Rattlecast: Recent Episodes
Rattle Poetry
Rattle is a publication of the Rattle Foundation, an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the practice of poetry, and is not affiliated with any other organization.
Hemat Malak joins Timothy Green on the Rattlecast for a conversation about poetry, identity, poetic form, and her debut collection, Shelf Life, published by 5 Islands Press. An Australian poet based in Picton, New South Wales, Hemat returned to poetry after more than four decades away and won the 2025 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize for “I Don’t Say My Name Right.” A longtime Rattle listener and member of the community, she has published several poems with Rattle, including the title poem “Shelf Life,” which we nominated for a Pushcart Prize.In this episode, we discuss Shelf Life, returning to poetry later in life, Australian poetry, identity and immigration, motherhood and belonging, formal poetry, sound and revision, and the role that prompts and poetry communities can play in developing a writer’s voice. We’ll also talk about Hemat’s journey from Rattle listener to Rattle contributor and award-winning poet, and open the lines for this week’s prompt-based poetry reading.This Week’s Prompt:Write a contemporary epic poem. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about something you’ve kept on a shelf for far too long. Submit your poem through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited on the show:https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFind more about Hemat Malak here:https://hematmalak.com/The Rattlecast livestreams every Monday on YouTube, Facebook, and X, then becomes available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.
Jeffrey Bean joins Timothy Green on The Rattlecast for a conversation about poetry, invented poetic forms, music, and his latest collection, Everywhere, Everywhere, winner of the 2024 Vern Rutsala Book Prize. A poet and professor of English at Central Michigan University, Jeffrey appears in the Invented Forms section of Rattle’s Summer 2026 issue with “Bach’s Bones,” part of a new series of poems inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach.In this episode, we discuss the quatrain ghazal and the possibilities of combining traditional poetic forms, Bach and music as influences on poetry, rhyme and formal poetry, the poems of Everywhere, Everywhere, and the craft of writing poems that make the ordinary strange and new. We’ll also open the lines for this week’s prompt-based poetry reading.This Week’s Prompt:Think of something you didn’t expect to open up but did. Make it risky! Next Week’s Prompt:Write a contemporary epic poem. Submit your poem through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited on the show:https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFind more about Jeffrey Bean here:https://www.jeffreybeanpoet.com/The Rattlecast livestreams every Monday on YouTube, Facebook, and X, then becomes available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.
In this episode, we discuss her work, the craft of poetry, myth and nature, and life between two countries. We’ll also open the lines for this week’s prompt-based reading.This Week’s Prompt:Pick a time in your life that was particularly impacted by the weather, and make us feel it right alongside you.Next Week’s Prompt:Think of something you didn’t expect to open up but did. Make it risky! Submit your poem through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited on the show:https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFind more about Joanna Preston here:https://joannapreston.com/The Rattlecast livestreams every Monday on YouTube, Facebook, and X, then becomes available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.
Lisa Baird joins Timothy Green on The Rattlecast for a conversation about her poetry and writing life. A spoken word poet, essayist, and community acupuncturist, her work has been shortlisted for the Room Poetry Contest, Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, and Sappho Poetry Prize, and longlisted twice for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her most recent book is When Whales Went back to the Water. In this episode, we discuss her work, the craft of poetry, trauma and recovery, nature, acupuncture, and more. We’ll also open the lines for this week’s prompt-based reading.This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that quotes a line from a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist from the year you found out about Rattle.Next Week’s Prompt:Pick a time in your life that was particularly impacted by the weather, and make us feel it right alongside you. Submit your poem through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited on the show:https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFind more about Lisa Baird here:https://www.lisabaird.ca/The Rattlecast livestreams every Monday on YouTube, Facebook, and X, then becomes available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.
Rasaq Malik Gbolahan joins Timothy Green on The Rattlecast for a conversation about his poetry and writing life. A Nigerian poet, performer, translator, and editor, Rasaq is the winner of the 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry for his first full-length collection The Origin of Wounds. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Agbowó and co-founder of Àtẹ́lẹwọ́, a digital journal dedicated to Yorùbá-language literature. In this episode, we discuss his work, the craft of poetry, and African literary spaces. We’ll also open the lines for this week’s prompt-based reading.This Week’s Prompt:Think of the moment in your life that you most wish you had a photo of but don’t. Make it come to life in a sensory-rich poem.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that quotes a line from a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist from the year you found out about Rattle.Submit your poem through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited on the show:https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFind more about Rasaq Malik Gbolahan here:https://rasaqmalikgbolahan.com/The Rattlecast livestreams every Monday on YouTube, Facebook, and X, then becomes available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.
Adam Scheffler is the author of two books of poems: Heartworm, which won the 2021 Moon City Press Prize, and A Dog’s Life, which won the 2016 Jacar Press Book Contest. He is also the author of a book of literary criticism, So This Is What It Feels Like: Empathy in the Poetry of James Wright (LSU Press, 2026). He grew up in Berkeley, California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD in English from Harvard. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wichita State University and a member of their MFA Faculty in Poetry.Find more here:https://adamscheffler.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem so light that it may even float!Next Week’s Prompt:Think of the moment in your life that you most wish you had a photo of but don’t. Make it come to life in your sensory-rich poem.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
D.M. Aderibigbe is from Lagos, Nigeria. His most recent book, 82nd Division, was selected for the National Poetry Series. His debut book, How the End First Showed, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (Walter E. Dakin Fellowship), The James Merrill House, OMI/Ledig House, Ucross, Jentel, and Boston University where he earned his MFA in creative writing. His poems appear in The Atlantic, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and New England Review, among others. He’s an assistant professor in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.Find more 82nd Division:https://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/82nd-division/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that reimagines a time when you didn’t speak up but should have. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem so light that it may even float!The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Amy M. Alvarez is the author of Makeshift Altar, winner of the 2025 American Book Award and CariCon Poetry Prize. Born to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents in New York, New York, her work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, place, and social justice. Selected as one of 2022’s Best New Poets, her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, the Virginia Creative Arts Center, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. In 2022, she was inducted as an Affrilachian Poet. She has taught at public high schools in the Bronx, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts, and at West Virginia University. She currently teaches writing and literature at Boston College as an Associate Professor of the Practice.Find more here:https://www.amymalvarez.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a pantoum that plays! Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that reimagines a time when you didn’t speak up but should have. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Valentina Gnup is a two-time Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist, and also appears in our new Best of the Ekphrastic Challenge anthology. She received her bachelor's degree in journalism from CSUF in 1980 and her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2002. Her most recent book is Ruined Music. She has two grown daughters and currently lives in Mill Valley, California, where she coaches high school writers.Find more here:https://www.valentinagnup.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you got into trouble outdoors. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a pantoum that plays! The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Other Poems (Penguin, 2013); winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award; Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003), winner of the Poets Prize; Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Nemerov's Door, published by Tupelo Press. Find more here:https://robertwrigley.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that’s all about taste! Include a scent, but not the word “delicious.” Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you got into trouble outdoors. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Giroux), a finalist for the 2022 PEN E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her work has been published in Granta, The Believer, N+1, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Food and Travel Writing. She has taught for The University of Iowa, The University of Arizona, Portland State University, Yale-NUS and currently serves as co-editor of the Kuhl House Poets Series at the University of Iowa Press. Find more here:https://www.lisawellswriter.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an after poem to one of the Rattle Poetry Prize finalist poems. Make sure not to take the magic from the source poem. Instead, create your own transformation!Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that’s all about taste! Include a scent, but not the word “delicious.” The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Words tent at Glastonbury, literature festivals in Brighton, Coventry and London, and numerous events, slams and open mics. In 2022 he collaborated with the American singer Kyla Gabka on her debut album Waiting for Autumn. His most recent book, Even God Gets Distracted Sometimes, combines his poems with visual art by Mark Shuttleworth. Find more here:https://linktr.ee/PoetryPreacherAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Consider your most controversial opinions and boldly write a poem about at least one without apologizing for the stance. Include a fresh metaphor. Next Week’s Prompt:Write an after poem to one of the Rattle Poetry Prize finalist poems. Make sure not to take the magic from the source poem. Instead, create your own transformation!The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
entityId=676734136As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which utilizes a quote as the title, and indicate who said it within the body of the poem. Next Week’s Prompt:Consider your most controversial opinions and boldly write a poem about at least one without apologizing for the stance. Include a fresh metaphor. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Alan Shapiro first appeared in episode 248. He's back with a new book, Diver. He's the author of 15 books of poetry, including Reel to Reel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Night of the Republic, a finalist for both the National Book Award and The Griffin Prize, two memoirs, a novel, two books of critical essays, and two translations. Shapiro has taught at Stanford University, Northwestern University, Warren Wilson College (in its low residency MFA program for writers), and from 1995 to 2021 he was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina.Find more here:https://www.unboundedition.com/product/diver-alan-shapiro-poetry/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that uses the present tense as one of the ways in which it creates tension.Next Week's Prompt:Write a poem which utilizes a quote as the title, and indicate who said it within the body of the poem. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Daniel Donaghy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Somerset, which was named co-winner of the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize. His previous poetry collections include Start with the Trouble, and Streetfighting, a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. He earned a BA in English from Kutztown University, an MA in English/Creative Writing from Hollins College, an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Cornell University, and a PhD in English from the University of Rochester. Donaghy was awarded the 2022 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and a 2019 Artist Fellowship by the Connecticut Office of the Arts. He is Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University, where he edits Here: a poetry journal with his students, and serves as Poet Laureate of Windham, CT. He grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, PA, which has inspired many of his poems.Find more here:https://www.danieldonaghy.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Pick a decision that shaped the trajectory of your life and imagine if you’d calculated a different choice. Include at least one scent.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that uses the present tense as one of the ways in which it creates tension.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Matthew Buckley Smith first appeared in episode 226. He won the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize for The Soft Black Stars. He's the author of Midlife (Measure, 2024) and Dirge for an Imaginary World (Able Muse, 2012). His poems have been featured in American Life in Poetry, Best American Poetry, and Poetry Daily. He hosts the poetry podcast SLEERICKETS.Find more here:https://www.matthewbuckleysmith.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a villanelle that features something you see every day–and you’re the only person in the world that does. Next Week’s Prompt:Pick a decision that shaped the trajectory of your life and imagine if you’d calculated a different choice. Include at least one scent.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Brendan Constantine first appeared on Rattlecast 108. He's back with a brand new book from Red Hen Press, The Opposites Game. Brendan is a poet based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in many of the nation’s standards, including Poetry, The Nation, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly, and Poem-a-Day. A popular performer, Brendan has presented his work to audiences throughout the U.S. and Europe, also appearing on NPR’s All Things Considered, TED ED, numerous podcasts, and YouTube. Brendan currently teaches at the Windward School and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since 2017, has been developing poetry workshops for people with Aphasia and Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI).Find more here:https://brendanconstantine.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that rallies against its own epigraph. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a villanelle that features something you see every day–and you’re the only person in the world that does. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
She is the author of eight books, including the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, which received the Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University, was a finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Book Award, and was named one of 20 Not-To-Miss Nonfiction Books of 2015 by The Huffington Post. Her most recent book, All Skate: True Tales from Middle Life, was published by the great literary underground Roadside Press in 2025. A former international flight attendant, Jakiela directs the writing program at The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, teaches creative writing in the doctoral program at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and leads many community workshops. Find more here:https://www.lorijakiela.net/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write about a time you took something more literally than you probably should have. Include as many colors as possible. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that rallies against its own epigraph. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Western Heritage Museum. It was also featured on the PBS NewsHour. He has written a memoir and four collections of essays. He lives with his wife Chrissy (poet Cally Conan-Davies) in Tasmania on the edge of the Southern Ocean.Find the book here:https://redhen.org/book_author/david-mason/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Pick an obscure holiday that occurs during the next week, and write a poem that celebrates accordingly. Include which holiday/date in the notes of your submission. Next Week’s Prompt:Write about a time you took something more literally than you probably should have. Include as many colors as possible. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
appeared in issue 88 and won the 2026 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. He's the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The End of Everything and Everything That Comes After That (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024). His poetry has received several awards, including the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the MFA program at Sam Houston State University and lives in Huntsville, Texas, with his wife and cats.Find more info here:https://www.nick-lantz.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you couldn’t keep the correct time straight. Include at least one temporal shift. Next Week’s Prompt:Pick an obscure holiday that occurs during the next week, and write a poem that celebrates accordingly. Include which holiday/date in the notes of your submission. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Best, was just released from Orison Books. Find more info here:https://www.janezwart.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem which confesses something that’s secretly seasonal to you, but not so much to others.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you couldn’t keep the correct time straight. Include at least one temporal shift. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
jason b. crawford (He/They) born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, Michigan, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and was published Fall 2025. They have been published in Poetry Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, among others. They are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.Find more info here:https://www.jasonbcrawford.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that begins precisely where you currently are in life, but lands somewhere else entirely.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem which confesses something that’s secretly seasonal to you, but not so much to others.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Alexandra Oliver was a finalist for the 2025 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is the author of three collections published through Biblioasis: Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (2013; recipient of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Let the Empire Down ( 2016), and Hail, the Invisible Watchman (2022). Her libretto for From the Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King, conceived in conjunction with composer Scott Wilson at the University of Birmingham, was performed by Continuum Music in Toronto in December, 2017. Oliver is a past co-editor of Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Everyman’s Library/Random House, 2015) as well as of the formalist journal The Rotary Dial. She has performed her work for CBC Radio and NPR, as well as at The National Poetry Slam and a murder of festivals and conferences. Oliver teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto and OCAD University.Find her most recent book here:https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/new-releases/hail-the-invisible-watchman/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that examines a surprising aspect of a job you otherwise generally love to do. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that begins precisely where you currently are in life, but lands somewhere else entirely.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Morri Creech is the winner of the 2025 Rattle Poetry Prize. He is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Sentence. His book Field Knowledge (Waywiser, 2006) received the Anthony Hecht Poetry prize and was nominated for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Poet’s Prize. The Sleep of Reason was a 2014 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as grants from the North Carolina and Louisiana Arts councils, he is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where he teaches courses in both the undergraduate creative writing program and in the low residency M.F.A. program. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife and two children.Find more at his website:https://www.morricreech.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Quick! Write a poem that moves fast. Include as many unique verbs as possible. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that examines a surprising aspect of a job you otherwise generally love to do. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Luisa Muradyan is originally from Odesa, Ukraine and is the author of I Make Jokes When I'm Devastated (Bridwell Press, 2025), When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), and American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). She holds a Ph.D. in Poetry from the University of Houston and won the 2017 Raz/ Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Additionally, Muradyan is a member of the Cheburashka Collective, a group of women and nonbinary writers from the former Soviet Union. Additional work can be found at Best American Poetry, the Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and Only Poems among others.Find more at her website:https://www.luisamuradyan.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian, or Miltonic sonnet. Use an exclamation mark at some point, and don't forget the volta!Next Week’s Prompt:Quick! Write a poem that moves fast. Include as many unique verbs as possible. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Note: Due to technical difficulties, Rhina wasn't able to join us. Instead, Timothy Green and Katie Dozier talked about her work and read poems with her friends Alfred Nichol and Pedro Poitevin. Rhina P. Espaillat is a bilingual poet, essayist, short story writer, translator, and former English teacher in New York City’s public high schools. Her newest book is For Instance, just out from Wiseblood Books. She has previous published twelve books, five chapbooks, and a monograph on translation. Her most recent works include the poetry collections: And After All, The Field, and Brief Accident of Light: A Day in Newburyport, co-authored with Alfred Nicol. Her numerous translations include work by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, San Juan de la Cruz, Garcia Lorca, Miguel Hernandez, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, and many contemporary poets of the Americas and the Hispanic diaspora, among others.Find For Instance here:https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p173/For_Instance%3A_Poems_by_Rhina_P._Espaillat.htmlAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that explores how one of the cognitive biases has shaped your life. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a formal sonnet—choosing between a Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian, or Miltonic sonnet. Don’t forget the volta and at some point, use an exclamation mark!The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Liz Robbins won the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize for her book Backlit. She's author of four previous collections, including Night Swimming, which won the 2023 Cold Mountain Press Annual Book Contest, and Play Button, which won the Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith. She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, where she works as an editor, as well as a poetry screener for Ploughshares.Find more on Liz at her website:https://www.lizrobbins.net/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-onlineFor links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time something was put somewhere that it didn’t belong. Include an unusual detail about the person that found it. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that explores how one of the cognitive biases has shaped your life. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Billy Collins has contributed frequently to Rattle over the years, including an interview in issue 15. He is the author of 16 collections of poetry, including Sailing Alone Around the Room, Aimless Love and, most recently, Dog Show. He served two terms as United State Poet Laureate and is a former Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College and New York State Poet. He is a New York Public Library Literary Lion and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently “between dogs,” his most recent an Australian Shepherd mix named Jeannine. He lives in Winter Park, Florida, with his wife Suzannah.Find Dog Show here:https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/790238/dog-show-by-billy-collins/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that describes the taste of a surprising food as creatively as possible. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time something was put somewhere that it didn’t belong. Include an unusual detail about the person that found it. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Poet, writer, food-travel journalist, dining critic, and educator Jen Karetnick is the author/co-author of 22 books, including seven full-length poetry collections, including Organ Language (Lit Fox Books, forthcoming September 2026); Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, forthcoming October 2026); and Inheritance with a High Error Rate, winner of the 2022 Cider Review Press Book Award. She is co-founder/co-curator of the non-profit organization, SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami), which offers residencies and a reading series for women-identifying poets, and Managing Editor of its publishing arm, the daily online literary journal, SWWIM Every Day.Find more on Jen here:https://jkaretnick.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that explores something left behind. Include as many tactile details as possible. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that describes the taste of a surprising food as creatively as possible. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Ron Koertge first appeared in episode #47. A prolific writer, Ron began publishing in the ’60s, including many novels for young adults, and is a two-time winner of the PEN Literary Award for Children’s Literature. Author of over 20 books of poetry, his most recent is Pandora's Kitchen, just out from Red Hen Press. Find more on Ron here:http://www.ronkoertge.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a villanelle that involves a trip.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that explores something left behind. Include as many tactile details as possible. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Hamilton County Public Library and Thomas More University. In 2021, he was named a member of Mexico’s National System of Art Creators, one of the country’s highest honors for artists. Author of six poetry collections, Iris has been awarded the Mérida National Poetry Prize (2009) for Cuaderno de los sueños and the Rodulfo Figueroa Regional Poetry Prize (2014) for Los disfraces del fuego, a book that was also a finalist for Ecuador’s International Poetry Prize Ciudad de la Lira. In 2025, Iris received the Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets for his book The Whole Earth is a Garden of Monsters/Toda la tierra es un jardín de monstruos. Manuel Iris has given readings, lectures, and talks across Mexico, the United States, and Europe. He currently resides and writes in Cincinnati, Ohio.Find more on Manuel here:https://manueliris.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Think about the biggest improvement you’ve made as a poet this year and write a poem that showcases your skill. Include what you’ve learned in the notes with your submission.Next Week's Prompt: Write a villanelle that involves a trip.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Julia B. Levine has appeared twice in Poets Respond, and she has a new chapbook, Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction, is just out from Wolfson Press. Her poetry awards include the 2015 Northern California Book Award for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU 2014), a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2024 Terrain Poetry Prize, the 2023 Oran Robert Perry Burke Award from The Southern Review, as well as a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work in building resiliency in teenagers in the context of climate change. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU 2021), won a Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry. Find more on Julia here:https://sites.google.com/view/juliablevineAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that’s all about breaks.Next Week’s Prompt:Think about the biggest improvement you’ve made as a poet this year and write a poem that showcases your skill. Include what you’ve learned in the notes with your submission.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Our scheduled guest, Billy Collins, was sick with a cold, so he postponed to January 19, 2026. Instead, we'll reveal this year's Pushcart Prize winners, and invite you to share your favorite poem that you wrote or published this year. You can still find Billy Collins' new book, Dog Show, here:https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/790238/dog-show-by-billy-collins/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that begins at the kitchen table and interrupts itself.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that’s all about breaks.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Jeff McRae’s debut collection, The Kingdom Where No One Dies, honors the ache and beauty of ordinary life. A contributor to Rattle dating back to 2004, Jeff lives in Vermont with his wife and three children. He earned a Masters in Writing from the University of New Hampshire and a Masters in Fine Arts in poetry from Washington University, St. Louis. Since returning to Vermont, he’s worked as a fly rod builder, a digital marketing copywriter, a youth employment specialist, and for fifteen years as a creative writing and literature instructor. He has been a finalist for several first book awards including the New Issues Poetry Prize, the Gerald Cable Book Award, and the Cider Press Review Book Award. An active musician, he also performs in theaters, clubs, and concert halls throughout New England.Find the book here:https://www.pulleypress.com/the-kingdom-where-no-one-diesAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an ode to something personal to you without it becoming a “personal poem”—i.e., a poem that only carries meaning to a very select group privy to specific knowledge. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that begins at the kitchen table and interrupts itself.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Richard Gilbert first appeared in episode 6 of the Rattlecast, way back in 2019. He earned a Ph.D. in Poetics and Depth Psychology at the Union Institute and University, 1990. In 1997, he moved to Japan to pursue Japanese haiku research. He is currently Associate Professor, Department of British and American Language and Literature, at Kumamoto University. In 2006, Richard was awarded a two-year grant from MEXT (the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) for research on modern Japanese haiku. His most recent book, Haiku Language Thought, explores haiku as the essence of poetic consciousness. Find the book here:https://www.modernhaiku.org/mhbooks/Gilbert-book-2025.htmlAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that begins with an ordinary parenting event that snowballs into something more.Next Week's Prompt: Write an ode to something personal to you without it becoming a “personal poem”—i.e., a poem that only carries meaning to a very select group privy to specific knowledge. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Julia Kolchinsky came to the United States as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old, from Dnipro, Ukraine. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Parallax(The University of Arkansas Press, 2025), selected as finalist for the Miller Williams Prize by Patricia Smith. Her other books include of 40 Weeks (YesYes Books, 2023), Don’t Touch the Bones, and The Many Names for Mother. Her next book is When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University and lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her family.Find more Julia's most recent books here:https://www.juliakolchinsky.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an assay that includes an allusion to at least five senses. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that begins with an ordinary parenting event that snowballs into something more.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL (BOA Editions, 2018). His next book, The Cloudmaker's Key, is coming out in the fall of 2027. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, and the most recent issue of Rattle. His poetry film, Riding the Highline, received the Jury Award at the 2015 Napa Valley Film Festival. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.Find more most recent books here:http://kaicarlsonwee.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you found yourself somewhere you didn’t belong, but have the poem turn to somewhere that you do.Next Week’s Prompt:Write an assay that includes an allusion to at least five senses. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 500 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early '70s, including five times in past issues of Rattle. He's the author of 40 books of poetry, most recently Barren Road. Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY Orange, he lives in Hudson, New York. Find more most recent books here:https://servinghousebooks.com/j-r-solonche/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Invent a form that borrows something you love about an existing form—but spins it in a new direction. (Also encouraged to submit this to our call for our invented forms tribute section, due January 15th, 2026.)Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you found yourself somewhere you didn’t belong, but have the poem turn to somewhere that you do.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Crystal Simone Smith is the author of Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press, 2025) and Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023). In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Smith is the recipient a Duke Humanities Unbounded Fellowship. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including POETRY Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Rattle, Poetry Daily, Frogpond, and The Heron’s Nest. She teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and writes poetry about the human condition and social change.Find more on Crystal at her website:https://www.crystalsimonesmith.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about the influence music has had on you over the years while making the poem itself as musical as possible. Next Week’s Prompt:Invent a form that borrows something you love about an existing form—but spins it in a new direction. (Also encouraged to submit this to our call for our invented forms tribute section, due January 15th, 2026.)The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Al Maginnes has published 15 books of poetry, including Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems (Redhawk Publications, 2023) and most recently Second Line, a sonnet sequence which just released this month. He has worked as a mail clerk, a landscaper, an electrician, a carpenter's helper, a hammock weaver, surveyor, and, since 1990, as a teacher. Al has published widely, including issues 63 and 89 of Rattle. He lives with his family in Raleigh, NC. Find his new and selected here:https://redhawkpublications.com/Fellow-Survivors-p529556536As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a haiku sequence inspired by the seasons.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about the influence music has had on you over the years while making the poem itself as musical as possible. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s debut poetry chapbook, EXILED, was published by Red Bird Chapbooks, and his work has appeared in two recent issues of Rattle. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Isele Magazine Poetry Prize. In 2023, he won the Hudson Review’s Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Alpine Fellowship Prize, as well as the Writivism Poetry Prize. Chiwenite served as chief editor at The School of Pharmacy, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, where he recently completed his undergraduate studies. Find more info here:https://linktr.ee/chiweniteonyekweluAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you were haunted and how you overcame the experience. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a haiku sequence inspired by the seasons.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
