Poem Life

Episode 12: Naming the Gaudy Neighbor

This episode explores the concept of naming and how part of the poet's job is to name things accurately and part of growing up involves living with or choosing the name that suits us. 

Episode 11: The Play is the Thing

This episode describes the connection between plays and poetry and how the two connect in the life of a budding poet. 

Episode 10: Running Away

This episode explores a theme of many young adult novels, running away, and how this theme also relates to growing up, both ideas of major importance in the life of a young poet.

Episode 9: Young Romance

This episode describes romance comic books of the 1970's and the possible influence of the genre in the poetry of teenage girls.

Episode 8: Moving Backward

This episode explores the function of the typewriter and publishing format in the development of a poet, who is seeking to connect but is moving backward.

Episode 7: Notes on Poetic Memory

This episode describes how childhood events become or do not become poetry and also ponders the nature of memory's influence on our writing.

Episode 6: The Longing for Ruin

This episode explains how the stuff of good poetry does not come naturally or biologically to us as children but a longing for ruin does.

Episode 5: Library Blocks & Heart Stones

This episode explores the theme of abandonment in our actual lives and in literature and the interplay between the two that can create poetry.

Episode 4: Ghosts in Autograph Books

This episode explores the phenomenon of autograph books and junior high note writing and the lives and the poetry that emerge from them. 

Episode 3: Strong Girls and Young Years

This episode describes two books that introduced the poet to a world of the imagination where both passive ladies and strong girls lived.