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 61: Rosa Alcalá (Translation Series, Ep. 1)
Episode 60: Robin Coste Lewis
Episode 59: Alison S. M. Kobayashi
Episode 58: Cate Marvin
Episode 57: Dorothea Lasky
Episode 56: Jennifer Kronovet
Episode 55: Anne Waldman
Episode 54: Gerald Stern
Episode 53: Tommy Pico
Episode 52: Richard Siken
Episode 51: TC Tolbert
Episode 50: Inside Commonplace
Episode 49: CAConrad
Episode 48: Poets at MacDowell: Destiny Birdsong, Juleen Johnson, Jenny George, Eloisa Amezcua, & Amanda Galvan Huynh
Episode 47: Erin Riley
Episode 46: Allison Parrish
Episode 45: Tyehimba Jess
Episode 44: Matthew Zapruder
Episode 42: Gabrielle Calvocoressi
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