José Enrique Medina is winner of the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize for Haunt Me. He earned his BA in English from Cornell University. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Best Microfiction 2019, The Los Angeles Review, The Tahoma Review, Burnside Review, and many other publications. A VONA fellow and frequent poetry slam judge, he writes with heart, heat, and just the right amount of haunt. He is the founder of the Chickens and Poetry Residency for Writers. When he’s not wrangling words, he’s usually on his ranch in Los Angeles, chasing after bunnies and baby chicks. Find more info here:https://medinawrites.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Orange you glad you get to write a prompt poem?Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you were haunted and how you overcame the experience. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator, and a finalist for the 2023 Rattle Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Someone Else's Hunger, is just out from Four Way Books. Her chapbook, Through the New Body, won the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Recently, she has been named a 2025 New Jersey Poetry Fellow, a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop, the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. Find more info here:https://www.isabelladesendi.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a persona poem that includes the word “prompt.”Next Week’s Prompt:Orange you glad you get to write a prompt poem?The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Roberta Beary (they/she) first appeared on episode 133. Roberta is long-time haibun editor at Modern Haiku and travels the world as Roving Ambassador for The Haiku Foundation. Their new book, Crazy Bitches, includes 80 haibun selected from poems written over a 20-year period, 2004 through 2024. With Lew Watts and Rich Youmans, Roberta Beary is co-author of Haibun: A Writer's Guide (2023).Find more info here:https://robertabeary.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you got more than you bargained for. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a persona poem that includes the word “prompt.”The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
In this special episode of the Rattlecast, we announce the winners of the 2025 Rattle Poetry Prize competition, and most of the 11 poets share their prize-winning work. The annual contest offers $25,000 in awards for individual poems. Find more info on the prize here:https://rattle.com/page/poetryprize/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Pick a specific obscure award and write a poem about it. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you got more than you bargained for. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Matthew Thorburn's latest book is String, a novel in poems, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2023. He’s also the author of five previous books, including The Grace of Distance, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the book-length poem Dear Almost, honored with the Lascaux Prize, and two chapbooks. His work has been recognized with a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from the Bronx and New Jersey arts councils and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Michigan and for many years a New Yorker, he lives and works in central New Jersey.Find more info here:https://www.matthewthorburn.net/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that features electricity. Next Week’s Prompt:Pick a specific obscure award and write a poem about it. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of fellowships from Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.Find more info here:https://richard-siken.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that touches on hair. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that features electricity. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Alora Young is a recent college graduate, actor, poet, and author of Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse. She was named the 2020-2021 Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States, and has performed her poetry on CNN, CBS, the TEDx stage, and more. Young talks with passion and prowess about how the history and impact of spoken word poetry, generational trauma, navigating Black girlhood & womanhood in America, and neurodivergence & creativity.Find more info here:https://alorayoung.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which someone is taken to a surprising school.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that touches on hair. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Gregory Orr has written thirteen poetry collections, a memoir, and several books of criticism, most recently A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry. His poetry collections include Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved and The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems. The recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.Find more info here:http://gregoryorr.net/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an ekphrastic poem based on a well-known painting that you dislike. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which someone is taken to a surprising school.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Sneha Madhavan-Reese is an award-winning writer and author of the poetry collections Elementary Particles and Observing the Moon. Her poems have appeared in publications around the world, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2016. Sneha's second collection, Elementary Particles, is inspired by her South Asian heritage and passion for science, and has themes of identity and belonging, language and loss. Elementary Particles was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. Find more info here:http://madhavan-reese.com/sneha/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a sonnet in which someone sings.Next Week’s Prompt:Write an ekphrastic poem based on a well-known painting that you dislike. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Bill Hollands was born and raised in Miami, Florida, graduated from Williams College, and received his MA in English as a Dr. Herchel Smith Fellow at Cambridge University. He worked for the New York Public Library and Microsoft before becoming a high school English teacher. He lives in Seattle with his husband and their son. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, he has been a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize, Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize in Poetry, Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize. He reads submissions for Poetry Northwest and is a 2025 Jack Straw Writing Fellow. His debut collection Mangrove is out now from ELJ Editions.Find that book here:https://billhollandspoetry.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a Poet’s Respond poem that is in response to an obscure/off-beat news story.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a sonnet in which someone sings.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Back in June 2014, Rattle unleashed its Poets Respond series, thrusting poetry into the heart of the news with raw, immediate verses that tackle the moment. Over 800 poems later, we’ve woven a vivid tapestry of our shared history, now distilled into a stunning new anthology—our first-ever Best of Rattle Awards collection. It’s as unpredictable and electric as the times we’ve lived through. Tune in to this special episode of the Rattlecast, where a stellar lineup of the anthology’s poets will join us to share their work and dive deep into the stories behind their unforgettable poems!Buy the anthology here: https://rattle.com/publications/best-of-pr/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with a specific type of poetic structure, either from the book Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns by Michael Theune or the book’s website (https://structureandsurprise.com/). Next Week’s Prompt:Write a Poet’s Respond poem that is in response to an obscure/off-beat news story. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
This conversation with Ruth Reichl originally appeared in issue #88 of Rattle and was recorded on March 25th, 2025. As a former culinary school student and foodie herself, our associate editor, Katie Dozier, joined in on the discussion. What does food have to do with poetry? Listen in to find out!Ruth Reichl is recognized as one of the most discerning voices in the food world, with accolades as a bestselling author, revered restaurant critic, and culinary industry influencer. Her icon status stems from groundbreaking roles in food journalism, including lead restaurant critic at the New York Times and editor-in-chief at Gourmet magazine. Ruth’s bestselling memoirs include Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir, which chronicles her tenure at the magazine and Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. Her cookbook My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life received best cookbook accolades from industry peers and booksellers. For TV, Ruth’s PBS series Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth featured the best cooking schools around the world.Subscribe to Ruth's Substack here: https://ruthreichl.substack.com/
Chad Frame is the author of Little Black Book, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award, Cryptid, and Smoking Shelter, winner of the Moonstone Chapbook Contest. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry/improv performance troupe, and the founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival. His work appears in Rattle, Strange Horizons, Pedestal, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, on iTunes from the Library of Congress, and is archived on the moon with The Lunar Codex.Find his most recent book here:https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/little-black-book-by-chad-frame/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which something is tasted on vacation that never should have been. Include a declarative statement.Next Prompt (for July 27th):Write a poem with a specific type of poetic structure, either from the book Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns by Michael Theune or the book’s website (https://structureandsurprise.com/). The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Michael Lavers is the author of two books of poems with the University of Tampa Press: After Earth (2019) and The Inextinguishable (2023). He has been awarded the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize, and the Michigan Quarterly Review Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets. He has degrees from Brigham Young University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Utah. Together with his wife, the writer and artist Claire Åkebrand, and their two children, he lives in Provo, Utah, and teaches poetry at BYU.Find his most recent book here:https://utampapress.org/product/the-inextinguishableAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a new rondeau that features an unusual noun that begins with the same letter of your first name. Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem in which something is tasted on vacation that never should have been. Include a declarative statement.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Yoda Olinyk is an author and writing coach who assists writers with book creation. Her debut memoir, Salt and Sour, took three years to write, and its release led her to help other writers. She worked as a full-time chef until 2022, then focused on writing, publishing in literary journals, including a poem in Rattle’s current food poems tribute, and released Dear Future Lover while working on her second memoir. She writes about addiction, love, and nature, often at 5:30 am. She enjoys dogs, yoga, and mental health advocacy and leads writing workshops.Find more on her website:https://www.doulaofwords.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which a wall comes down. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a new rondeau that features an unusual noun that begins with the same letter of your first name. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
John Poch is the author of seven collections of poems, including Poems (2004), a finalist for the PEN/Osterweil Prize; Two Men Fighting with a Knife (2008), winner of the Donald Justice Award; and Fix Quiet (2015), winner of the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize. He is a founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine and a co-editor of Old Flame: From the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine. He is the series editor of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and he recently published a book of essays, God’s Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination, and a book of aphorisms on the practice of poetry, Notes on the Poet. He teaches at Grace College in Indiana.Find his little book of criticism here:https://www.measurepress.com/measure/catalog/books/notes-poet/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which space is very important. Include a scent. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which a wall comes down. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rich Youmans is an editor, writer, and poet with a primary interest in haibun. From 2018 to 2019 he served on the editorial team of Haibun Today, and in 2020 he became editor in chief of Contemporary Haibun Online and its related print anthology, Contemporary Haibun. His books include Shadow Lines (1999), linked haibun with Margaret Chula, and Head-On: Haibun Stories (2019), both of which were recognized in the HSA Merit Book Awards. He is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Lew Watts, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023). He lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.Visit Contemporary Haibun Online here:https://contemporaryhaibunonline.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Find a song lyric from a genre you don’t normally listen to, and use that as an epigraph to a poem. Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem in which space is very important. Include a scent. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Matt Mason served as the Nebraska State Poet from 2019-2024 and has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times and Matt has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His work can be found in Rattle, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and in hundreds of other publications. Mason’s 5th book, Rock Stars, was published by Button Poetry in 2023.Find more at Matt's website:https://midverse.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a different kind of haibun than you ever have before that features a big leap. Next Week’s Prompt:Find a song lyric from a genre you don’t normally listen to, and use that as an epigraph to a poem. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Kat Lehmann is winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize and previously appeared on Rattlecast 8 in 2020. She is a founding editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. Her haiku have won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award for Individual Poem and are featured in A New Resonance: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2023). Kat holds a B.A. from Hampshire College and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Utah. She lives in Connecticut at the edge of an old forest where she loves to think about the way each piece holds the whole. Find more at katlehmann.weebly.com.For more information, visit: https://katlehmann.weebly.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set in a garden you’ve only been to once before and include a metaphor. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a different kind of haibun than you ever have before that features a big leap. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
For years, Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad Jabr have been exchanging poems from Mosul to Massachusetts and back, and they're now collected into a book, Where Do You Live? with translations by Wadaq Qais and Tamara Al-Attiya. They join us for a special episode at a special time (12pm ET). Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr was born in Mosul, Iraq. She is a prize-winning poet and short story writer who has participated in critical conferences and international poetry festivals. She has a PhD of Philosophy in Arabic Literature. Her books include the poetry collections I Draw My Sorrow from His Collar, and two books of criticism: The Dialectic of Poetry and Prose in Modernist Poetry, and The Poetics of the Prose Poem. Additionally, she’s released a children’s book: Sultan and Shanidar. Hanaa teaches at the University of Mosul.Jennifer Jean first appeared in episode 76 of the Rattlecast. Her poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry and she’s the editor of the forthcoming anthology Other Paths for Shahrazad: a Bilingual Anthology of Poetry by Arab Women (Tupelo Press, 2026). Jennifer is an organizer for the Her Story Is collective, a faculty member at Solstice MFA, and a senior program manager at the Fine Arts Work Center.Wadaq Qais was born in Basra, Iraq. She received a degree in accounting in 2021. Later, she found her true calling in the Translation Department at the University of Basra, College of the Arts, where she is completing her studies. Reading provided her a gateway to other worlds, allowing her to broaden her perspective and expertise in the disciplines of both literary and business translation. For more information, visit: https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/hanaa-ahmad-jabr-jennifer-jeanAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set in a garden you’ve only been to once before and include a metaphor. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a postcard poem to someone that would be very surprised to hear from you.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Susan Cohen's most recent book is Democracy of Fire. She is the author of two chapbooks and two previous full-length collections of poems, as well as co-author of a non-fiction book. She was a newspaper reporter, contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine, and faculty member of the University of California Graduate School of Journalism before studying bioethics and poetry at Stanford University while on a John S. Knight fellowship for mid-career journalists. Her numerous journalism honors include a grant from the Fund for Investigative Reporting and two Science in Society Awards from the National Association of Science Writers. In 2013, she turned her full writing attention to poetry and earned an MFA from Pacific University. Her second full-length collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the 2015 David Martinson-Meadowhawk prize from Red Dragonfly Press. She lives in Berkeley, California, For more information, visit: https://www.susancohen-writer.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with “self-portrait” in the title that features an odd bird. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set in a garden you’ve only been to once before and include a metaphor. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Li-Young Lee is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Invention of the Darling. A collection of his new and selected mother poems, I Ask My Mother to Sing, is out this summer from Wesleyan University Press. He has received many honors for his writing including the 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Award, the American Book Award, and more. He lives in Chicago. Find The Invention of the Darling here: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393867190Find I Ask My Mother to Sing here:https://www.weslpress.org/9780819502032/i-ask-my-mother-to-sing/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about unrequited love for something other than a human. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with “self-portrait” in the title that features an odd bird. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Dion O'Reilly first appeared on episode 173. Her new book, Limerence, is just out from Floating Bridge Press. She is the author of two previous poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator, a finalist for the Steel Toe Book Prize and the Ex Ophidia Prize; Ghost Dogs, winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Poetry Award and The Catamaran Poetry Prize. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.Find more here: https://www.dionoreilly.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you had to do someone else’s job and found the result surprising. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about unrequited love for something other than a human. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Dave Newman is the 2024 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award winner. He's worked as a truck driver, a book store manager, an air filter salesman, a house painter, and a college teacher. Dave is the author of seven books, including The Same Dead Songs: a memoir of working-class addictions (J.New Books, 2023), East Pittsburgh Downlow (J. New Books, 2019), The Poem Factory (White Gorilla Press, 2015), the novels Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children (Writers Tribe Books, 2012), Two Small Birds (Writers Tribe Books, 2014), Please Don’t Shoot Anyone Tonight (World Parade, 2010) and the collection The Slaughterhouse Poems (White Gorilla Press, 2013), named one of the best books of the year by L Magazine. Winner of numerous awards, including the Andre Dubus Novella Prize, he lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley, with his wife, the writer Lori Jakiela, and their two children. Before starting at Pitt-Greensburg, he worked in medical research, serving elders.Pre-order his forthcoming book here: https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/newman/191As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about an echo you’ve heard more than a few times. Include as many sounds as possible.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you had to do someone else’s job and found the result surprising. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Susan Browne first appeared on Rattlecast 29. Her fourth collection, Monster Mash, was just released from Four Way Books. She's published three previous books of poetry, Buddha’s Dogs, Zephyr, and Just Living. Awards include prizes from Four Way Books, the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, the River Styx International Poetry Contest, The Fischer Poetry Prize, and the James Dickey Poetry Prize. She received a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She has also collaborated to create a word/music CD. She lives in Northern California.Find more about Susan and all of her books here: https://www.susanbrownepoems.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which someone makes a mistake that leaves an impression.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about an echo you’ve heard more than a few times. Include as many sounds as possible.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Partridge Boswell is author of the 2023 Fool for Poetry Prize-winning chapbook Levis Corner House (Southword Editions, Munster Literature Centre) and Grolier Poetry Prize-winning collection Some Far Country Partridge is co-founder of Bookstock Literary Festival and teaches at Vallum Society for Education in Arts & Letters in Montreal. His poems have recently found homes in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword and The Moth. He lives with his family in Vermont and troubadours widely with the poetry/music group Los Lorcas, whose debut release Last Night in America is available on Thunder Ridge Records. Find more about the band here: https://loslorcas.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that includes a prank and ends with a question. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which someone makes a mistake that leaves an impression.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Lew Watts was born and raised in Cardiff, Wales. He lived and worked for many years in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa before moving to the United States in 2002. He is the author of the novel, Marcel Malone, and three poetry collections—his most recent, Eira, a collection of haibun and haiku, received a 2024 Touchstone Award. Lew is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Rich Youmans, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide, and serves as the haibun co-editor of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America. Beyond poetry, he is ex-chair of the World Bank’s external panel on climate change, and a past board member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the home of the Doomsday Clock; he currently sits on various corporate and non-profit boards. He divides his time between Chicago and West Michigan with his wife, Roxanne, and his rascal-of-a-dog, Willis. His other passions are four granddaughters, fly fishing (anytime, anywhere), rugby, jazz guitar, tango music, and gin martinis.Find Eira here: https://www.snapshotpress.co.uk/books/eira.htmAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a specific type of phobia you do not personally have but know of someone that does. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that includes a prank and ends with a question. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark is the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies. Her new book is Scorched Earth. Find more at: https://www.tianaclark.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an ekphrastic poem based on a work of art by an artist that shares your first or last name. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a specific type of phobia you do not personally have but know of someone that does. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Stephen Gibson is the author of several poetry collections, including Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror, selected by Billy Collins as the winner of the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize; Rorschach Art Too, winner of the Donald Justice Prize; and Rorschach Art. His most recent book is Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale. Gibson, who retired in 2015, taught at Palm Beach State College for thirty-two years. He lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.Find more the new book at: https://www.stephen-gibson.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that references small talk in a big way. Next Week’s Prompt:Write an ekphrastic poem based on a work of art by an artist that shares your first or last name. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Keetje Kuipers is the author of four books of poems, all from BOA Editions. Her most recent collection, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), was the winner of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, was selected by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Named one of the top ten debut poetry books of 2010 by Poets & Writers, her first book also appeared in the top ten on the contemporary poetry bestseller list. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail (2014), was a book club selection for The Rumpus, and her third book, All Its Charms (2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.Find more information at: https://keetjekuipers.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time that you carried more than you ever thought possible, and include a reference to temperature. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that references small talk in a big way. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Judith Fox is an award-winning fine art photographer, poet, public speaker, and business leader. The temporary service she founded in Richmond, Virginia in 1978 was purchased by a NYSE firm in 1996. During her business career, Fox served on many for-profit and non-profit boards, was a public speaker and consultant. After selling her company, Judith devoted herself full-time to photography and writing. Fox’s award-winning photographs are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), the Museum of Photographic Arts (MoPA), the Southeast Museum of Photography (SMP), the Harry Ransom Center, the Haggerty Museum of Art, and the Harn Museum; her work is in private and corporate collections throughout the world. Fox’s photographs have been exhibited in solo and group shows in the United States and Europe. After her book I Still Do: Loving and Living with Alzheimer’s was released, Fox became a global advocate for Alzheimer’s awareness and education. She’s been a speaker and consultant on Alzheimer’s and family caregiving for corporations, non-profit associations and universities. I Still Do was named “one of the best photography books of 2009” by Photo-Eye Magazine. Judith Fox lives and works in Southern California and is currently working on a collection of poetry.Find more information at: https://www.judithfox.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about the happiest place on earth. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time that you carried more than you ever thought possible, and include a reference to temperature. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of two chapbooks and one poetry collection—This Strange and Wonderful Existence, Take Me Home, and Lightning is a Mother. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50.Find more information at: https://bethanyjarmulwriter.wordpress.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that includes an unexpected vow. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about the happiest place on earth. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Todd Robinson, affectionately known to acolytes as "Toddfather," is a poet and educator based in Omaha. He is the author of Mass for Shut-Ins (Backwaters Press, 2018) and Note at Heart Rock (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2012). Recipient of the 2011-2012 Thompson Learning Community’s Outstanding Faculty Award, he has conducted writing workshops with The Seven Doctors Project, The Naturalist School, Nebraska Warrior Writers, Nebraska Writers Collective, and the CÚRAM center for research in medical devices. He is founder and host of the Kaneko Art Museum’s Bibliophilia reading series, which is currently on a long pandemic pause. He earned a B.A. and M.A. from Creighton University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He serves as vice president on the board of directors of Big Feels Lab.Find more information at: https://www.toddfather.netAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that includes a memory you’ve never shared. Include dialogue. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that includes an unexpected vow. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
