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 81: Commonplace goes to Taiwan, Part 2
Episode 80: Commonplace goes to Taiwan, Part 1
Episode 79: Christine Larusso
Episode 78: Anne Boyer
Episode 77: Tina Chang
Episode 76: Ada Limón
Episode 75: Victoria Chang
Episode 74: Rachel Zucker's SoundMachine
Episode 73: Jennifer Croft (Translation Series Ep. 3)
Episode 72: Ilya Kaminsky
Episode 71: Mira Jacob
Episode 70: Alicia Jo Rabins
Episode 69: Live Reading with Brown, Joseph, Meitner Parker, Pico, Tolbert, and Yanyi
Episode 68: Live Reading w/ Calvocoressi, Falkner, Gay and Mark
Episode 67: John Biewen
Episode 66: Sarah Gambito
Episode 65: Hillary Frank
Episode 64: John Keene (Translation Series, Ep. 2)
Episode 63: Juliana Spahr
Episode 62: Khadijah Queen
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