writers Mentioned in the EpisodeAnne Sexton
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Dover Publications, 1997 reprint)
Carl Phillips (as a poet and as the editor of Yale Younger)
Carl Phillips’s essay “A Politics of Mere Being”
Leonora Carrington
Camus
Jean-Paul Sartre
Wittgenstein
Bertrand Russell
Rachel McKibbens’ Blud (Copper Canyon, 2017)
Paul Celan
Anna Ahkmatova
Amiri Baraka
Robert Hayden
Sekhmet
Jean Baudrillard
Roland Barthes
Adrienne Rich
Jane
Inanna
Descent of Alette
Episode 121: Fred Moten and Ronaldo Wilson - Part 2
Episode 120: Fred Moten and Ronaldo V. Wilson
Episode 119: Eugenia Leigh's Bianca (KTCO feed drop)
Episode 118: Laurel Snyder
Episode 117: Charif Shanahan & Safia Elhillo with Isaac Ginsberg Miller
Episode 116: The Gathered Congregation
Episode 115: Moheb Soliman
Episode 114: Live & Embodied
113: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Episode 112: Gabrielle Octavia Rucker with V Conaty
Episode 111: The Confessional Episode
Episode 110: The Poetics of Wrongness
Episode 109: Joy Harjo
Episode 108: Saeed Jones
Episode 107: Eileen Myles
Episode 106: S. Yarberry with V Conaty
Episode 105: Carl Phillips
Episode 104: The Critical Response Process with Liz Lerman & John Borstel
Episode 103: Cody-Rose Clevidence with Valentine Conaty
Episode 102: Rebekah Wolkstein
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