NOTE THE SPECIAL TIME! WE'RE LIVE AT NOON ET THIS WEEK!S.C. Flynn was born in a small town in Australia of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His poetry has been published in over 100 journals and magazines around the world. The Colour of Extinction, first full-length collection, was just published but Renard Press.Find more information at: https://scflynn.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an elegy that’s not about a person. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that includes a memory you’ve never spoken of before. Include dialogue. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
2011 Rattle Poetry Prize winner Hayden Saunier has published five collections of poetry and her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Gell Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and nominated numerous times for a Pushcart Prize. Her acting resume includes film and television appearances in The Sixth Sense, Philadelphia Diary, House of Cards, Mindhunter, Hack and Do No Harm and dozens of roles at regional theatres such as the Guthrie Theatre , Walnut Street Theatre, Arden Theatre, George Street Playhouse, Interact Theatre and People's Light and Theatre Company. A Poet Laureate Emerita of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, she lives in the Philadelphia area. Find more information at: https://www.haydensaunier.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that explores the perspective of the other side, and arrives somewhere opposite to where the poem begins. Next Week’s Prompt:Write an elegy that’s not about a person. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Kim Addonizio was featured with a tribute to her and her poetry students in issue 67 and featured on Rattlecast 88. Kim authored nine poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her most recent collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton, September 2024). She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, and Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist in poetry. Recent books include Now We're Getting Somewhere: Poems (W.W. Norton) and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). Find more information at: https://www.kimaddonizio.comAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with a title that begins with “Poem in Which I” after Denise Duhamel. For the next word in the title, find a random verb on randomwordgenerator.com.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that explores the perspective of the other side, and arrives somewhere opposite to where the poem begins. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Denise Duhamel was one of our 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize winners, and her book, In Which, was published along with this winter's issue. Her most recent full-length books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, she lives in Hollywood, Florida.Find the In Which here: https://www.rattle.com/product/in-which/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Think of a word that transports you back to childhood, and give the poem that title. Next Week's Prompt:Write a poem with a title that begins with “Poem in Which I” after Denise Duhamel. For the next word in the title, find a random verb on randomwordgenerator.com.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Donald Platt is the author of eight volumes of poetry, most recently Swansdown (Grid Books, 2022). His poems have appeared in many journals, including The New Republic, Nation, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000, 2006, and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three Pushcart Prizes, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, two Verna Emery Poetry Prizes, and the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize. He's been a professor in Purdue University’s English Department since 2000.Find the Swansdown here: https://www.grid-books.org/donald-plattAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which something is overfilled. Include as many tactile details as possible. Next Week’s Prompt:Think of a word that transports you back to childhood, and give the poem that title. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Willie James King is a long-time contributor to Rattle, having appeared in 8 issues dating back to 1997. He's the author of five books of poetry, most recently To Be the Difference from Press 53. His poems have appeared widely in such publications as America, Appalachian Heritage, Confrontation, Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, New Contrast (South Africa), English Journal, Southern Poetry Review, and Urthona (UK). He has nine Pushcart Prize nominations and one Best of the Net. He resides in Montgomery, Alabama.Find the his most recent book here: https://www.press53.com/poetry-collections/to-be-the-difference-by-willie-james-kingAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a pantoum that references your favorite shape.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which something is overfilled. Include as many tactile details as possible. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rex Wilder is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Rare Fuel, which was just released from Finishing Line Press. A award-winning poet and photographer, e is the author of four previously published books of poetry. His poetry collection, Open Late: New & Collected Poems (1979-2018), was published by Chatwin in 2018 and his latest book, A Quiet Place to Land was published by Chatwin in November, 2023. Find the new book here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/rare-fuel-by-rex-wilder-winner-of-the-2023-the-donna-wolf-palacio-poetry-prize/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that includes a wish for the New Year and features a sound you’ve never written in a poem before. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a pantoum that references your favorite shape.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Chase Twichell is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Things as It Is (Copper Canyon, 2018). After teaching for many years (Hampshire College, the University of Alabama, Princeton University), she left academia to found Ausable Press, a not-for-profit publisher of contemporary poetry, which was acquired by Copper Canyon in 2009. From 2013 to 2016 she served as Chair of the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Awards Jury. A longtime student in the Mountains and Rivers Order at Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York, she splits the year between the Adirondacks and Saratoga Springs, NY.Find more on Chase here: https://www.chasetwichell.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Recall a time that you acted poorly during winter, and write a poem that crafts a different resolution to the incident. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Lexi Pelle is a poet and editor living in New Jersey. She was the winner of the 2022 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize, Crosswinds Poetry Prize and the Marvin Bell Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in issue 81 of Rattle, Poets Respond, Ninth Letter, SWWIM, Sucarnochee Review, and The Shore.Find more on Lexi here: https://www.lexipelle.org/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Think of a time you traveled. Write a poem that reimagines that journey but set in a different time period.Next Week’s Prompt:Recall a time that you acted poorly during winter, and write a poem that crafts a different resolution to the incident. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Eric Kocher is one of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize winners for Sky Mall, which was included for subscribers with our fall issue. He teaches Environmental Studies at Wofford College. Some of his poems have previously appeared in 32 Poems, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Oversound, and A Public Space, among others. He lives in upstate South Carolina with his wife, Audrey, and their two children, Oscar and Louise.Find the book here: https://www.rattle.com/product/sky-mall/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a triolet that includes a bird.Next Week’s Prompt:Think of a time you traveled. Write a poem that reimagines that journey but set in a different time period.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Austin Alexis is the winner of the 2014 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award for his book Privacy Issues. He has also written two chapbooks―Lovers and Drag Queens and Lincoln & Other Poems. A member of St. George’s Choral Society, one of the oldest choral societies in the United States, Austin's poem "The Concert" appears in our Tribute to Musicians issue. He has taught literature and creative writing at a number of colleges, including Long Island University, John Jay College, and Hunter College, and currently teaches at New York City College of Technology.Find the book here: https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780979750984/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an ode to the first thing you remember being thankful for. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a triolet that includes a bird.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Brody Parrish Craig (they/them) is a southern writer who upheaves expectations to open spaces for connection, unlearning, and change. They are the author of Boyish, the winner of the 2019 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, and editor of TWANG, a regional collection of trans, nonbinary & gender-non-conforming creators tied to the south/midwest. Brody Parrish Craig's debut full-length collection, The Patient is An Unreliable Historian, exploring madness, harm reduction, and disability justice, is just out from Omnidawn Publishing.Find more here: https://www.brodyparrishcraig.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a braid poem in which three or more stories are woven together. Next Week’s Prompt:Write an ode to the first thing you remember being thankful for. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
This conversation with Ani DiFranco appeared in issue #85 of Rattle and was recorded on May 23, 2024. We talked about the relationship between poetry and music, creativity and the subconscious, trauma, public cancellation and more. Widely considered a feminist icon, Grammy winner Ani DiFranco was one of the first artists to create her own record label in 1990. While she has been known as a Folksinger, her music has embraced punk, funk, hip hop, jazz, soul, electronica, and even more distant sounds. Her most recent album is Unprecedented Sh!t. Her memoir No Walls and the Recurring Dream was a New York Times Top 10 best seller, and her debut children’s book The Knowing is out now. DiFranco was starring on Broadway as Persephone in the Tony and Grammy Award-winning Best Musical, Hadestown, when this interview was conducted. Find more at: https://anidifranco.com
Joseph Millar is the author of six books of poetry, including Dark Harvest: New & Selected Poems. His latest collection, Shine, was published in October of 2024. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University before spending 30 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in Pacific University's low-residency MFA Program.Find more here: https://www.josephmillar.org/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Pick a photographic portrait featuring someone you don’t know personally, and write a short poem that explores their story.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a braid poem in which three or more stories are woven together. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist with three monographs: Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry, Invited to Life: After the Holocaust, and On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues. He has been featured in solo exhibits at the Skirball Cultural Center, the Woody Guthrie Center, and the Rockefeller Arts Center, among other places; a number of his portraits of American poets are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. His writing has won the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction, and has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize. He is a two-time winner of the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal: once for History and once for Poetry. Find more here: https://bavansise.format.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which someone wears a costume. Include as many sounds as possible. Next Week’s Prompt:Pick a photographic portrait featuring someone you don’t know personally, and write a short poem that explores their story.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
These highlights from Rattlecast #257 aired on KPFK-Los Angeles (90.7 FM) August 11, 2024. Siddharth's fifth book, All These Streets We've Known By Heart, was published in 2022. Siddharth serves as Editor, Visual Narratives with The Bombay Literary Magazine, but calls the city of Poona home.
Jim Tilley is a Canadian-American poet, mathematician, and author of four poetry collections, a personal essay, and a novel. Born and raised in Québec, Jim holds a Bachelor's degree in physics from McGill University and a doctorate in physics from Harvard. After earning his PhD, Jim pivoted to actuarial science and established himself as a prominent thought leader in that field. During his 25-year career in insurance and investment banking, he published several prize-winning papers. During his working career, Jim served as Morgan Stanley’s Global Head of Fixed Income Research and Chief Information Officer for Institutional Securities. For two years, he worked to help fund the California Earthquake Authority. In his retirement, he studied creative writing through workshops at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sarah Lawrence College, and others. His newest book, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe, was just published by Red Hen Press. Find more here: https://www.jimtilleypoetry.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in the first person perspective in which something is repaired with the use of a most unlikely tool. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which someone wears a costume. Include as many sounds as possible. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Andrea Hollander is the author of six full-length poetry collections, including Blue Mistaken for Sky (finalist for the 2018 Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Poetry Fest) and Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems (finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and college textbooks, including Writing Poems, The Poets' Grimm, and The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry—and in such literary journals and publications as The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and The Georgia Review. For more than 22 years, Hollander served as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, which awarded her the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. In 2011 she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she continues to mentor writers individually and to teach. In 2017 she established The Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she taught in her home until COVID when she switched to Zoom. Her most recent book is And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin Books, 2023). Find more here: https://www.andreahollander.net/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a villanelle that mentions your favorite season. Make each refrain slightly different. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in the first person perspective in which something is repaired with the use of a most unlikely tool. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Philip Metres is the author of twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon 2024), Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan, 2018), Sand Opera (Alice James, 2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State, 2015). His work—poetry, translation, essays, fiction, criticism, and scholarship—has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Watson Foundation. He is the recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. He lives with his family in Cleveland, OhioFind more here: https://philipmetres.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in haiku stanzas (tercets with lines of five, then seven, then five syllables). Do not make it haiku!Next Week’s Prompt:Write a villanelle that mentions your favorite season. Make each refrain slightly different. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
These highlights from Rattlecast #255 aired on KPFK-Los Angeles (90.7 FM) September 25, 2024. Suzanne Lummis is an influential poet and publisher, educator and arts organizer in Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Open 24 Hours.
Ron Riekki has a B.S. in Religion, with a focus on Buddhism, and an M.A. in Interreligious Studies, with a primary focus on indigenous religious practice and a secondary focus on Buddhism. His books include U.P., Posttraumatic, My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction, and i have been warned not to write about this. Ron is also a filmmaker and his plays have been performed in Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, Illinois, and New York, and he was selected as a Tennessee Williams Scholar where he studied with Arlene Hutton and Pulitzer Prize-winner Lee Blessing. His most recent book is Blood / Not Blood then the Gates. Find that here: https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Not-Then-Gates-Poems-ebook/dp/B0B6Y9YSX8/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which someone unexpectedly wins something. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in haiku stanzas (tercets with lines of five, then seven, then five syllables). Do not make it haiku!The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Molly Peacock was featured in issue 32 of Rattle. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Widow’s Crayon Box, The Analyst, The Second Blush, and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. She is also the author of several books of prose and a memoir, and has written two biographies of painters. Molly served as president of the Poetry Society of America, where she initiated the Poetry in Motion series on New York City’s subways and buses. After moving to Canada, she created The Best Canadian Poetry series, and serves as its general editor. For more, visit:https://www.mollypeacock.orgIn the second hour, we'll announce this year's Rattle Poetry Prize results live on the air. The winner has not been notified—we'll let them know together.As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:I dare you to write a poem in which you dare someone to do something colorful.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in which someone unexpectedly wins something. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Dorianne Laux first appeared on episode 44. She published two new books in 2024: Life on Earth, a collection of poems, and Finger Excersizes, a book of essays on craft. She is author of seven books, including Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and The Book of Men, which won The Paterson Prize. For more, visit:https://www.doriannelaux.comAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a persona prose poem set in the future. Next Week’s Prompt:I dare you to write a poem in which you dare someone to do something colorful.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Ori Fienberg has appeared twice in Poets Respond, and his new book, Where Babies Come From, was just released by Cornerstone Press. Ori is also the author of the chapbooks Old Habits, New Markets (2020) and Interim Assistant Dean of Having a Rich Inner Life (2023). His writing has appeared in Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and many other journals and anthologies. A graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, Ori teaches poetry for Northeastern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.For more, visit:https://orifienberg.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Find someone’s last words, and use that as an epigraph in a poem where “death” is not mentioned by name.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a persona prose poem set in the future. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
These highlights from Rattlecast #236 aired on KPFK-Los Angeles (90.7 FM) August 28, 2024. James Crews is the editor of several bestselling anthologies, including The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope.
Susan Terris began her writing career in children’s fiction, publishing 21 books with major New York publishing houses before dedicating herself to poetry. Since then, she’s published 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and 2 plays. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Susan is editor emerita of Spillway, former co-editor of Runes, and a poetry editor at Pedestal Magazine. For more, visit:www.susanterris.comAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Use the random feature on Wikipedia twice to find two articles. Write a poem about one of the topics, and use the other as the title. Next Week’s Prompt:Find someone’s last words, and use that as an epigraph in a poem where “death” is not mentioned by name.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Chris Anderson first appeared on episode 143. Chris is a Catholic deacon, poet, and retired professor of English living in Corvallis, Oregon. He grew up in Spokane, Washington, went to college at Gonzaga University, and attended graduate school at the University of Washington. He taught literature and writing for 38 years, 34 of them at Oregon State University. In 1997 he completed a Masters in Theology at Mount Angel Seminary and was ordained a deacon. Since then, he has served at St. Mary’s in Corvallis, as well as leading retreats and offering spiritual direction. He has written, co-written, or edited 15 previous books, Love Calls Us Here, which was just published by Wild House Publishing. He and his wife, Barb, have lived for many years on the edge of the forest north of Corvallis. They have three children, four grandchildren, and two dogs. For more, visit:deaconchrisanderson.comAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with your least favorite word to appear in a poem as the title. Include why it’s your least favorite in the submission note.Next Week’s Prompt:Use the random feature on Wikipedia twice to find two articles. Write a poem about one of the topics, and use the other as the title. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Siddharth Dasgupta writes poetry and fiction from lost hometowns. His fourth book, A Moveable East, was published in early 2021. A fifth book and third collection of poetry, All These Streets We've Known By Heart, was published in 2022. Siddharth’s literature has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Prairie Fire, Epiphany, Rogue Agent, Lunch Ticket, Kyoto Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He has read in cities like Bombay, Lucknow, Mandalay, Galle, Paris, Istanbul, and Dubai. Siddharth serves as Editor, Visual Narratives with The Bombay Literary Magazine, but calls the city of Poona home. Follow Siddharth on Instagram here:https://www.instagram.com/citizen.bliss/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a hot haiku sequence.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with your least favorite word to appear in a poem as the title. Include why it’s your least favorite in the submission note.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Jennifer Hambrick is a classical musician, broadcaster, and poet. Her full-length poetry collection In the High Weeds won the Stevens Prize. In her haikai work, Hambrick won the Martin Lucas Haiku Award and the HSA Haibun Award. Her haibun collection, Joyride (2021), won the Marianne Bluger Book Award from Haiku Canada. Hambrick served as program chair for the 2023 Haiku North America conference; she resides in Columbus, Ohio. Her new book of haiku is A Silence or Two.Find more on Jennifer here:https://jenniferhambrick.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that directly references your favorite theatrical play.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a hot haiku sequence.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Suzanne Lummis is an influential poet and publisher, educator and arts organizer in Los Angeles. As series editor of The Pacific Coast Poetry Series (Beyond Baroque Books), she edited the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, named one of the ten best books of 2015 by The Los Angeles Times. She teaches for the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and was the Mellon Foundation Institute for the Study of Los Angeles visiting poet at Occidental College, Spring 2017. Her web series, They Write by Night, produced by poetry.la, explores film noir, crime fiction, and writers who incorporate influences from those arts into their poetry.Find Open 24 Hours here:https://wsupress.wsu.edu/product/open-twenty-four-hours/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that features multiple unexpected turns, leaps, or voltas. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that directly references your favorite theatrical play.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Chera Hammons is a winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award through PEN Texas and the 2020 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award through the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and recently served as Writer-in-Residence at West Texas A&M University. Her poetry chapbook Amaranthine Hour received the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award. Poetry collections include Recycled Explosions, The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City, and Maps of Injury. Her debut novel, Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom, is available through Torrey House Press. She is a member of the editorial board of poetry journal One. She often writes about chronic illness and invisible disability, horses, and the unique landscape of the Texas panhandle, where she resides. Find her on Instagram @chera_writes. For more on Chera, visit her website:https://www.cherahammons.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write journalistic poem that explores the sensory details of where you live. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that features multiple unexpected turns, leaps, or voltas. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Kari Gunter-Seymour first appeared on Rattlecast 48 and was interviewed in our Appalachian Poets issue. She is the current Poet Laureate of Ohio and just published a new book of poems, Dirt Songs. Her previous poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. A ninth-generation Appalachian, she is the editor of I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, funded by the Academy of American Poets and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Women of Appalachia Project’s anthology series Women Speak. For more on Kari, visit her website:https://www.karigunterseymourpoet.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a traditional ghazal that references at least one other poet. When submitting, please include the name of the poets referenced in the submission note.Next Week's Prompt:Write journalistic poem that explores the sensory details of where you live. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Maaz Bin Bilal is a poet, translator, and academic. His first collection of poetry, Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu, was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. His translations of Fikr Taunvis’s Partition diary, The Sixth River, and Mirza Ghalib’s Persian long poem on Banaras, Chiragh-e-Dair, Temple Lamp, were also critically noted. Reviews of his books may be found in Wasafiri, World Literature Today, The Hindu, Indian Express, and other publications. His poems have been translated into German, Hindi, Irish, and Bengali. Maaz was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Trust fellowship in writing and translation in Wales (2018–19), and the Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship in writing in Germany (2022–23). He holds a PhD on the politics of friendship in E. M. Forster’s work from Queen’s University Belfast and teaches literary studies at O. P. Jindal Global University.For more on Maaz, visit his website:https://www.maazbinbilal.comAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set on a specific road or path. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a traditional ghazal that references at least one other poet. When submitting, please include the name of the poets referenced in the submission note.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Erin Murphy first appeared on Rattlecast 142. She is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Human Resources, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; Fluent in Blue (April 2024); Taxonomies (2022), a collection of demi-sonnets, a form she devised; and Assisted Living (2018), poems about caregiving. In addition, her chapbooks include Fields of Ache, a collection of centos (2022). Her most recent co-edited anthologies are Bodies of Truth, a collection of narrative medicine essays (University of Nebraska Press), and Creating Nonfiction (SUNY Press), both of which won Gold Medals in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.For more on Erin, visit her website:https://sites.psu.edu/erincmurphy/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an elegy for something that was in your home.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set on a specific road or path. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Christine Potter is the author of the time-traveling YA series The Bean Books. She has also published three collections of her poems: Zero Degrees At First Light, Sheltering In Place, and most recently, Unforgetting. She's taught creative writing to high schoolers, junior high students, and senior citizens. Christine ran the online poetry workshop The Gazebo for many years. Her poems have appeared in magazines ranging from Rattle to The Anglican Theological Review--and once wrapped around a stick of Double Bubble in Gum Ball Poetry. She's been nominated for the Pushcart Prize a few times, and has had a poem commissioned for July 4th by ABC Radio News. Christine is also a sometimes-singer and a dulcimer and guitar player who knows how to fake change ringing on a small carillon. She's appeared many times in Rattle and Poets Respond, and is the new poetry editor of Eclectica magazine. For more on Chris, visit her website:https://chrispygal.weebly.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an extended metaphor poem that features a celestial body.Next Week’s Prompt:Write an elegy for something that was in your home.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Annie Finch is an American poet, writer, translator, speaker, teacher, and performer. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Spells: New and Selected Poems. Her other works include influential essays, books, and anthologies on poetics, feminism, and women’s earth-based spirituality, including the influential book Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. Educated at Yale and Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D, she has lectured at universities including Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford and performed her poetry across the United States and in India, Mexico, Africa, and throughout Europe. She was the interviewee in issue 82 of Rattle. For more on Annie, visit her website:https://anniefinch.com/Annie also shared some links and notes on meter:How to Scan a Poem videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZh1NNP6WsQSubstack scansion introhttps://anniefinch.substack.com/p/useful-background-on-scansionHow to Scan a Poem (print)https://bookshop.org/a/1041/9781737307563Poetry Witch Community/Meter Magic Spiralwww.poetrywitch.orgAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set in a place you’ve always dreamed of going to but never have. Allude to all the basic senses. Next Week’s Prompt:Write an extended metaphor poem that features a celestial body.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Alan Shapiro has published many books of poetry and prose, including Reel to Reel, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Night of the Republic, finalist for both the National Book Award and the International Griffin Prize, The Dead Alive and Busy, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Mixed Company, winner of the LA Times Book Prize. His new books of poetry, Proceed to Check Out, and By and By, were published in 2022 and 2023 respectively. He now lives in New England. Find Proceed to Checkout here:https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo130500563.htmlFind By and By here:https://waywiser-press.com/product/by-and-by/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an ode to something that doesn’t conform to typical ode topics and begins with an epigraph.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set in a place you’ve always dreamed of going to but never have. Allude to all the basic senses. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Nancy Miller Gomez first appeared on Rattlecast 146. Her chapbook, Punishment, was published as part of the Rattle chapbook series. She has worked as a waitress, a stable hand, an attorney, and a television producer. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails and the Juvenile Hall. She has a B.A. from The University of California, San Diego, a J.D. from the University of San Diego and a Master in Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University. She is currently working on a collection of personal essays. Her first full-length poetry manuscript, Inconsolable Objects, is now available from YesYes Books. She grew up in Kansas, but currently lives in Santa Cruz, California. Find more on Nancy and her books here:https://www.nancymillergomez.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem using a regular meter of some kind that references your ancestral home. Next Week's Prompt:Write an ode to something that doesn’t conform to typical ode topics and begins with an epigraph.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
