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 101: Prageeta Sharma
Episode 100: Doreen Wang
Episode 99: Douglas Kearney
Episode 98: Torrey Peters
Episode 97: Camille Dungy
Episode 96: Judy Grahn
Episode 95: Jason Schneiderman
Episode 94: Jennifer Block
Episode 93: Arielle Greenberg
Episode 92: Behind the Scenes
Episode 91: Nate Marshall
Episode 90: Makenna Goodman
Episode 89: The Ladder Out of the Hole
Episode 88: Global Roll Call, Part 3
Episode 87: Global Roll Call, Part 2
Episode 86: Global Roll Call, Part 1
Episode 85: The Craft of the Literary Interview
Episode 84: M. NourbeSe Philip
Episode 83: Darcey Steinke
Episode 82: Maggie Nelson
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