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 41: Danez Smith
Episode 40: Kaveh Akbar
Episode 39: Erika L. Sánchez
Episode 38: Sharon Olds
Episode 37: Sheila Heti and Sarah Manguso
Episode 36: Dialogue Arts Project
Episode 35: Aracelis Girmay
Episode 34: Dr. Joshua Bennett
Episode 33: Sabrina Orah Mark
Episode 32: Laynie Browne
Episode 31: Carmen Giménez Smith
Episode 30: Sarah Vap
Episode 29: Molly Peacock
Episode 28: Poems for Mother's Day
Episode 27: Rita Dove
Episode 26: Alice Notley
Episode 25: Ross Gay
Episode 24: Julie Carr
Episode 23: Morgan Parker
Episode 22: Undocupoets 2 — Javier Zamora, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Janine Joseph
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