The great-grandchild of eight Irish immigrants, poet Julie Kane was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in Massachusetts, upstate New York, and New Jersey, graduating from Cornell University with a B.A. in English and winning first prize in the Mademoiselle Magazine College Poetry Competition, judged by Anne Sexton and James Merrill. That led her to graduate school in creative writing at Boston University, where she was one of Sexton's students at the time of her death. Since 1999 she has lived in Natchitoches, where she is Professor of English Emeritus at Northwestern State University and winner of the Excellence in Teaching Award, Mildred Hart Bailey Faculty Research Award, and Dr. Jean D'Amato-Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award. During 2002 she was a Fulbright Scholar to Lithuania, teaching at Vilnius Pedagogical University. She won the National Poetry Series, judged by Maxine Kumin, in 2002 and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, judged by David Mason, in 2009. From 2011-2013 she served as the Louisiana Poet Laureate. In 2018 she joined the poetry faculty of the Western Colorado University low-residency MFA program.Find more on Julie and her books here:https://www.juliekanepoet.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Find a partner and write a collaborative poem in some kind of form. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem using a regular meter of some kind that references your ancestral home. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
With special guest Denise Duhamel! Julie Marie Wade is a poet, lyric essayist, memoirist, and an experimental/hybrid forms writer. She is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, winner of the Colgate University Press Nonfiction Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; the book-length lyric essay Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing; and Otherwise: Essays, winner of the 2022 Autumn House Prize. Wade holds an MA in English from Western Washington University, an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from the University of Louisville. Born in Seattle, she now lives in Florida and is an associate professor of English in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami, where she teaches poetry, memoir, lyric essay, and hybrid forms.Find more on Julie and her books here:https://www.juliemariewade.comWe'll also be joined by Denise Duhamel for part of the episode to discuss her collaborations with Julie. Denise was the guest on Rattlecast 86, and a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize, in addition to publishing award-winning books like Queen for a Day and Kinky. Find their co-written book, The UnRhymables, here: https://www.amazon.com/UNRHYMABLES-Collaborations-Prose-Denise-Duhamel/dp/0578421429As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Pull a random card from a deck and write a poem about it.Next Week’s Prompt:Find a partner and write a collaborative poem in some kind of form. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of twelve books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Say Goodnight, a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; and Vox Angelica, which won the 1992 Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. Translated into a dozen languages, Liu’s poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. Liu is an intuitive reader of occult esoterica, including the Tarot and the I-Ching and the Akashic Records, and he gives readings at Mirabai (Woodstock) and the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies (Rhinebeck). He teaches at SUNY New Paltz and Vassar College.Find more on Timothy and his books here:https://www.timothyliu.net/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a golden prose poem: one that includes the words from your favorite haiku but goes in a different direction.Next Week’s Prompt:Pull a random card from a deck and write a poem about it.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Richard Garcia was born in San Francisco in 1941 and began writing in his teens. After publishing his chap book, Selected Poems, in 1972, he stopped writing for a number of years until an encouraging letter from Octavio Paz convinced him to return to it. In 1978 he published a bilingual book for children, My Aunt Otilia's Spirits, and University of Pittsburgh Press published The Flying Garcias in 1991. He earned the MFA degree in creative writing from Warren Wilson College Writers' Program in 1994. His third volume of poetry with BOA Editions, The Chair, was released in 2014; The Other Odyssey won the 2012 American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his most recent book, Porridge, won the Press 53 Prize.Find more on Richard here:https://www.richardgarcia.info/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an ekphrastic poem about your favorite painting. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a golden prose poem: one that includes the words from your favorite haiku but goes in a different direction.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Gerald Locklin (1941 - 2021) published over one hundred volumes of poetry, fiction, and literary essays including Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet, (Water Row Press) and Go West, Young Toad, (Water Row Press). Charles Bukowski called him “One of the great undiscovered talents of our time.” The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in the English Language calls him “a central figure in the vitality of Los Angeles writing.” A volume of his selected poems, Requiem for the Toad, has just been published by NYQ Books. We'll be joined by former Rattlecast guest Clint Margrave, who edited the book, as well as Locklin's literary executors, Patricia and David Cherin. Find the new book here:https://nyq.org/books/title/requiem_for_the_toadAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem to share on social media about what poetry means to you. Next Week’s Prompt:Write an ekphrastic poem about your favorite painting. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Kim Stafford is Emeritus Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He writes, teaches, and travels to raise the human spirit through poetry. In 1986, he founded the Northwest Writing Institute, and he has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate for a two-year term.Find more on Kim here:https://www.kimstaffordpoet.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with a single word as the title, in which our understanding of that word shifts by the end of the poem. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem to share on social media about what poetry means to you. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Winner of the 2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize, George Bilgere, his wife, and his two exceptionally fine little boys spend the school year in Cleveland, Ohio, because living in Cleveland builds character. In the summers the family heads off to Berlin, Germany, where the kids study German while George does important research on beer gardens. He’s the author of eight collections of poetry and shows no signs of slowing down.Find more on George here:https://www.georgebilgere.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with internal rhyme in every line. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with a single word as the title, in which our understanding of that word shifts by the end of the poem. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine collections of poetry, one collection of short stories, and a novella. Recent books include Blur (The Word Works), winner of the Tenth Gate Prize, Book of Years (Cloudbank Books), Under Black Leaves (Etchings Press), Black Flowers (LSU Press), and The Owl That Carries Us Away, winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. His poems and stories have appeared in literary journals that include Kenyon Review, Slate, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Missouri Review. He is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. His short story, "Balloon," was listed as a Distinguished Story of 2018 by The Best American Short Stories.Find more on Doug here:https://dougramspeck.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set in spring that includes personification.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem with internal rhyme in every line. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes is the author of the chapbook Present Values (Backbone Press, 2018), winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. His poems have previously appeared in various Philippine and U.S. journals and have been anthologized in The Powow River Anthology, Villanelles, The Achieve Of, The Mastery: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English, mid-‘90s to 2016, and No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant and First-Generation American Poetry. Find José's chapbook here:https://backbonepress.org/titles/present-values/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem from the perspective of one of your childhood toys.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set in spring that includes personification.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Raymond P. Hammond is the editor-in-chief of both The New York Quarterly and NYQ Books. He holds an MA in American Poetry from NYU's Gallatin School and is the author of Poetic Amusement, a book of literary criticism. He lives in Beacon, NY with his wife, the poet Amanda J. Bradley, and their dog Hank.Find more information on Raymond, visit: https://raymondhammond.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a short poem that explores someone else’s awe.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem from the perspective of one of your childhood toys.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
James Crews is the editor of several bestselling anthologies, including The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, which has over 100,000 copies in print. He has been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and on NPR’s Morning Edition. James is the author of four prize-winning books of poetry—The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment—and a book of short essays, Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion and Connection. James also speaks and leads workshops on kindness, mindfulness, and writing for self-compassion. He lives with his husband on forty rocky acres in the woods of Southern Vermont.Find more information on James, visit: https://www.jamescrews.net/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a “golden" sestina or tritina: start with an epigraph from another poem, and use six (or three) words from that quote as the end-words of your sestina or tritina. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a short poem that explore someone else’s awe.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Erica Reid appeared in this winter's issue of Rattle. Her manuscript, Ghost Man on Second, won the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was just published by Autumn House Press in spring of 2024. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, and earned her MFA at Western Colorado University.Find more information on Erica, visit: https://ericareidpoet.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a “What to Do if …” poem about what to do in an unusual situation. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a “golden sestina” (or tritina): start with an epigraph from another poem, and use six (or three) words from that quote as the end-words of your sestina or tritina. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Michael Meyerhofer is a contemporary poet and fantasy author who believes those two genres genuinely can get along. His fifth poetry book, Ragged Eden, was published by Glass Lyre Press. His fourth, What To Do If You're Buried Alive, was originally published by Split Lip Press, then recently re-released by the fine books at Doubleback Press. In addition to his poetry books, he has published two fantasy trilogies. His debut fantasy novel, Wytchfire (Book I in the Dragonkin Trilogy), was published by Red Adept Publishing, and went on to win the Whirling Prize and a Readers Choice nomination from Big Al's Books and Pals. An avid weightlifter, medieval weapons collector, and unabashed history nerd, he currently lives, teaches, and inhabits various coffee shops around Fresno, CA.Find more information on Michael, visit his website: https://www.troublewithhammers.com/In the second hour, we'll be joined by special guest Zilka Joseph, who first appeared on episode 131, to share a few poems from her new book, Sweet Malida. Find her new book here:https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/the-laadu-makers-my-mother-and-grandmothers-legacyAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Revise a poem that you wrote a long time ago by radically shifting its perspective. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a “What to Do if …” poem about what to do in an unusual situation. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, San José State University professor emerita, lecturer, blogger, and workshop presenter who has taught over 100 workshops. She was appointed the second Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, 2011-2013. She has collaborated with both visual artists and musicians. She is Assistant Editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, Black Lawrence Press, 2018. Her work is included in many anthologies. Listening to Mars, her fifth book of poetry, was just released. Find more information on Sally, visit his website: https://sallyashton.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a haiku sequence that talks about love without mentioning it by name. Next Week’s Prompt:Revise a poem that you wrote a long time ago by radically shifting its perspective. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Joshua Eric Williams is author of two full-length collections of haiku from Red Moon Press: The Strangest Conversation, which received an honorable mention in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards, and Silent After, which was just released. His haiku, "silent after," from Rattle' Poets Respond series, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won a 2022 Touchstone Award from the Haiku Foundation of America. Find more information on Eric, visit his website: https://thesmallestwords.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a song of someone or something, as a persona poem 32 lines long. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a haiku sequence that talks about love without mentioning it by name. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
George David Clark is The author of Reveille (winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize) and Newly Not Eternal (just released from LSU Press). After earning an MFA at the University of Virginia and a PhD at Texas Tech University, David held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Poetry at Colgate University and, later, the Lilly Postdoctoral Fellowship at Valparaiso University. The editor-in-chief of 32 Poems, he previously served in various capacities on the staffs of Meridian, Iron Horse Literary Magazine, and the Best New Poets anthology. Since 2015 David has taught creative writing and literature at Washington & Jefferson College, where he is now an associate professor. He lives in McMurray, PA with his wife, Elisabeth, and their four children.Find more information and George's books here: http://www.georgedavidclark.com/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem entitled, “A Brief History of [X],” where X is a word that needs to be translated, and the poem is less than a page.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a song of someone or something, as a persona poem 32 lines long. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rimas Uzgiris is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of North of Paradise, published by Kelsay Books (2019). Tarp, a collection of his poetry in Lithuanian translation was published by Kauko laiptai. He is translator of Caravan Lullabies by Ilzė Butkutė, Then What by Gintaras Grajauskas, Now I Understand by Marius Burokas, The Moon is a Pill by Aušra Kaziliūnaitė, and Vagabond Sun by Judita Vaičiūnaitė. Uzgiris has contributed significantly as editor and translator to two anthologies: How the Earth Carries Us: New Lithuanian Poets, and New Baltic Poets. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and the Poetry Spring 2016 Award for translations of Lithuanian poetry into other languages, he teaches translation at Vilnius University. Find North of Paradise here: https://kelsaybooks.com/products/north-of-paradiseAs always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that tells a story about a silent interaction with a stranger. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem entitled, “A Brief History of [X],” where X is a word that needs to be translated, and the poem is less than a page.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Diana Goetsch is an American poet and essayist, author of eight poetry collections, the acclaimed memoir This Body I Wore, and dozens of features and columns. She was winner of the 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize for her book, In America. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, LitHub, Tricycle, The American Scholar, The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Grace Paley Teaching Fellowship at The New School. Find the more on Diana here: https://www.dianagoetsch.com/The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. For the full interview, including Poets Respond, the Prompt Lines, and more, visit YouTube.com/RattlePoetry.
Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award, and One Turn Around The Sun (2017). His latest work of poetry, Voodoo Libretto, was published by Etruscan Press in 2022. Seibles lives and teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.Find the more on Tim here: https://blueflowerarts.com/artist/tim-seibles/And Voodoo Libretto here:https://etruscanpress.org/product/voodoo-libretto-new-selected-poems-by-tim-seibles/As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find the full episode, including the Prompt Lines and Poets Respond, at YouTube.com/RattlePoetry
Miracle Thornton is a winner of the 2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and her book, Plucked, was published with the winter issue of Rattle. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Rattle, DREGINALD, Silent Auctions, UpNorth Lit, and elsewhere. She’s been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and Princeton University, among others. She currently studies Literature at Bennington College.Find the chapbook here: https://www.rattle.com/product/plucked/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. For the full episode, which includes the Prompt Lines, Poets Respond, and more, visit YouTube.com/RattlePoetry
Matthew Buckley Smith's poems and stories have appeared in AGNI, American Life in Poetry, and elsewhere. His first book of poems, Dirge for an Imaginary World, was selected by Andrew Hudgins for the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. His second book of poems, Midlife, was selected by David Yezzi for the 2021 Richard Wilbur Award, and will be published soon. For more information: matthewbuckleysmith.comOrder his book, Midlife, here:https://www.amazon.com/Midlife-Matthew-Buckley-Smith/dp/1939574382/The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. To watch the full version, including our Poets Respond poems and Prompt Lines, visit YouTube.com/RattlePoetry
Debra Marquart is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, as well as the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine. Marquart serves as Iowa’s Poet Laureate and the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. The author of seven books―including The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere and Small Buried Things: Poems―Marquart has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over 50 grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Award, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and Elle Magazine’s Elle Lettres Award. In 2021, Marquart was awarded a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book is Gratitude with Dogs: New and Collected. For more information: debramarquart.comReview the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that includes multiple lists. Next Week’s Prompt:Look at an old family photograph, and find an object in the background that you hadn’t noticed before. Write a poem about it. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Gaetan Sgro is an internal medicine doctor, girl dad, and medical educator at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine where he co-directs a program in the medical humanities. He is the recipient of teaching awards including the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award, the Golden Apple Teaching Award, and the Carl R. Fuhrman Clinical Educator of the Year Award. His writing has appeared in Rattle, The Bellevue Literary Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Hektoen International, The Healing Muse, Academic Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, the Best New Poets Anthology, and elsewhere.Find more at his website:https://www.gaetansgro.com/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Move through an unnatural environment and describe it as though you were writing a nature poem. Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that includes multiple lists. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Greg Kosmicki is a poet and retired social worker who lives in Omaha, Nebraska. He founded The Backwaters Press in 1997, which he now serves as Editor Emeritus. Greg’s poetry has been published in numerous magazines since 1975, both print and online. Some of his earliest publications were in Poetry NOW in 1975 and Paris Review, in 1977. He received artist’s fellowships for his poetry from the Nebraska Arts Council 2000 and 2006. Three of his poems have been read on Writer’s Almanac. Author of thirteen books and chapbooks of poems, he is a 2000 and 2006 recipient of the Nebraska Arts Council's Merit Award. His previous collection, It’s As Good Here as It Gets Anywhere (Logan House) was a finalist for the 2017 High Plains Book Award. His new book is We Eat the Earth. He and his wife Debbie are parents of three children and grandparents of two.Find Greg's most recent book here:https://wscpress.com/3157/features/we-eat-the-earth-by-greg-kosmicki-2/Find Edward Nudelman's new book here:https://www.edwardnudelman.com/booksReview the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that begins with an idiomatic expression that you take literally or incorrectly, and see where it goes.Next Week’s Prompt:Move through an unnatural environment and describe it as though you were writing a nature poem. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Bob Hicok’s tenth collection, Water Look Away, was published by Copper Canyon Press this year. A two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, he’s also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and eight Pushcart Prizes, and his poems have been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of The Best American Poetry. He teaches at Virginia Tech.Find Bob's most recent book here:https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/water-look-away/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that addresses a pain from childhood, and use a refrain. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that begins with an idiomatic expression that you take literally or incorrectly, and see where it goes.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Joshua Mensch is a poet, visual artist, and a founding editor of the literary journal B O D Y. He grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, and lives in Prague, Czech Republic. His first book, Because: A Lyric Memoir, was published in May 2018 by W.W. Norton and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry.Find more on Joshua here:https://www.joshuamensch.com/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write and epistolary poem (a letter) to someone you are thankful for. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that addresses a pain from childhood, and use a refrain. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Carrie Shipers’ poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New England Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other journals, including two issues of Rattle. She is the author of Ordinary Mourning (ABZ, 2010), Cause for Concern (Able Muse, 2015), Family Resemblances (University of New Mexico, 2016), and Grief Land (University of New Mexico, 2020). Find more on Carrie here:https://www.carrieshipers.com/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a “how-to” poem about something you don’t know how to do.Next Week’s Prompt:Write an epistolary poem (a letter) to someone you are thankful for. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Prartho Sereno has made her home in a bamboo hut in India, a 150-year-old farmhouse in Maine, a spiritual community in Oregon, and for the past 23 years, a funky upstairs duplex north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Along with painting & poetry Prartho has dabbled in such art forms as taxi driver, family therapist, phys ed instructor at Cornell University, housecleaner, single parent, head cook, amateur singer/song-writer, illustrator, and palm-reading psychic in various Catskill resorts. Author of the award-winning collections Indian Rope Trick, Elephant Raga, and Call from Paris, and author/illustrator of the IPPY-winning gift book, Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives and Loves of Kitchen Utensils, Prartho's other published works include a poetry chapbook, Garden Sutra, a song/music/poetry CD, Salt, and a book of essays, Everyday Miracles: An A to Z Guide to the Simple Wonders of Life. Her most recent is Starfall in the Temple, just released by Blue Light Press. She is founder of the ongoing poetry writing series: The Poetic Pilgrimage: Poem-Making as Spiritual Practice, now online.Find more on Prartho here:https://www.prarthosereno.com/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a sonnet with the title “The End of _____ Is Not _____” after Jamaica Baldwin’s American sonnet, “The End of Sorrow Is Not Happiness.”Next Week’s Prompt:Write a “how-to” poem about something you don’t know how to do.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Jamaica Baldwin is a poet and educator originally from Santa Cruz, CA. Her first book, Bone Language, was published by YesYes Books in June 2023. Her accolades include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor's prize, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, as well as the San Miguel de Allende Writer's Conference Contest Poetry Award. Jamaica has also served as a community based teaching artist with Writers in the Schools - Seattle, Louder Than a Bomb - Great Plains (an affiliate of Nebraska Writers Collective), and taught a generative writing workshop for women in Guatemala. Jamaica has a PhD from the University of Nebraska -Lincoln in English with a focus on poetry and Women's and Gender Studies and she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in New York.Find more on Jamaica here:https://www.jamaicabaldwin.com/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that features a shadow. Next Week's Prompt:Write a sonnet with the title “The End of _____ Is Not _____” after Jamaica Baldwin’s American sonnet, “The End of Sorrow Is Not Happiness.”The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night at Skate World and co-host of the Shadowlands paranormal podcast. Her poetry has appeared in The Collagist, Gargoyle, Failbetter, Rattle and Mudlark, among other publications and anthologies, including a forthcoming anthology about Detroit music. A graduate of the University of Michigan, she has served as submissions editor for Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation and poetry editor for Failbetter. She currently lives in Detroit.Find more on Christina here:https://www.christinakallery.com/This eve of Halloween episode features a spooky open lines—dim the lights and have a creepy poem ready to share! Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about one of your fears. Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that features a shadow. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Brian Turner is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently: The Wild Delight of Wild Things (2023), The Goodbye World Poem (2023), and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook (2023), all just published by Alice James Books. His other collections include Here, Bullet to Phantom Noise, and the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country. He is the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres anthologies. A musician, he has also written and recorded several albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and The Retro Legion’s American Undertow. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando, Florida, with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.Find more on Brian here:https://brianturner.org/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a museum for an abstract concept, using one of the forms Maryann read: ghazal, villanelle, call and response, or alliterative. Title it “The Museum of ______.” Next Week's Prompt:Write a poem about one of your fears. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Maryann Corbett grew up in McLean, Virginia, and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. She worked for almost thirty-five years for the Minnesota Legislature. Trained as a medievalist and linguist, she holds a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota. Though she wrote poems as a young person, she largely left creative writing during the decades when she did scholarly work, took care of a family, and worked full-time. One of her poems is included in The Best American Poetry 2018. She is the author of six books of poetry and two chapbooks. Her most recent book is The O in the Air. Find more on Maryann here:https://www.maryanncorbett.com/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an assay—a poem that breaks down an idea or topic into it's constituent parts. (See Jane's assays, "Silence" and "To Judgment.")Next Week's Prompt:Write a poem about a museum for an abstract concept, using one of the forms Maryann read: ghazal, villanelle, call and response, or alliterative. Title it “The Musuem of ______.” The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections and is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on the craft of poetry, and edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s work, which has been translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019. Her newest book is The Asking: New & Selected Poems.Order your copy of The Asking here:https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715681/the-asking-by-jane-hirshfield/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set in the first place you ever worked. Next Week's Prompt:Write an assay—a poem that breaks down an idea or topic into it's constituent parts. (See Jane's assays, "Silence" and "To Judgment.")The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Arthur Russell comes from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He works as an attorney and landlord in New Jersey. He has received writing fellowships from Syracuse University and The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, won Brooklyn Poets Poem of the Year in 2015, and was runner up for the Allen Ginsburg Poetry Award for 2021. He serves on the board of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets, co-leads their weekly workshop, and co-hosts their monthly readings.Find the chapbook here:https://www.rattle.com/product/at-the-car-wash/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Pick an inanimate object and trace the evolution of your relationship with it throughout your life. Title it with the name of that object. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem set in the first place you ever worked. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of DISEASE OF KINGS, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in October 2023. He is also the author of THE LOW PASSIONS (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and DYNAMITE (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, BuzzFeed, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, and many other publications, including several issues of Rattle. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Camargo Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, he is the winner of the Poetry International Prize. Visit Anders online at:https://www.anderscarlsonwee.com/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a haibun that mentions time.Next Week’s Prompt:Pick an inanimate object and trace the evolution of your relationship with it throughout your life. Title it with the name of that object. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Penny Harter's most recent books are Keeping Time, Still-Water Days, and A Prayer the Body Makes. Earlier collections include Recycling Starlight; The Night Marsh; Buried in the Sky; Grandmother's Milk; Turtle Blessing; Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth; and Stages and Views. With her late husband, William J. Higginson, she is co-author of The Haiku Handbook (Kodansha America), and with him was a co-editor of From Here Press for many years. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including collections of haiku. Her awards include three Poetry Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, including the Arnold Gingrich Award; the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, a teaching-poet award from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and two fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.Visit her online at:https://www.pennyharterpoet.com/Review the Rattlecast on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattle-poetry/id1477377214As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a sequel: a poem that refers to another poem and starts immediately after the events in that poem.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a haibun that mentions time.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Lana Hechtman Ayers is managing editor of three poetry presses: Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers. She facilitates generative writing workshops in the Amherst Method, runs a poetry book club, helps other poets assemble manuscripts, and teaches at writer’s conferences. Ayers is the author of eight poetry collections, two of which have come out in 2023: Overture (Kelsey Books) and When All Else Fails (Poetry Box). Her ninth, The Autobiography of Rain, is coming out in 2024.
Visit her online at: https://lanaayers.com
Note: The originally schedule guest, Bob Hicok, will return later this year. Thank you to Lana for swapping places with him!
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a one-sentence poem that includes two truths and a lie.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a sequel: a poem that refers to another poem and starts immediately after the events in that poem.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and son. She co-edits One Sentence Poems, an online journal of short poetry, and also works as a librarian. In addition to writing and reading, she enjoys running with her dog, kayaking, and exploring as much of the world as she possibly can. She's appeared five times in Poets Respond and another five in the Ekphrastic Challenge. Her first book of poems, Various Lies, is available from Finishing Line Press, and her most recent, Beach Reading, is just out from Bottlecap Press. Find Various Lies here:https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/various-lies-by-elizabeth-mcmunn-tetangco/Find Beach Reading here:https://bottlecap.press/products/readingAs always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a sonnet with a number in it.Next Week's Prompt: Write a one sentence poem that includes two truths and a lie.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Pedro Poitevin is a mathematician, translator, and bilingual poet living in Salem, Massachusetts. His Spanish language book of poems titled Perplejidades was published by Cooperativa La Joplin in early 2015 in México. His columns and poems in Spanish have appeared in Letras Libres, Partisan Magazine, Periódico de Poesía, and other venues. His first book in English, Nowhere at Home, was just published by Penteract Press and features many traditional and experimental forms, including palindromic and self-describing poetry.
Find more info at: https://penteractpress.com/store/nowhere-at-home-pedro-poitevin
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Pick a single word at random from the dictionary and use that as the title of a poem in which someone gets their hands dirty.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a sonnet with a number in it.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Irish poet Jane Clarke is the author of three poetry collections and an illustrated poetry booklet. Her three collections were published by Bloodaxe Books: The River in 2015, When the Tree Falls in 2019 and A Change in the Air in 2023, which is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023 and is also longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023. In 2016 The River was the first poetry collection ever shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Award, given for a distinguished work of fiction or non-fiction evoking the spirit of a place. Originally from a farm in Roscommon, Jane now lives in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow.
Find more info at: http://www.janeclarkepoetry.ie/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a villanelle that includes a cryptid (i.e., a mythological figure, such as the Loch Ness Monster).
Next Week's Prompt: Pick a single word at random from the dictionary and use that as the title of a poem in which someone gets their hands dirty.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
At work, Natalie Padilla Young writes copy for marketing and branding materials, spanning a wide range of clients and industries. Natalie is the author of All of This Was Once Under Water, now available from Quarter Press. The first run is a limited-edition, full-color hardcover book, illustrated beautifully by the German artist Maximiliane Spieß. It is a speculative collection of poems grounded in Utah's history and scenery.
Find more info at: https://www.natalieyoungarts.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a poem in the form of a letter to a favorite poet that includes a suggestion for them.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a villanelle that includes a cryptid (i.e., a mythological figure, such as the Loch Ness Monster).
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of four poetry volumes including, most recently, the book-length poem, Midwhistle (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). His other poetry collections are: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016); Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019); and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one edition titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Best American Poetry 2018, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. He has won the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the On Teaching Poem Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize (UK), the Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, as well as prizes from The Academy of American Poets, The Mississippi Review, The Crab Orchard Review, The Madison Review, and Stone Canoe. He co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). He holds a PhD in English Literature from Binghamton University. He teaches high school English in Endicott, NY and lives in Endwell New York with his wife, Christina, their daughter, Luciana, their son, Dante Jr., and their goldendoodle, Sunny.
Find the book here: https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/6174.htm
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a poem in which something is cooked.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem in the form of a letter to a favorite poet that inclues a suggestion for them.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Ana María Caballero is a Colombian-American literary artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She's the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Sevens Foundation Grant and has been a finalist for numerous other literary prizes, including the prestigious Kurt Brown, Vassar Miller and Academy of American Poets Prizes. The author of five books in Spanish and English, with a sixth forthcoming in 2024, Caballero has presented her poems as fine art at leading international venues, such as bitforms, UNIT, Gazelli Art House, L’Avant Galerie Vossen, and FeralFile, and has released work in partnership with TIME, Diario ABC and Playboy. Widely recognized as a digital poetry pioneer whose own practice is transforming the way language is exhibited, experienced and transacted, she’s also the cofounder of Web3 literary gallery theVERSEverse, long listed for the Lumen Prize and the Digital Innovation in Art Award.
Find more information at her website: https://anamariacaballero.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a poem as a dialogue with an alter-ego.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem in which something is cooked.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Sasha Stiles is author of the “instant techno classic” poetry collection, Technelegy (Black Spring Press Group, 2021), and has been named “perhaps the leading blockchain poet” by Right Click Save, as well as one of the top 10 NFT artists to watch in 2023. Her work is available via many of the world’s top platforms, including fxhash, Quantum, SuperRare, Objkt, Foundation, Nifty Gateway, Artsy, and Infinite Objects. In 2022, she became the first writer to bring AI-powered literature to a major auction house when her poem, “COMPLETION: When it’s just you,” sold at Christie’s. Other honors include a Future Art Award, nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and finalist status for the Christopher Smart Prize and Palette Emerging Poet Prize. Stiles is also co-founder of theVERSEverse, an acclaimed crypto literary collective where poems are art, poetry is code, and language is limitless. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Stiles lives just outside New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.
Find more information at her website: https://www.sashastiles.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a prose poem. Make it a parable and include at least one animal.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem as a dialogue with an alter-ego.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Bruce Weigl is the author of over twenty books of poetry, translations and essays, most recently Among Elms, in Ambush (BOA, 2021), On the Shores of Welcome Home (BOA, 2019), and The Abundance of Nothing (Northwestern University Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Weigl has won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Creeley Award, The Cleveland Arts Prize, The Tu Do Chien Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the 2018 “Premiul Tudor Arghezi Prize” from the National Museum of Literature of Romania. Having fought in the American War in Vietnam (Quang Tri, 1967-1968), Bruce Weigl has been working to promote mutual understanding and reconciliation between Vietnam and the US via literature and cultural exchanges for over twenty years. He is the co-translator of four Vietnamese-English poetry collections and has received a Medal for Significant Contributions from the Vietnam Union of Literature and Arts Associations and the Vietnam Writers Association, who acknowledge his efforts and success in the promotion of Vietnamese literature to the world. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio, and in Hà Nội, Việt Nam.
Find his most recent books here: https://www.boaeditions.org/collections/bruce-weigl
In the second hour, we'll be joined by special guest Ernest Hilbert. Ernest was the guest on Rattlecast 112 and has a new book, Storm Swimmer, just published by UNT Press. He'll read a couple poems from the book, which you can find here: https://www.ernesthilbert.com/storm-swimmer/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a glosa set in the distant future.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a parablistic prose poem. Include at least one animal.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. At the age of twelve he arrived in the United States. He received an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1987. He is the author of 11 collections of poetry, most recently Amerikan Chernobyl. His work has appeared in a multitude of magazines and journals internationally. He has been taking photographs on the road for the last three decades. When he is not writing, he is out riding his motorcycle up and down the Blue Highways of the Southeast, photographing disappearing urban and rural landscapes. His 10th volume of poetry, THE PAINTED BUNTING’S LAST MOLT, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Spring of 2020. Mr. Suárez makes his home in Florida.
Find Amerikan Chernobyl here: https://www.amazon.com/AMERIKAN-CHERNOBYL-Virgil-Su%C3%A1rez/dp/B0C129WNZB/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a mixed media poem of some kind. Use art or sound or some other medium combined with your poem.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a glosa set in the distant future.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
The Summer 2023 issue of Rattle features a Tribute to NFT Poets. NFTs are non-fungible tokens, using a blockchain to make a permanent, collectible digital record of something—in this case poems. Turning poems into collectable art opens up many new opportunities for creating and sharing poetry, and offers an entirely new realm to explore for poets. Several of the dozen poets in the NFT feature will join to share their work and discuss their use of the technology.
Guest include: Katie Dozier, Pierre Gervois, Johnny Dean Mann, George Pastana, Justin Tagg, and Dick Westheimer.
Find the issue here: https://www.rattle.com/product/i80/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write an ode to an object in the room you’re in.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a mixed media poem of some kind. Use art or sound or some other medium combined with your poem.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Recorded on September 21, 2022, and published in Rattle #78, this conversation is a deep dive into the divided brain, exploring the role the two unique hemispheres play in creativity. We also discuss how the modern world has come to be dominated by the left hemisphere’s narrow focus and how poetry might be an antidote to “the matter with things.”
Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and of the Royal Society of Arts, as well as a former Clinical Director of the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. His previous book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World reached international recognition and acclaim and has marked him out as one of the greatest thinkers and philosophers of our time. His latest publication is a two-volume work, The Matter with Things, which was published in 2021 by Perspectiva Press. A sustained critique of reductive materialism, it concerns the questions of who we are and what is the world? What do we mean by purpose, value, and the divine? And how do we most reliably set about finding out?
Find more at: channelmcgilchrist.com
Barbara Hamby is a professor at Florida State University, specializing in poetry and fiction. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Holoholo (2021) and Bird Odyssey (2018). Her book of linked stories, Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award/John Simmons Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. She also co-edited an anthology of poetry, Seriously Funny, with her husband David Kirby. She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and many other many other magazines, as well as Best American Poetry 2000, 2009 and 2010.
Find much more info here: https://barbarahamby.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a poem titled “Happiness.”
Next Week’s Prompt: Write an ode to an object in the room you’re in.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod, North American Review, Slant, American Journal of Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. She has been an Associate Editor for Good Works Review and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She likes the light on November afternoons, the music of Stravinsky, the smell of the ocean. She hates pretense, fundamentalism and sauerkraut. What’s Left Over is her fifth book, released last year by FutureCycle Press.
Find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Left-Over-Ruth-Bavetta/dp/1952593301
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write about a stranger you encounter this week. How are they the same as you? How are they different?
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem titled “Happiness.”
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Shawn R. Jones was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Womb Rain and A Hole to Breathe. Her work has appeared in Tri-Quarterly, New Ohio Review, River Heron Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her poetry collection, Date of Birth, won the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry and is available from Persea Books. Shawn is the co-owner of Tailored Tutoring LLC and Kumbaya Academy, Inc., a dance instructor at Halliday Dance, and a member of the Langston Hughes Society and the poetry performance troupe, No River Twice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and an MFA from Rutgers-Camden. When she is not writing, dancing, or teaching, she enjoys spending time with her family and her lucky pit bull, Ross.Find much more at:http://shawnrjones.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a about a personal relationship using an extended metaphor throughout the entire poem.Next Week’s Prompt:Write about a stranger you encounter this week. How are they the same as you? How are they different?The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Francesca Bell was raised in Washington and Idaho and settled as an adult in California. She did not complete middle school, high school, or college and holds no degrees. She has worked as a massage therapist, a cleaning lady, a daycare worker, a nanny, a barista, and a server in the kitchen of a retirement home. Bell’s writing appears in many magazines including ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. Her translations appear in Mid-American Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, River Styx, and Waxwing. Her first book, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. In 2023, Red Hen Press will publish What Small Sound, her second book of poetry, and Whoever Drowned Here, a collection of poems by Max Sessner that she has translated from German. She is translation editor at the Los Angeles Review and the Marin County Poet Laureate.
Find much more at: https://www.francescabellpoet.com/
This episode will also include appearances by Wendy Videlock in Poets Respond, along with 2023 Wrightwood Poetry Slam winner Propaganda Poet!
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a poem about a cultural myth you no longer believe in.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a about a personal relationship using an extended metaphor throughout the entire poem.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Originally from the west of Ireland, Anne Casey is a poet and writer living in Sydney, Australia. Over a 30-year career, she has worked as a business journalist, writer, magazine editor, media communications director and legal author. She is author of five books of poetry, including one co-authored with US poet, Heather Bourbeau. She has served as Vice President of Voices of Women Incorporated, a not-for-profit literary and performance arts initiative; guest editor of Not Very Quiet Journal; and as Senior Poetry Editor for the two literary journals of Swinburne University in Melbourne - Other Terrain Journal and Backstory Journal from 2017 to 2020. Anne has served on numerous editorial advisory boards and is a founding member of Irish-Australian women's arts ensemble, The Prankqueans. She is serving as a guest editor for the 'Archive' issue of Rabbit Poetry Journal (RMIT University) in 2023.Find much more at:http://www.anne-casey.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a memory from childhood using Frank’s form in “Small Town Brewery Blues.”Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about cultural myth you no longer believe in.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Frank Dullaghan is an Irish writer living in the UK after 15 years in the Middle and Far East. He holds an MA with Distinction in Writing from the University of South Wales. He has been widely published in literary journals and has five collections published by Cinnamon Press, most recently In the Coming of Winter. Secrets of the Body, a pamphlet of poems about the mythical Pope Joan, was published by Eyewear Publishing. He has also published two collections of haiku. In Dubai, he was an active member of various spoken word collectives. His screenplay for the short film Melody won the audience award in the Mumbai Women’s International Film Festival. His first full-length movie script, Everything You Ever Believed, is currently under a “shopping agreement” in the United States. Frank was a long-standing poetry judge for the Emirates Festival of Literature. He has regularly collaborated with the University of South Wales to provide poetry responses to artwork for display at various exhibitions. His work has been nominated for Best on the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Forward Prizes.Find much more at:https://twitter.com/frankdullaghanAs always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Pick a poem written in a language you don’t speak. “Translate” the poem into English, without looking up any of the words.Next Week's PromptWrite a poem about a memory from childhood using Frank’s form in “Small Town Brewery Blues.”The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Michael Favala Goldman is a Danish literary translator, educator and jazz clarinetist. Goldman’s books of original poetry include Who has time for this? (2020), Slow Phoenix (2021), Small Sovereign (2021), If you were here you would feel at home (2022), and This May Sound Familiar (2022). Among his seventeen translated books are Dependency (Penguin Classics) by Tove Ditlevsen, The Water Farm Trilogy by Cecil Bødker, and Something To Live Up To, Selected Poems of Benny Andersen. His work has appeared in scores of literary journals and has received rave reviews in the New York Times and The London Times. Goldman lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA, where he has been running poetry critique groups since 2018. He also serves as Chair of the Program Committee for Straw Dogs Writers Guild and as Member of the Board of Directors for the Northampton Center for the Arts. Find much more at:https://michaelfavalagoldman.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Find a photograph at least 100 years old that includes a person. Write a poem as a letter to that person.Next Week’s Prompt:Pick a poem written in a language you don’t speak. “Translate” the poem into English, without looking up any of the words.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Published by Vallentine Mitchell of London, publisher of the first English language edition of Anne Frank's diary, New Voices is a ground-breaking multigenre book. The editors selected 58 distinct images from noted collections consisting of vintage photography, propaganda posters, newsreel stills and the like, matching each to a poet, short story or flash fiction writer, plus features by essayists as well. Each writer interpreted these “silent witnesses” from the period in their own unique way, creating new perspectives for our times. Together this diverse group, including writers of color, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, LGBTQ, prominent and emerging writers, from around the world have contributed a powerful body of work, based on the Holocaust, that challenges worrying international trends of xenophobia, anti-democratic movements and alternative truths enabled by social media by recognizing the power of art to portray truth. This episode will feature foreword contributor Joy Ladin, author of eleven books including most recently, the revised second edition of The Book of Anna, winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for poetry and co-editor Howard Debs, former Rattle "Ekphrastic Challenge" artist and guest editor whose chapbook Political is winner of the 2021 American Writing Awards in poetry, along with contributors reading from their work in the book including: Ellen Bass, Lois P. Jones, Geoffrey Philp, Alex Escude, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, Lauren Camp, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach and Jacqueline Osherow. Book cover image: "Symbols: The World Entire" by Amy E. BartellFind much more at:https://newvoicesproject.org/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about something you will never do.Next Week’s Prompt:Find a photograph at least 100 years old that includes a person. Write a poem as a letter to that person.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Tresha Faye Haefner has studied poetry outside of academia with poets including Kim Addonizio, Sally Ashton, and Ellen Bass. Her own work has been published in several journals, including BloodLotus, The Cincinnati Review Fourth River, Hunger Mountain, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She is founder of The Poetry Salon and is the recipient of the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize. Haefner is also a three time Pushcart nominee and author of two chapbooks, The Lone Breakable Night and Take This Longing from Finishing Line Press. She holds a degree in Humanistic Psychology with a Specialization in Creativity Studies from Saybrook University. Her new book, When the Moon Had Antlers, won the Pangea Prize is out this spring from Pine Row Press.Find much more at:https://www.thepoetrysalon.com/tps/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Use an object as metaphor for some aspect of the body, as Julia does with fruit in 40 Weeks. Write a poem using colons to create a string of similes, as she does throughout the book. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about something you will never do.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnipro, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon. She earned a Ph.D in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation, Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry, which pays particular attention to the underrepresented atrocity in the former Soviet territories. She is the founder and host of Words Together, Worlds Apart, a virtual poetry reading series born out of pandemic but meant to outlast it. Julia's newest collection, 40 WEEKS is now available through YesYes Books. She is also the author of The Many Names for Mother, selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize and is available from Lost Horse Press and perhaps your local book store. You can find her poems in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. She is Assistant Professor and Murphy Fellow in Creative Writing at Hendrix College and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with her family.Find much more at:https://www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write an ekphrastic poem about a recent image in your camera roll.Next Week's Prompt:Use an object as metaphor for some aspect of the body, as Julia does with fruit in 40 Weeks. Write a poem using colons to create a string of similes, as she does throughout the book. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Alexis Rhone Fancher’s poem, “when I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:” was chosen by Edward Hirsch for inclusion in The Best American Poetry of 2016. Her poems and flash fiction have been published in over 200 literary magazines and journals, including: RATTLE, Verse Daily, VOX POPULI, Slipstream, Spillway, Askew, Plume, and elsewhere. Find Alexis’s photographs on the cover of Witness, Pithead Chapel, The Pedestal Magazine, and Heyday, as well as a 5-page spread in River Styx. Her street photography is published world-wide. Since 2013 Alexis has been nominated 29 times for the Pushcart Prize, 1 Best Short Fiction award, 1 Best Micro-Fiction award, and 6 Best of the Net awards. In 2018 she won The Pangolin Prize for Poetry. She and her husband live and collaborate on the bluffs of San Pedro, CA, twenty five miles from downtown L.A. She's the other of many books, most recently Brazen. Find much more at:https://www.alexisrhonefancher.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Pick a noun, either randomly or with intention. Write a poem that includes that noun in every line.Next Week’s Prompt:Write an ekphrastic poem about a recent image in your camera roll.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Dick Westheimer and his wife and writing companion, Debbie, have lived on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. A regular at the Rattlecast open mic, his poems have appeared several times in Rattle's Poets Respond series, and he was a finalist for the 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Paterson Review, Whale Road Review, Minyan, Gyroscope Review, and Cutthroat. His debut collection, A Sword in Both Hands: Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, was just released by Sheila-Na-Gig. Find more on Dick Westheimer here:https://dickwestheimer.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a series of small poems as journal entries this week. Each day, write about a detail that you would want your future self to remember.Next Week’s Prompt:Pick a noun, either randomly or with intention. Write a poem that includes that noun in every line.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
John W. Evans is winner of the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize for The Fight Journal. He's also the author of Should I Still Wish: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Young Widower: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and The Consolations: Poems (Trio House Press, 2014). His books have won prizes including the Peace Corps Writers Book Prize, a ForeWord Reviews Book Prize, the River Teeth Book Prize, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and the Trio Award. Should I Still Wish is published in the American Lives Series. John is currently the Phyllis Draper Lecturer in Nonfiction at Stanford University, where he was previously a Jones Lecturer and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in Northern California with his three young sons. (web)Find more on John W. Evans here:https://johnwevans.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Personify a place where you’ve lived as if it were a character sketch of a real person.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a series of small poems as journal entries this week. Each day, write about a detail that you would want your future self to remember.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rachel Custer's new book, Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books) is a "hard-hitting and harrowing and almost hypnotically beautiful" look at Middle America. Custer is also the author of The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She is the recipient of a 2019 fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and a 2015 mentorship from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, The American Journal of Poetry, The Antigonish Review, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters. She attended the University of Indiana and the University of Chicago. She lives in Indiana.Find the new book here:https://www.terrapinbooks.com/rachel-custer.htmlIn the second hour, Jennifer Jean returns to share a few poems from her new book, Voz. Find more here:https://www.jenniferjeanwriter.com/books.htmlAs always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in the voice of one of your ancestors. Use formal verse of some kind.Next Week’s Prompt:Personify a place where you’ve lived as if it were a character sketch of a real person.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Jennifer Reeser is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Strong Feather (Able Muse Press, 2022), and Indigenous (Able Muse Press, 2019), which was awarded Best Poetry Book of 2019 by Englewood Review of Books. Reeser's poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, the Hudson Review, Recours au Poème, Light Quarterly, the Formalist, the Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse, and elsewhere. A biracial writer of European American and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana and now divides her time between Louisiana and her land on the Cherokee Reservation in Indian Country near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation of which her family is a part.Find much more here:https://jenniferreeser.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a long poem in a single sentence.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem in the voice of one of your ancestors. Use formal verse of some kind.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
James Davis May is the author of Unusually Grand Ideas, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in February 2023. His previous collection. Unquiet Things, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2016 and named runner-up for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in Five Points, Guernica, The Missouri Review, New England Review, The New Republic, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He has received scholarships and fellowships from The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Inprint, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar. In 2016, his poem “Ed Smith” won the Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Award. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Mercer University, where he directs the creative writing program, and a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry.Find much more here:https://jamesdavismay.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you faced a moral dilemma.Next Week’s Prompt:Write the long poem in a single sentence.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Abby E. Murray has moved around the country and taught writing in Colorado, Georgia, Alaska, New York, and Washington, where she served as the 2019-2021 Poet Laureate for the city of Tacoma. Her first book, Hail and Farewell, won the 2019 Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Previous chapbooks include How to Be Married after Iraq (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Quick Draw: Poems from a Soldier’s Wife (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and Me and Coyote (Lost Horse Books, 2010). Find much more here:https://www.abbyemurray.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem around a simile comparing an emotion to a grammatical term, such as “Love as an Intransitive Verb” or “Anger as a Semicolon.”Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a time you faced a moral dilemma.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Sarah A. Etlinger holds a BA in English from Skidmore College, an MA in English from Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition (English) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Scholarly interests include new media studies, first-year composition, feminist literature, the Beatles, and popular culture. Currently, she is Associate professor of Composition and Literature at Rock Valley College where she teaches courses in composition, film, and literature. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of three books: Never One for Promises (Kelsay Books, 2018), Little Human Things (Clare Songbirds, 2020), and most recently The Weather Gods (Barclay Press, 2023). Find much more here:https://sarahetlinger.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem that replies to someone else's poem. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem around a simile comparing an emotion to a grammatical term, such as “Love as an Intransitive Verb” or “Anger as a Semicolon.”The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
The originally schedule guest, Kwame Dawes, couldn't make it, so this week's episode of the Rattlecast featured an extended open lines. But first, Michael Mark and Thomas Mixon joined to share recent Poets Respond poems. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a linked haiku sequence in which each haiku includes a line from the previous haiku.Next Week's Prompt:Write a poem in reply to someone else’s poem.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Michael Dylan Welch has written haiku since 1976. He is a past or current officer, director, or board member of the Haiku Society of America, the Haiku Poets of Northern California, Haiku Northwest, Haiku North America (cofounder, 1991), the American Haiku Archives (cofounder, 1996), and the Tanka Society of America (founder, 2000; president 2000-2004). Michael is poet laureate for the city of Redmond, Washington, is the proprietor of National Haiku Writing Month (NaHaiWriMo), and runs an extensive personal website devoted mostly to haiku (graceguts). He is also editor/publisher of Press Here haiku and tanka books (since 1989). His books include True Colour (a collection of solo rengay), Here, There, and Everywhere (an anthology of longer poetry), various Haiku North America conference anthologies, With Cherries on Top: 31 Flavors from NaHaiWriMo (a free PDF book with his photographs featuring poems by NaHaiWriMo contributors), Fifty-Seven Damn Good Haiku by a Bunch of Our Friends (edited with Alan Summers), and several art books from PIE Books in Tokyo with translations from the Japanese (with Emiko Miyashita), including 100 Poets: Passions of the Imperial Court, a translation of the thirteenth-century waka collection, Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a poem from which was published on the back of 150,000,000 U.S. postage stamps in 2012. Michael lives with his family in Sammamish, Washington.Find much more here:https://www.graceguts.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Go to quora.com. Answer one of the questions on the home page incorrectly, as a prose poem or haibun. Bonus points if you post it there.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a linked haiku sequence in which each haiku includes a line from the previous haiku.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist who walks the desert with her son J.J. in search of owl pellets and rattlesnake skins. Her poetry collections include The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Lowbrow Press, 2011). Her poetry film collaborations with Cheryl Gross have been shown across the world. She has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, an organization that promotes success for youth in secondary schools, MHA, Volunteers of America in their Homeless Youth Center, and with Red Hen’s WITS program. She is the creator of The Poetry Circus and collaborator on the Nevermore Poetry Festival. She currently teaches at Paraclete High School.Find much more here:http://www.nicelledavis.net/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a phone call you wouldn’t actually make.Next Week’s Prompt:Go to quora.com. Answer one of the questions on the home page incorrectly, as a prose poem or haibun. Bonus points if you post it there.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
A.E. Hines’s debut collection, Any Dumb Animal, received Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest, and was a daVinci Eye finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book award. His poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary journals, including more recently: Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Rhino, Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, The Greensboro Review, and I-70 Review. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Writing at Pacific University.Find much more here:https://www.aehines.net/In the second hour, we'll be joined by special guest Ron Koertge, who returns to share a few poems from new book, I Dreamed I Was Emily Dickinson's Boyfriend. http://www.ronkoertge.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Go to a newspaper of your choice. Find a headline you find completely uninteresting. Read the entire article and let your mind wander. Write a poem about where it went. Title it with a phrase from the article.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a phone call you wouldn’t actually make.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: All Possible Histories, released in December 2022 with Riot in Your Throat; Letdown, released in March 2020, selected for the Marie Alexander Series, and published by White Pine Press, and Boy With a Halo at the Farmer's Market, which won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize and was published in 2015. Her chapbook, Helen of Troy is High AF will be out with Harbor Editions in January 2023, and American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press chapbook prize. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, including in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and Willow Springs. She lives with her family in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College, edits the Rise Up Review, and advocates for neurodiversity and the decentering of the cis/het white hegemony.Find much more here:https://www.soniagreenfield.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Think about a time in your life when you felt like you lost yourself. What were the circumstances? Use as much detail as possible. How did you find yourself again? Write for 10 minutes. Next, type into a search bar: “If you don’t” and then just one more letter (for example, "If you don't r".) How does the search engine think you might want to finish the sentence? Choose one of these as the first line of your poem. How can you tie the ideas together? Maybe you can incorporate a few of them into your poem?Next Week’s Prompt:Go to a newspaper of your choice. Find a headline you find completely uninteresting. Read the entire article and let your mind wander. Write a poem about where it went. Title it with a phrase from the article.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Poet, community organizer, and instructor Angela Voras-Hills grew up in Wisconsin. She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of the poetry collection Louder Birds (2020), selected by Traci Brimhall for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Voras-Hills has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and Key West Literary Seminar as well as a fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston. She cofounded The Watershed: A Place for Writers, a literary arts organization, which evolved into Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Find much more here:https://www.angelavorashills.com/In the second hour, we'll be joined by special guest Clint Margrave, who appeared in RC24, sharing a few poems from his new book, Visitor. https://clintmargrave.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Embodied Poetry Scavenger Hunt: Experiment with cross-pollination, incorporating movement and body awareness. To begin your scavenger hunt, head to wildhoneywords.com/create for details!Next Week's Prompt:Think about a time in your life when you felt like you lost yourself. What were the circumstances? Use as much detail as possible. How did you find yourself again? Write for 10 minutes. Next, type into a search bar: “If you don’t” and then just one more letter (for example, "If you don't r".) How does the search engine think you might want to finish the sentence? Choose one of these as the first line of your poem. How can you tie the ideas together? Maybe you can incorporate a few of them into your poem?The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Emily Ruth Hazel is a cross-pollinating poet, author, and artist who is passionate about diversifying the audience for poetry and the contexts in which we find it. Founder and creative director of Wild Honey Words, a poetry-meets-art boutique that offers expressive apparel, accessories, décor, and journals featuring her words and designs, Emily brings everyday life into poetry and brings poetry into everyday life. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and is a two-time recipient of national Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes. Her chapbook, Body & Soul (Finishing Line Press, 2005), was a New Women’s Voices finalist. A graduate of Oberlin College’s Creative Writing Program, she has led writing workshops at libraries, schools, and community centers in Massachusetts, Ohio, New York, and South Africa. Currently based in the foothills of Los Angeles, Emily is developing several poetry book manuscripts and co-writing lyrics for an original musical inspired by the life of the extraordinary singer, cultural bridge builder, and Civil Rights foremother Marian Anderson.Find much more here:https://emilyruthhazel.com/Wild Honey Words:https://www.wildhoneywords.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a secret, but use extended metaphor to keep it a secret. This Week's Prompt:Embodied Poetry Scavenger Hunt: Experiment with cross-pollination, incorporating movement and body awareness. To begin your scavenger hunt, head to wildhoneywords.com/create for details!The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
John Brehm was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska and educated at the University of Nebraska and Cornell University. He is the author of three full-length books of poetry, Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, and No Day at the Beach, all from the University of Wisconsin Press, and a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press. His collection of essays, The Dharma of Poetry, was recently released by Wisdom Publications and is a companion to his acclaimed anthology, The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, also from Wisdom Publications. John teaches for Mountain Writers Series in Portland, Oregon, and for The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. He offers a monthly Poetry as Spiritual Practice gathering and with his wife, Alice Boyd, leads mindfulness retreats that incorporate Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons, guided meditations, and mindful poetry discussions. He lives in Portland, Oregon.Find much more here:https://www.johnbrehmpoet.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Write a poem using a word list. Read part of a book and write down a list of the 10 words that stand out most. Use those 10 words to inspire your poem. Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a secret, but use extended metaphor to keep it a secret.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Dion O’Reilly’s debut book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her second collection, Sadness of the Apex Predator, was chosen for the 2024 Portage Poetry Series from University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press. Her poems and essays appear in The Sun, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Ghost Dogs is the winner of the Independent Press award for poetry, the Dragonfly award for poetry, the Pinnacle Achievement Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award. She teaches poetry workshops in person and on Zoom and is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective which produces poetry radio shows, podcasts, and events. Dion is also a screener for the Catamaran Literary Reader. Find much more here:https://dionoreilly.wordpress.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:What is your earliest memory of a color? Next Week's Prompt:Writing a poem using a word list. Read part of a book and write down a list of the 10 words that stand out most. Use those 10 words to inspire your poem. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Elaine Sexton’s latest collection of poems is Drive (Grid Books, 2022). Her three previous books of poetry are: Sleuth (New Issues, 2003), Causeway (New Issues, 2008), and Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015). An avid book maker and micro-publisher, she is the author of several chapbooks, and has curated site-specific events with accompanying limited-edition chapbooks, and periodicals, among them Hair and 2 Horatio. She teaches text and image and poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has been guest faculty at New York University and in the graduate writing program at City College (CUNY). Formerly a senior editor at ARTnews and visual arts editor for Tupelo Quarterly, she serves as a contributing editor for On the Seawall, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Find much more here:https://www.elainesexton.org/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Victoria Chang radically changes the way in which we regard obituaries by writing an entire poetry collection using obits as form. Write an obituary for one of the following: a previous version of yourself, a friendship or romantic relationship, a body part, your adult child’s childhood, or for someone who has not died but that you’ve lost (read “One Year After My Dying Father and I Stop Speaking to Each Other Again” by Eugenia Leigh in Split This Rock for inspiration!)Next Week’s Prompt:Color Memory. What is your earliest memory of a color? Draft notes toward a poem starting with the first thing, the first color that comes to mind. Name it, and refine this description. Write down any and all details you can think of related to this color, describing it so a reader can begin to "see" what you see, and the circumstances around this experience. Joseph Albers, artist, color theorist, and arts educator, wrote: “If one says “Red” (the name of the color) and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.” He considered color to be “passive, deceiving, and unstable.” When drafting your next poem describe the color and every action, idea, and concrete image that comes to mind. This may be a list poem, a prose poem. See what comes.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean American author of NIGHT SWIM (Diode Editions, 2022) & three chapbooks. She serves as Editor-in-Chief for Harbor Review, as a Brooklyn Poets Mentor, is a proud Smith College graduate & has been a public school educator for 20 years. She serves on the faculty of Hudson Valley Writers Center & the Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown. Her work has won or been finalist for several prizes & her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Sundress Anthology Best of the Net. Joan’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), RHINO, Rattle, Dialogist & elsewhere, and she is available for manuscript consultations, reading and workshops. Please follow her on Twitter @joanpglass and see her website at www.joankwonglass.com. She lives in Connecticut with her family.Find much more here:https://joankwonglass.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Write a list poem of choices, each line/choice ending with the line “and I will die on this hill.” It could be funny like “A bar of soap is better than any kind of body wash, and I will die on this hill.” Or heavier things. Another option is to write a longer poem detailing a choice which ends with the line.Next Week's Prompt:Victoria Chang radically changes the way in which we regard obituaries by writing an entire poetry collection using obits as form. Write an obituary for one of the following: a previous version of yourself, a friendship or romantic relationship, a body part, your adult child’s childhood, or for someone who has not died but that you’ve lost (read “One Year After My Dying Father and I Stop Speaking to Each Other Again” by Eugenia Leigh in Split This Rock for inspiration!)The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rick Lupert has been involved in the Los Angeles poetry community since 1990. He is the recipient of the 2014 Beyond Baroque Distinguished Service Award for service to the Los Angeles poetry community. He is the author of 21 books: Paris: It’s The Cheese, Brendan Constantine is My Kind of Town, and most recently God Wrestler and I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii. He hosted the Cobalt Café reading series in Canoga Park for almost 21 years and is regularly featured at venues throughout Southern California. Rick created and maintains the Poetry Super Highway, an online resource and publication for poets, and works as the music teacher and graphic and web designer for anyone who would like to help pay his mortgage. He lives in Newhall, California with his wife Addie, son Jude, and three cats.Find much more here:https://www.poetrysuperhighway.com/rick/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Write a poem inspired by your favorite poet.Next Week’s Prompt:Write a list poem of choices, each line/choice ending with the line “and I will die on this hill.” It could be funny like “A bar of soap is better than any kind of body wash, and I will die on this hill.” Or heavier things. Another option is to write a longer poem detailing a choice which ends with the line.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Nicole Caruso Garcia's full-length debut poetry collection is Oxblood (Able Muse Press 2022). Her writing appears in journals and anthologies such as Best New Poets 2021, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Light, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, PANK, Plume, the Raintown Review, Rattle, RHINO, Sonora Review, Spillway, and Tupelo Quarterly.Find her new book and much more here:http://www.nicolecarusogarcia.com/index.htmlAs always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Start with a first line from a James Tate poem and write a poem (or prose poem) that incorporates dialogue within the narrative. See where your imagination takes you! Suggestions: Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem inspired by your favorite poet.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
David James has published six books, six chapbooks, and has had more than thirty of his one-act plays produced in the U.S. and Ireland. His most recent books are Alive in Your Skin While You Still Own It and Wiping Stars from Your Sleeves. His second book, She Dances Like Mussolini, won the 2010 Next Generation Indie book award. He has taught writing at Oakland Community College for over twenty years. Alive in Your Skin While You Own It:https://kelsaybooks.com/products/alive-in-your-skin-while-you-still-own-itWiping Stars from Your Sleeves:https://www.shantiarts.co/uploads/files/jkl/JAMES_STARS.htmlNail Yourself into Bliss:https://kelsaybooks.com/products/nail-yourself-into-blissAs always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Think about the geographical place that says home to you, its flora and fauna, the distinctive shape of the land and the buildings there rooted, the people who feel like family and community, whose tongues shapes sounds like your own. Then, even in so simple a form as a list, draw the most distinctive of those elements together and show—in hints or explicitly—how you are partly contingent on those specificities, how you emerge from that milieu. Next Week's Prompt:Start with a first line from a James Tate poem and write a poem (or prose poem) that incorporates dialogue within the narrative. See where your imagination takes you!The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
David Bowles is a Mexican American author and translator from south Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. He has written over two dozen award-winning titles, most notably They Call Me Güero and My Two Border Towns. His work has also been published in multiple anthologies, plus venues such as The New York Times, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, School Library Journal, Rattle, Translation Review, and the Journal of Children’s Literature. Additionally, David has worked on several TV/film projects, including Victor and Valentino (Cartoon Network), the Moctezuma & Cortés miniseries (Amazon/Amblin) and Monsters and Mysteries in America (Discovery).Find the books and much more here:https://davidbowles.us/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Pick a villain from pop culture, comic books, fairy tales, etc., and have them respond to the events of the last six years. Include a musical instrument and a favorite food.Next Week's Prompt:Think about the geographical place that says home to you, its flora and fauna, the distinctive shape of the land and the buildings there rooted, the people who feel like family and community, whose tongues shapes sounds like your own. Then, even in so simple a form as a list, draw the most distinctive of those elements together and show—in hints or explicitly—how you are partly contingent on those specificities, how you emerge from that milieu. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
For the special episode on a special day (Halloween eve), we've invited a poet who's work delves into the myths and legends relevant to the day—Jeannine Hall Gailey. We'll also share spooky poems during a special open lines. Jeannine Hall Gailey is a writer with MS who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and is the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize, Field Guide to the End of the World, and the upcoming Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Ploughshares. Find the books and much more here:https://webbish6.com/Find Jeannine's forthcoming book here:https://www.boaeditions.org/products/gaileyAs always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Write a spooky poem for Halloween. Next Week’s Prompt:Pick a villain from pop culture, comic books, fairy tales, etc., and have them respond to the events of the last six years. Include a musical instrument and a favorite food.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind, (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist and a Massachusetts Center for the Book 'Must Read' and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate Press). Her poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Chicago Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her poem, "This Patch Where the Light Cannot Reach," was selected by Mary Ruefle for the Philip Booth Poetry Prize (Salt Hill Journal). Her sonnet crown, "Witch Kitsch," was selected by Marilyn Nelson for the Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club). Cindy received an MFA from the University of Oregon where she was a Graduate Teaching Fellow and an assistant poetry editor for Northwest Review. She is co-poetry editor of Mom Egg Review. Find the book and much more here:https://www.cindyveach.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Write a poem about a landmark in your area.Next Week's Prompt:Write a spooky poem for Halloween. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Robert Pinsky is the author of numerous books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Figured Wheel, and prose, including The Sounds of Poetry. He served as United States Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000, during which time he founded the Favorite Poem Project. He has edited several anthologies, most recently The Book of Poetry for Hard Times. His most recent book is his just-published memoir, Jersey Breaks. Pinsky teaches at Boston University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.https://robertpinskypoet.comFind the book and much more here:https://robertpinskypoet.comIn the second hour, Kari Gunter-Seymour returns (ep. #48) to discuss her new book, Alone in the House of My Heart. https://www.karigunterseymourpoet.com/As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:Andhadhi is a unique kind of Tamil poetry constructed such that the last or ending word of each stanza becomes the first word of the next stanza . In some instances, the last word of the series of stanza becomes the beginning of the very first stanza , thus making the poem a true garland of stanza. Andha(m) means "end" and Adhi means "beginning."Next Week’s Prompt:Write a poem about a landmark in your area.The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Nikita Parik holds a Master's in Linguistics, a three-year diploma in French, and another Master's in English. Diacritics of Desire (2019) is her debut book of poems, followed by Amour and Apocalypse (2020), a novel in translation. Published in India and overseas, she is the recipient of the Mukti Bose Memorial IPPL Young Poet Award 2022 and one of the Nissim Excellence in Writing Award 2020. Nikita currently edits the EKL Review. A winner of the Ekphrastic Challenge in 2021, her most recent book, My City is a Murder of Crows, was published in July. Order her new book here:https://www.amazon.sg/My-City-Murder-Crows-poems/dp/9391431429As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/This Week's Prompt:In his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, Wordsworth writes about what he called “spots of time,” small memorable events we experience that thereafter remain in our consciousness and “give profoundest knowledge,” helping us determine who and what we are and what we may become. Write a poem in which you focus on one of these “spots of time” in your own life and what it has subsequently meant to you.Next Week’s Prompt:Andhadhi is a unique kind of Tamil poetry constructed such that the last or ending word of each stanza becomes the first word of the next stanza . In some instances, the last word of the series of stanza becomes the beginning of the very first stanza , thus making the poem a true garland of stanza. Andha(m) means "end" and Adhi means "beginning."The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Bruce Bennett was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1940. He received his A.B., A.M., and Ph. D. from Harvard, and taught at Oberlin College from 1967-70, where he co-founded and served as an editor of Field. In 1970 he moved back to Cambridge, where he co-founded and served as an editor of Ploughshares. Bruce is the author of ten books of poetry and more than thirty poetry chapbooks. His New and Selected Poems, Navigating The Distances (Orchises Press), was chosen by Booklist as “One Of The Top Ten Poetry Books Of 1999.” Just Another Day in Just Our Town, Poems: New And Selected, 2000-2016, was published by Orchises in January 2017, and has gone into a second printing. His newest project, Images into Words, is a series of ekphrastic poems, co-authored by Jim Crenner.
For more information, visit Bruce's website: https://justanotherdayinjustourtown.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Open a poetry journal to any page. Go to the end of a poem. Use all or part of the last line to begin a new poem.
Next Week’s Prompt: In his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, Wordsworth writes about what he called “spots of time,” small memorable events we experience that thereafter remain in our consciousness and “give profoundest knowledge,” helping us determine who and what we are and what we may become. Write a poem in which you focus on one of these “spots of time” in your own life and what it has subsequently meant to you.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Jill Kandel's newest book, The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir, is a story about building family across cultural, linguistic, and geographical divides. Kandel’s essays have been published in multiple journals and anthologies and her poems have appeared twice in Rattle. Her first book, So Many Africas: Six Years in a Zambian Village (Autumn House Press, 2015) won the Autumn House Nonfiction Prize and the Sarton Women’s Literary Award. Kandel currently lives with her husband in Fargo/Moorhead, a few blocks away from the Red River. Kandel also blogs about writing and her recovery from brain injury.
Now through October 3rd, receive ten percent off and free shipping with the code RATTLE – all caps – on Jill's website. https://www.jillkandel.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a historical figure most people don’t know. If you like, write the poem from that person’s point of view.
Next Week’s Prompt: Open a poetry journal to any page. Go to the end of a poem. Use all or part of the last line to begin a new poem.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Jessy Randall is the author of the poetry collections Suicide Hotline Hold Music (Red Hen Press, 2016), There Was an Old Woman (Unicorn, 2015), Injecting Dreams into Cows (Red Hen Press, 2012) and A Day in Boyland (Ghost Road Press, 2007), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her newest book, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science, was recently published by Gold SF / University of London. Her poems, poetry comics, and diagram poems have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, McSweeney's, and Asimov's, and she occasionally guest-edits the online magazine Snakeskin. She is curator of special collections at Colorado College.
Find more at: https://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall/
In the second hour, we'll be joined by special guest Michael Mark, to talk about his Rattle Chapbook Prize winning collection, Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet.
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write about a bruise or a scar, internal or external.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem about a historical figure most people don’t know. If you like, write the poem from that person’s point of view.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and currently serves on the boards of AWP, Mass Poetry, and Montserrat College of Art. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti, among others. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O'Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives with her two kids in Beverly, MA.
Find more at: https://www.januarygilloneil.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Craft a poem that connects to a folktale, Bible story, fairy tale, mythology, etc., and gives us a new perspective, turning it on its head.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write about a bruise or a scar, internal or external.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rachel Mallalieu is an emergency physician and mother of five. She writes poetry in her spare time. Rachel is the author of A History of Resurrection (Alien Buddha Press 2022). Some of her recent work is published or forthcoming in Blood and Thunder, Nelle, Tribes, Dialogist, Willows Wept Review, Jarfly, Rattle and elsewhere. Rachel lives with her husband and children in Maryland and practices emergency medicine just outside of Baltimore.
Find more at: https://rachel-mallalieu.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Find a portrait painting online and assume the voice of that person and imagine a backstory for your "other self." How does it feel to be looked at all the time? Is there anything in the background of the painting that may offer a glimpse into this other person’s life you’re trying to imagine? Lose your self and let your imagination take off.
Next Week’s Prompt: Craft a poem that connects to a folktale, Bible story, fairy tale, mythology, etc., and gives us a new perspective, turning it on its head.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Linda Nemec Foster has published twelve collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book) which was created with co-author Anne-Marie Oomen and artist Meridith Ridl. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, National Writer’s Voice, Dyer-Ives Foundation, The Poetry Center (NJ), Fish Anthology (Ireland), and the Academy of American Poets. In 2021 her poetry book, The Blue Divide, was published by New Issues Press. A new collection of flash fiction, Bone Country, is forthcoming in 2023, after being honored as a finalist in several national competitions. The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (2003-2005), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.
Find more at: https://www.lindanemecfoster.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about every place you’ve ever lived, how it felt to be there. What made that place different or special, beautiful or terrible? What did you see or eat there? How did it smell? What did you pass on your way home?
Next Week's Prompt: Find a portrait painting online and assume the voice of that person and imagine a backstory for your "other self." How does it feel to be looked at all the time? Is there anything in the background of the painting that may offer a glimpse into this other person’s life you’re trying to imagine? Lose your self and let your imagination take off.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Prisoner Express creates an opportunity for incarcerated men and women to get information, education and a public forum for creative self-expression through books. Fourteen poets from the program were featured in this summer's issue of Rattle. We'll talk to Gary Fine, the founder of the program, as well as Elizabeth S. Wolf, who's Rattle Chapbook Prize-winning book Did You Know? inspired hundreds of prisoners to write their own chapbooks and encouraged us to participate, too.
Find more at: https://prisonerexpress.org/
September 6th, 6pm CST SpoFest event with guest author Elizabeth S. Wolf: The link to the Zoom registration is provided inside the FB event page details. Sign up to read in our open mic, and to enter your name in our book raffle! https://www.facebook.com/events/1105419076847302/
Find Elizabeth's new book at:: https://kelsaybooks.com/products/a-collection-of-partings
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a snippet of conversation you overhear this week.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about every place you’ve ever lived, how it felt to be there. What made that place different or special, beautiful or terrible? What did you see or eat there? How did it smell? What did you pass on your way home?
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Cati Porter is the author of ten books and chapbooks, including her newest, Novel, a chapbook from Bamboo Dart Press. Her work has appeared in So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, as winner of their annual poetry competition, as well as many others including Rattle, Verse Daily, Salon.com, Contrary, Shark Reef, West Trestle, and Pratik. She is the founder of poetry journal Poemeleon, and lives in Inland Southern California with her family where she directs Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit.
Find more at: https://www.catiporter.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write about a time you were a stranger in a strange land.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a snippet of conversation you overhear this week.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Raquel Franco is a wife, mother, friend, sister, daughter and author. Her work has been featured in Thought Catalog, Harness Magazine and Rattle Magazine. She is the author of poetry collections, Keep Me Wild, This Woman is Still Girl and When the Bee Stings. She is also featured in the poetry compilation, Crown Anthology, that includes over 100 widely known Instagram artists.
Find more at: https://www.raquelfranco.co/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write an obituary for an inanimate object or idea.
Next Week's Prompt: Write about a time you were a stranger in a strange land.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Heather Altfeld has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University with majors in both Anthropology and Creative Writing, and an MFA in Poetry from the California State MFA consortium. She teaches in the Honors Program and for the Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities at California State University, Chico. Heather's second book of poems, Post-Mortem was selected by Eric Pankey for the 2019 Orison Prize, and is now available for order through Orison Books.
Find more at: https://www.heatheraltfeld.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Choose a local news article. Follow Anna M. Evan’s process from The Quarantina Chronicles: Make a word cloud from the text. Write a tritina using the three most common words as its line endings.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write an obituary for an inanimate object or idea.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Anna M. Evans is author of six books of poetry, most recently Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic and The Quarantina Chronicles. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award. She currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County.
Find more at: http://www.annamevans.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about the movie you've seen the most often.
Next Week's Prompt: Choose a local news article. Follow Anna M. Evan’s process from The Quarantina Chronicles: Make a word cloud from the text. Write a tritina using the three most common words as its line endings.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Troy Jollimore is the author of four books of poetry and three books of philosophy, as well as numerous articles, essays, and reviews. His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for 2006. His third, Syllabus of Errors, appeared on the New York Times' list of the best books of poetry published in 2015. His most recent, Earthly Delights was published last year by Princeton University Press. He is currently a Professor in the Philosophy Department at California State University, Chico.
Find more at: https://www.troyjollimore.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a canzone that confesses something.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about the movie you've seen the most frequently.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Alexis Sears's first book, Out of Order, won the the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was just published by Autumn House Press. Alexis received her BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has been widely published, including in Rattle's Poets Respond last month with her "Heartbreak Ghazal." She was a scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2019. Currently, she teaches 9th grade English in Oakland, California.
Find more at: https://www.alexissears.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt (from Katie Bickham): Take any abstraction like sorrow, envy, loneliness, desire, homesickness, hope, etc. and make that your title. Then the body of the poem is simply a description of that abstraction using ONLY concrete images and stories. Three great examples are Anne Sexton's "Courage," Stephen Dunn's "Tenderness," and Jane Kenyon's "Happiness."
Next Week's Prompt: Write a canzone that confesses something.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Katie Bickham's second book of poetry, Mouths Open to Name Her, is now available from LSU Press. It was selected by former Louisiana Poet Laureate Ava Leavell-Haymon as part of the Barataria Poetry Series. Her debut collection, The Belle Mar (Pleiades 2015), won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Katie is the recipient of The New Millenium Poetry Prize, The Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize from Pleaides Press, The Missouri Review Editor's Prize, and Rattle's Reader's Choice Award for "The Blades." Katie teaches creative writing at Bossier Parish Community College in Bossier City, Louisiana.
Find more at: http://www.katiebickham.net/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt (from Mark Gibbons): Write a poem titled, “If This Were a _______ Poem” (insert some known artist or character: Charlie Chaplin, Madonna, Jackson Pollack, Miles Davis, Isadora Duncan, Prince, Hemingway, etc.), as in Mark Gibbons' “If This Were a Sam Shepard Poem.”
Next Week's Prompt (from Katie Bickham): Take any abstraction like sorrow, envy, loneliness, desire, homesickness, hope, etc. and make that your title. Then the body of the poem is simply a description of that abstraction using ONLY concrete images and stories. Three great examples are Anne Sexton's "Courage," Stephen Dunn's "Tenderness," and Jane Kenyon's "Happiness."
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
After a week off due to a forest fire, the Rattlecast is back online!
Montana Poet Laureate Mark Gibbons is the author of nine books and two chapbooks of poetry, most recently In the Weeds. He’s edited two poetry collections for Drumlummon Institute and is the editor of the Montana Poets Series for FootHills Publishing. For four decades, Gibbons has taught poetry to a variety of citizens in Montana from one-room schools to colleges to the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs. He lives in Missoula with his wife and continues to teach with the Missoula Writing Collaborative.
Find more at: https://gibbonspoetry.com/
Learn more about NFT poetry at KHDM's website: https://www.thenftpoetrygallery.com/
Or follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/katie_dozier
Note: Cati Porter's episode has been rescheduled for August 15th.
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: The coal miner descends.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem titled, “If This Were a _______ Poem” (insert some known artist or character: Charlie Chaplin, Madonna, Jackson Pollack, Miles Davis, Isadora Duncan, Prince, Hemingway, etc.), as in Mark Gibbons' “If This Were a Sam Shepard Poem.”
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Campbell McGrath is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems, and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in scores of literary journals and anthologies, as well as the New Yorker, Atlantic Magazine, Harper's and the New York Times. McGrath's writing has been recognized with some of the most prestigious awards in American letters, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award." He lives with his wife in Miami Beach, and teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University.
Find more at: https://www.campbellmcgrath.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: May is National Photography Month. Write a poem inspired by a photograph of your own, and share the photo along with the poem.
Next Week's Prompt: The coal miner descends.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Nancy Miller Gomez's chapbook, Punishment, was published as part of the Rattle chapbook series. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2021, The New Ohio Review, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. A failed waitress, she has worked as a stable hand, an attorney, and a television producer. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz County jails. She grew up in Kansas, but currently lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Find more information at: https://www.nancymillergomez.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a waltmarie (https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/waltmarie-poetic-forms).
Next Week’s Prompt: May is National Photography Month. Write a poem inspired by a photograph of your own, and share the photo along with the poem.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Alexis V. Jackson is a Philadelphia-born, San Diego-based writer and teacher whose work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Jubilat, The Amistad, La Libreta, Solstice Literary Magazine, and 805 Lit among others. She is a 2021 finalist for the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Erica Hunt selected Jackson’s debut collection, My Sisters’ Country, as second-place winner of Kore Press Institute’s 2019 Poetry Prize. She has served as a reader for several publications, including Callaloo and Bomb Magazine. Jackson has lectured in the University of San Diego’s English Department. She has also taught poetry at her alma mater, Messiah University.
Find more information at: https://www.alexisvjackson.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Your earliest childhood memory.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a waltmarie (https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/waltmarie-poetic-forms).
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Mike White has published two poetry collections, How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017). His work can be found in magazines including Ploughshares, Poetry, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review. His is winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize, the Washington Prize, and Rattle's 2010 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. Originally from Canada, he now lives in Salt Lake City and teaches at the University of Utah.
Find his most recent book here: https://waywiser-press.com/product/addendum-to-a-miracle/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: On the elevator, a stranger says something unexpected.
Next Week’s Prompt: Your earliest childhood memory.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Chris Anderson was the featured interviewee in our Poets of Faith issue, Rattle #45. Anderson is a recently retired professor of English at Oregon State University, a poet, a retreat leader, and a Catholic deacon. He is the author, co-author, or editor of over a dozen books, including books of literary criticism, textbooks, a book of essays, a memoir, and two books of poetry. His most recent book, Light When It Comes, is a mixture of homilies and poems. His weekly homilies often include poetry and are available by email subscription on his website.
For more, visit: https://deaconchrisanderson.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a demi-sonnet.
Next Week’s Prompt: On the elevator, a stranger says something unexpected.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Erin Murphy is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Human Resources, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; Taxonomies, a collection of demi-sonnets, a form she devised (2022); and Assisted Living (2018). Her most recent edited anthologies are Bodies of Truth, a collection of narrative medicine essays (University of Nebraska Press), and Creating Nonfiction (SUNY Press), both of which won Gold Medals in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards. She is Professor of English and creative writing at the Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College and serves as the poetry editor of The Summerset Review. She was also our 2021 Readers' Choice Award winner for "The Internet of Things."
For more, check out her website at: http://www.erin-murphy.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on a classic novel.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a demi-sonnet.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children’s books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book of poetry, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, came out in 2011, and her third book, Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin, appeared in 2016. Harrington’s children’s books have won many awards and citations, including a listing among Time magazine’s top 10 children’s books. Harrington has worked as a public librarian and now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois.
For more, check out her website at: https://janiceharrington.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Let’s write a poem about one (or each!) of the 12 Jungian archetypes. The first archetype is “the artist.”
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem based on a classic novel.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Kate Gale is co-founder and managing editor of Red Hen Press, editor of the Los Angeles Review, and she teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction and in the Ashland, Ohio MFA Program. She is author of seven books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press in 2014, and Echo Light from Red Mountain in 2014 and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis, which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee. Her newest book, The Loneliest Girl, was just published by University of New Mexico Press.
For more, check out her website at: https://kategale.com/
In the first hour, we're joined by special guest George Bilgere, returning to share a pair of poems from his new book, Central Air. http://www.georgebilgere.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: An aphorism is a concise statement that contains a bit of wisdom or wit about life, such as “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” or “Honesty is the best policy.” Write a poem that is either based on an aphorism or contains one or more aphorisms.
Next Week's Prompt: Let’s write a poem about one (or each!) of the 12 Jungian archetypes. The first archetype is “the artist.”
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
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Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry: Coffin Honey, Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His poetry has appeared in Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry and his poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editor's Prize, the Midwest Book Award, the ForeWord INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. He teaches creative writing, American literature, and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
For more, check out his website at: http://www.todddavispoet.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: A woman walks down a dirt road late at night.
Next Week’s Prompt: An aphorism is a concise statement that contains a bit of wisdom or wit about life, such as “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” or “Honesty is the best policy.” Write a poem that is either based on an aphorism or contains one or more aphorisms.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose is winner of the 2021 Rattle Chapbook Prize for Imago, Dei, which was included for subscribers with the spring issue of Rattle. Her poetry and prose appear in The Atlantic, The Sun, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Weekly Humorist, Mom Egg Review, and other journals and collections. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is also the author of the chapbook Wild Things (Main Street Rag, 2021). A professor of English, her writing and scholarship focus on myths of gender and sex in literature and popular culture. She also facilitates writing-as-therapy workshops for breast cancer survivors in Rochester, New York, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and five rescue animals.
For more, check out her website at: https://www.elizabethjohnstonambrose.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about food or drink.
Next Week’s Prompt: A woman walks down a dirt road late at night.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Kim Stafford is a writer and teacher in Oregon, and founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College. His poetry titles include A Gypsy’s History of the World (Copper Canyon Press) and Wild Honey, Tough Salt (Red Hen Press). He has published a biography, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (Graywolf Press), We Got Here Together (a children’s book from Harcourt-Brace), and a book about writing and teaching: The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft (University of Georgia Press). His books have received Pacific Northwest Booksellers awards, and a Citation for Excellence from the Western States Book Awards. He co-founded the annual Fishtrap Writers Gathering in Oregon and teaches regularly at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle. Kim's most recent book is Singer Come from Afar (Red Hen Press).
For more, check out his website at: https://www.kimstaffordpoet.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about something you were wrong about.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem about food or drink.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Susan Vespoli lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where she relies on the power of writing to stay sane. She’s taught Montessori preschoolers and ENG101 to community college students, owned a school, delivered newspapers, bicycled up a mountain, rehabbed a few extreme fixer-upper houses, and currently facilitates virtual writing circles on writers.com. Her work has been published in Rattle, Mom Egg Review, NASTY WOMEN POETS: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, Nailed Magazine, and other cool spots. Her new book, Blame it on the Serpent, opens all the windows and doors to shed light on her experience of loving offspring captured by the terrorist known as an opioid epidemic.
For more, check out her website at: https://susanvespoli.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a haibun. The haiku’s season is spring.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about something you were wrong about.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Kevin Clark’s Self-Portrait with Expletives won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Book Competition. His first full-length collection, In the Evening of No Warning, earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets. In spring 2020, Kevin was selected for a two-year appointment as poet laureate of San Luis Obispo County, California. Recipient of two teaching awards, Clark has written a textbook on writing poetry, The Mind’s Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry. Clark lives with his wife, Amy Hewes, on California’s central coast, where he continues to play hardball and city league softball. Stephen F. Austin University Press just published Kevin Clark’s third full-length collection, The Consecrations.
Find more at: https://kevinclarkpoetry.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about one of the seven wonders of the world: Great Pyramid of Giza, Colossus of Rhodes, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Lighthouse of Alexandria, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis. (This is the classic list; feel free to use an updated list that includes different wonders.)
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a haibun. The haiku’s season is spring.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Kashiana Singh is a management professional by job classification and a work practitioner by personal preference. Kashiana’s TEDx talk was dedicated to Work as Worship. Her poetry collection, Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words presents her voice as a participant and an observer. Kashiana’s latest full-length collection, Woman by the Door, is a knitted collage of poems rooted in lived experiences and saturated with the poet’s varied sensibilities and influences. Her poems have been published on various platforms including Poets Reading the News, Visual Verse, Oddball Magazine, Rattle #73, and elsewhere. Kashiana lives in Chicago and carries her various geographical homes within her poetry.
Find Kashiana's books and more at: https://kashiana.wordpress.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show.
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a descort poem. A descort is defined by its lack of predictability; no line in the poem should resemble any other line in terms of length and meter, and no lines should rhyme. In other words, each line should be unique.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem about one of the seven wonders of the world: Great Pyramid of Giza, Colossus of Rhodes, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Lighthouse of Alexandria, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis. (This is the classic list; feel free to use an updated list that includes different wonders.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
0:00 Welcome 1:10 Tatiana Dolgushina, “When War Makes a Child” 11:10 Featured Guest: Kashiana Singh 1:12:02 Kim Stafford, "Five Poems for Ukraine" 1:24:38 Open Lines 1 1:34:45 Brian Beatty, "Winter Can Go Away" 1:37:35 Open Lines 2 1:55:35 Tim's & Megan's Prompt Poems 1:59:43 Open Lines 3 2:25:10 Sciku, Next Week's Prompt & Guest
Roberta Beary identifies as gender-expansive, and writes to connect with the disenfranchised, to let them know they are not alone. Her work appears in Rattle, 100 Word Story, Cultural Weekly, and The New York Times. Her short poem collection, The Unworn Necklace, received a finalist award from Poetry Society of America. Her prose poem collection, Deflection, was named a National Poetry Month Best Pick by Washington Independent Review of Books. Her next haiku collection, Carousel, won the Snapshot Press manuscript book award and should be out by the end of 2022. She lives in County Mayo, Ireland with her husband Frank Stella.
Find Roberta's books and more at: https://robertabeary.com/
Find Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's Worlds Together Worlds Apart readings here: https://www.facebook.com/WTWA2020/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: It’s the year 2222. What kind of world do we live in? Write a poem about it.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a descort poem. A descort is defined by its lack of predictability; no line in the poem should resemble any other line in terms of length and meter, and no lines should rhyme. In other words, each line should be unique.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Marjorie Saiser is the author of six books of poetry and co-editor of two anthologies. Her work has been published in American Life in Poetry, Nimrod, Rattle.com, PoetryMagazine.com, RHINO, Chattahoochee Review, Poetry East, Poet Lore, and other journals. She has received the WILLA Award and nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her latest book is a collection of new and selected poems, The Track the Whales Make.
Find Marjorie's books and more at: http://www.poetmarge.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about one of your ancestors.
Next Week's Prompt: It’s the year 2222. What kind of world do we live in? Write a poem about it.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Zilka Joseph was awarded a Zell Fellowship and the Elsie Choy Lee Scholarship from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Daily, The Writers’ Chronicle, Frontier Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, and other publications. Sharp Blue Search of Flame, her book of poems published by Wayne State University Press, was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book Award. In Our Beautiful Bones, her most recent book, has had been nominated for a Pushcart, A PEN, and a Michigan Notable Book Award. She was born in Mumbai, lived in Kolkata, and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work is influenced by Eastern and Western cultures and by her Bene Israel roots. She teaches creative writing workshops, and is a freelance editor and manuscript advisor. She is dedicated to coaching, lifting up every writer she works with, and creating a unique community of writers/students wherever she lives and teaches.
Find Zilka's books and more at: http://www.zilkajoseph.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about an act of rebellion.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about one of your ancestors.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
William Logan writes poetry and a little criticism. His most recent books are Rift of Light (poems, Penguin, 2017) and Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods (essays, Columbia University Press, 2018). His reviews, when there are reviews, appear in the New York Times Book Review, the New Criterion, Poetry, Hudson Review, Hopkins Review, and other journals. He teaches poetry workshops and the occasional graduate course in the craft of poetry. Logan received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence, and the Allen Tate Prize.
Find more on his most recent book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/556232/rift-of-light-by-william-logan/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a Lennon lyric set in winter.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about an act of rebellion.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Lester Graves Lennon is a poet, editor, and investment banker. His first book of poetry, The Upward Curve of Earth and Heavens, is found in more than 70 public and university libraries including U.C. Berkeley, Yale, Harvard and Oxford. His second book, My Father Was a Poet, was published in the spring of 2013. His third book, Lynchings: Postcards from America, has just been published. Lester is the Poetry Editor of Rosebud Magazine, a founding member of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Poet Laureate Task Force, a board member of the Community of Writers, and emeritus member of the West Chester University Poetry Center Advisory Board.
Find more on his new book here: https://www.wordtechweb.com/lennon_postcards.html
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem with one word per line.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a Lennon lyric set in winter.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Bill Glose is an award-winning writer whose honors include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Award, the Dateline Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Heroes' Voices Award for Veteran's Poetry. Bill is the author of five books of poetry—Postscript to War (Main Street Rag Press, 2020), Virginia Walkabout (San Francisco Bay Press, 2018), Personal Geography (David Robert Books, 2016), Half a Man (FutureCycle Press, 2013), and The Human Touch (San Francisco Bay Press, 2007)—and two chapbooks, Child of the Movies (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Memory of Spring (Orchard Street Press, 2021). He was also the editor of the story anthology, Ten Twisted Tales (San Francisco Bay Press, 2008). From 2003 to 2020, Bill was a contributing editor with Virginia Living and a regular contributor to other magazines. He still writes freelance articles, appears frequently as a featured speaker on literary craft, and serves as a judge in writing contests.
Find more info and all the books here: http://www.billglose.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Make the title of your poem a question and the body of your poem the answer (or the other way around!).
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem with one word per line.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Marcela Sulak returns to share her work as a translator! Marcela has published four titles with Black Lawrence Press–three poetry collections, including City of Skypapers (2021), Decency (2015) and Immigrant (2010), as well as her lyric memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds (2020). She’s co-edited with Jacqueline Kolosov the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Sulak, who translates from the Hebrew, Czech, and French, is a 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, and her fourth book-length translation of poetry: Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (University of Texas Press). Her essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and Gulf Coast online, among others. She coordinates the poetry track of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, where she is an associate professor in American Literature. She also edits The Ilanot Review and hosts the TLV.1 Radio podcast, Israel in Translation.
Find more info and all the books here: http://www.marcelasulak.com/ As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write an echo verse poem by repeating the end syllable of each line, either verbatim or as a rhyme or slant rhyme. Robert Lee Brewer offers excellent examples of this form on the Writer’s Digest website.
Next Week's Prompt: Make the title of your poem a question and the body of your poem the answer (or the other way around!).
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Grant Quackenbush grew up skateboarding in San Diego. He received his MFA from Boston University and his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His poems have appeared in Rattle 69, 73, and the Ekphrastic Challenge. This is his first book.
For more, visit: http://pinyon-publishing.com/offtopic.html
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a place you’ve always wanted to visit. Be as specific as you can (i.e., the Louvre rather than just Paris, France.)
Next Week's Prompt: Write an echo verse poem by repeating the end syllable of each line, either verbatim or as a rhyme or slant rhyme. Robert Lee Brewer offers excellent examples of this form on the Writer’s Digest website.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Amanda Newell won the 2021 Rattle Chapbook Prize for I Will Pass Even to Acheron. Her poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Gargoyle, Plume, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program, she has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and The Frost Place, and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her first full-length collection, Postmortem Say, is forthcoming in 2023 from Červená Barva Press.
For more, visit: https://www.amandanewellpoet.com
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a moment of 2021 you’ll never forget.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a place you’ve always wanted to visit. Be as specific as you can (i.e., the Louvre rather than just Paris, France.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
José A. Alcántara lives in western Colorado. He has worked as a bookseller, mailman, commercial fisherman, baker, carpenter, studio photographer, door-to-door salesman, and math teacher. His poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Rattle, RHINO, The American Journal of Poetry, and the anthologies, 99 Poems for the 99%, and America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience. The Bitten World, his first poetry collection, has just been published by Tebot Bach.
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
Find the book: http://tebotbach.org/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about the winter solstice.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a moment of 2021 you’ll never forget.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor and translator. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry. Her work features in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collections Peripheries (Cyberhex 2015), Pointillism (Copper Coin 2017) and Date Palms (City Press 2017) and a biography of her mother, titled Shehnaz; A Tragic True Tale of Royalty, Glamour and Heartbreak (Penguin Random House 2019). Her latest collection of poetry Open Zero, published in September 2021 from Yoda Press.
Find more here: https://www.sophianaz.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a tricube, a form invented by Phillip Larrea that consists of three stanzas made up of three lines where each line contains three syllables.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about the winter solstice.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
A native of Detroit, Jim Daniels currently lives in Pittsburgh and is the Thomas S. Baker University Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon. His recent books include Rowing Inland (Wayne State University Press, 2017) and The Perp Walk. He also coedited the anthology RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. His most recent book, Gun/Shy, has just been published by Wayne State University Press. Jim Daniels has appeared in five issues of Rattle, most recently issue #57.
Find Gun/Shy here: https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/gunshy
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Take a walk around your neighborhood and write a poem about it. (Alternatives to walking: Take a drive, sit on your porch, or look out your window.)
Next Week's Prompt: Write a tricube, a form invented by Phillip Larrea that consists of three stanzas made up of three lines where each line contains three syllables.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, essays, and fiction. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, winner of the All-India Poetry Competition, and her first book, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and a Firecracker Award. Her fourth collection of poetry, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books), has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry 2021 and was just published in the United States by Copper Canyon Press. She lives in Tamil Nadu, India.
Find the book and more at: tishanidoshi.com
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Coin a word or a phrase, then make the the title of your poem.
Next Week's Prompt: Take a walk around your neighborhood and write a poem about it. (Alternatives to walking: Take a drive, sit on your porch, or look out your window.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He has received many honors for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work appears frequently in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize volumes. Kirby is the author of numerous books, including The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in poetry. His Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll was named one of Booklist's Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010, and the Times Literary Supplement called it "a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense." His most recent books are Help Me, Information and The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them.
Find the book and more at: https://english.fsu.edu/faculty/david-kirby
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a snake or serpent.
Next Week's Prompt: Coin a word or a phrase, then make the the title of your poem.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, and most recently, Daughters, a series of persona poems in the voices of daughters of various characters from folklore, mythology, and popular culture. Solastalgia, a collection of poems exploring climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2023. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection.
Find the book and more at: https://brittneycorrigan.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: “A guy walks into a bar” is one of the most common joke intros. Write a poem that starts with that line. (It does not have to be a humorous poem.)
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem about a snake or serpent.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Ananda Lima’s poetry collection Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) was the winner of the Hudson Prize. She is also the author of the chapbooks Vigil (Get Fresh Books, 2021), Tropicália (Newfound, 2021, winner of the Newfound Prose Prize), Amblyopia (Bull City Press, 2020), and Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the Vella Chapbook Prize). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She has served as the poetry judge for the AWP Kurt Brown Prize, as staff at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program. She has been awarded the inaugural Work-In-Progress Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers, for her fiction manuscript-in-progress. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.
Find the book and more at: https://www.anandalima.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write an apology poem.
Nextx Week's Prompt: “A guy walks into a bar” is one of the most common joke intros. Write a poem that starts with that line. (It does not have to be a humorous poem.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Clemonce Heard was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the winner of the 2020 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Major Jackson. His poetry collection, Tragic City, which investigates the events of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press in October 2021. Heard’s work has appeared or is forthcoming from Obsidian, The Missouri Review, Cimarron Review, Iron Horse, World Literature Today, Poetry, Rattle, Ruminate, and elsewhere. He earned a BFA in graphic communications from Northwestern State University, and an MFA in creative writing from Oklahoma State University. Heard was a recipient of a 2018-2019 Tulsa Artist Fellowship and was the 2019-2020 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, and serves as the Sala Diaz artist-in-residence.
Find the book and more at: https://www.clemonceheard.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: This was a lot of fun last time, so let’s do another random street view poem. Randomstreetview.com is a site that randomly generates photographs of streets all over the world. Find a photo that speaks to you and write a poem about it.
Next Week's Prompt: Write an apology poem.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Ernest Hilbert’s debut poetry collection Sixty Sonnets (2009) was described by X. J. Kennedy as “maybe the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America.” His other books include All of You on the Good Earth (2013); Caligulan (2015), which was selected as the winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize; and Last One Out (2019). Hilbert currently keeps a heavily-encrypted dark web poetry site called Cocytus and a more public website to promote emerging poets called E-Verse Radio. Hilbert graduated with a doctorate in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, where he edited the Oxford Quarterly. Hilbert later served as poetry editor of Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City and editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, published by the American Poetry Fund in Washington DC. He works as an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, Keeper of the Mediterranean Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and their son, Ian.
Find the book and more at: https://www.ernesthilbert.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a spooky poem for Halloween.
Next Week's Prompt: This was a lot of fun last time, so let’s do another random street view poem. Randomstreetview.com is a site that randomly generates photographs of streets all over the world. Find a photo that speaks to you and write a poem about it.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, Rattle, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and Nashville and now lives in San Francisco. She completed her Ph.D. in Biomedical Science (Cancer Biology) from UCSF, where she studied novel drug candidates in preclinical models of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. She currently works with life science and biopharma groups as a competitive intelligence manager, with a focus on ovarian cancer.
Find the book and more at: https://jqiwriter.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: A ballad is a music-based poem that tells a story. This form isn’t especially complicated but it does have very specific requirements. Webexhibits.org has great instructions on how to write your own ballad. (If you google “webexhibits” and “ballad,” webexhibit.org’s “Make Your Own Ballad” page will be the first hit.) “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Tennyson and “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer are examples of ballad poems.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a spooky poem for Halloween.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Joseph Fasano is a writer and educator. He studied mathematics and astrophysics at Harvard University before changing his course of study and earning a degree in philosophy, with a focus on philosophy of language after Wittgenstein. He did his graduate study in poetry at Columbia University, where he now teaches. Fasano is the author of the novel The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the "20 Best Small Press Books of 2020." His books of poetry are The Crossing (Cider Press Review, 2018), praised by Ilya Kaminsky for its "lush drive to live, even in the darkest moments"; Vincent (2015); and Fugue for Other Hands (2013), which won the Cider Press Review Book Award. A winner of the Rattle Poetry Prize, he serves on the Editorial Board of Alice James Books, and he is the Founder of the Poem for You Series, a digital space offering recitations of listeners' favorite poems by request. He is also a songwriter, and his songs and performances can be found on his social media platforms.
Find these books and more at: http://josephfasano.net/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem in second person. (One of the most famous poems written in second person: “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.)
Next Week's Prompt: A ballad is a music-based poem that tells a story. This form isn’t especially complicated but it does have very specific requirements. Webexhibits.org has great instructions on how to write your own ballad. (If you google “webexhibits” and “ballad,” webexhibit.org’s “Make Your Own Ballad” page will be the first hit.) “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Tennyson and “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer are examples of ballad poems.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Mark Jarman is the author of eleven books of poetry. The Heronry is his most recent. He has also published two books of essays and reviews, most recently Dailiness. His book Questions for Ecclesiastes (Story Line Press, 1997) won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Jarman's other awards include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2011, he received the Balcones Poetry Prize for Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems. He recently retired as Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, the soprano Amy Jarman.
Find these books and more at: https://www.markjarmanpoetandcritic.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem without using articles (a, an, the).
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem in second person. (One of the most famous poems written in second person: “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Marissa Davis is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky, now residing in Brooklyn, New York. Her poetry has appeared or will soon appear in Sundog Lit, Poem-A-Day, Glass, Frontier Poetry, Nimrod, Great River Review, New South, Southeast Review, and Mississippi Review, among others. Her translations are published or forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Mid-American Review, The Common, American Chordata, and RHINO. Her chapbook, My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak (Jai-Alai Books, 2020) was selected by Danez Smith for Cave Canem’s 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Prize. Davis holds an MFA from New York University.
Find more the book and more at: https://www.marissa-davis.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: “To Autumn” by John Keats is one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language. It is richly imagistic and descriptive. Write your own ode to autumn.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem without using articles (a, an, the).
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Deborah P Kolodji is the California regional coordinator for the Haiku Society of America and former moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group. The former president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, Kolodji is also is a member of the Haiku Poets of Northern California , the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, Haiku Canada, the British Haiku Society, and the California State Poetry Society. Author of four chapbooks of poetry, her first full-length book of haiku and senryu is Highway of Sleeping Towns, from Shabda Press. Debbie has published more than 1000 haiku in publications such as Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Bottle Rockets, A Hundred Gourds, Acorn, Rattle, and Mayfly, as well as speculative poetry in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and others. Her work has been anthologized in such publications as The Rhysling Anthology, Red Moon Anthology, Dwarf Stars, Aftershocks: Poetry of Recovery, New Resonance 4, and The Nebula Awards Showcase: 2015. Debbie co-organized the 2013 Haiku North America conference aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, and joined Haiku North America as a director in 2016.
Find more the book and more at: http://www.deborahpkolodji.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: You’ve been driving for hours on a long, empty stretch of highway. It’s miles and miles of nothing but desert landscape--no rest stops, no gas stations. Just when you’re starting to think you’ll never see civilization again, a building comes into view. What is it? Write a poem about it.
Next Week’s Prompt: “To Autumn” by John Keats is one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language. It is richly imagistic and descriptive. Write your own ode to autumn.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast 110 features Vince Gotera and his new book, The Coolest Month.
Vince Gotera is a Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa where he served as Editor of the North American Review (2000-2016). After that, he served as editor of Star*Line, the print journal of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. His collections of poems include Dragonfly, Ghost Wars, Fighting Kite, and the upcoming Pacific Crossing.
Find more on Vince at his website: https://vincegotera.blogspot.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem that contains an anagram. An anagram is created by rearranging the letters of a certain word or phrase to make another word or phrase—for example, an anagram of “anagram” is “nag a ram.” Bonus points if the title of your poem is part of the anagram.
Next Week's Prompt: You’ve been driving for hours on a long, empty stretch of highway. It’s miles and miles of nothing but desert landscape--no rest stops, no gas stations. Just when you’re starting to think you’ll never see civilization again, a building comes into view. What is it? Write a poem about it.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Bonus Links
Register for Tim's editor interview with Lit Mag News on Friday 9/17 here: https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/save-the-dates-upcoming-editor-interviews
Register for Rattle's Poetry Day in Wrightwood here: https://www.wrightwoodarts.com/poetryday/
Find the Renaissance Heart performance featuring Francesca Bell and Douglas Manuel here (October 2nd in Los Angeles): https://stickfigureproductions.live/
Gil Arzola’s first book of poetry, Prayers of Little Consequence, was published in 2019 by Passager, who named him their Poet of the Year. His story “Losers Walk” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018, and other work has appeared in Dash, Palabra, Whetstone, The Tipton Review, The Elysian Review, Crosslimb, and Slab, among others. His chapbook, The Death of a Migrant Worker, is included for all Rattle subscribers with the fall issue.
Find the chapbook here: https://www.rattle.com/chapbooks/the-death-of-a-migrant-worker/
Find his first book here: https://www.passagerbooks.com/prayers-of-little-consequence-by-gilbert-arzola/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem set in a time period of at least one hundred years ago.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that contains an anagram. An anagram is created by rearranging the letters of a certain word or phrase to make another word or phrase—for example, an anagram of “anagram” is “nag a ram.” Bonus points if the title of your poem is part of the anagram.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Brendan Constantine was born in Los Angeles, the second child of actors Michael Constantine and Julianna McCarthy. An ardent supporter of Southern California’s poetry communities and one of its most recognized poets, he has served as a teacher of poetry in local schools and colleges since 1995. His first collection, Letters to Guns, was released in February 2009 from Red Hen Press to wide acclaim. This was followed in 2011 by Birthday Girl With Possum, under the performance based publisher Write Bloody, and established Mr. Constantine as a poet equally at home on the page and the stage. His work can be found in many of the nation’s standards, including Poetry, Tin House, Best American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Virginia Quarterly, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Field, Chautauqua, and Poetry Daily. His most recent collections are Dementia, My Darling (2016) from Red Hen Press and Bouncy Bounce (2018), a chapbook from Blue Horse Press.
He currently teaches creative writing at the Windward School. In addition, he brings poetry workshops to veterans, hospitals, foster care centers, & shelters for the homeless. He is also very proud of his work with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project. Since 2017, he has been working with speech pathologist Michael Biel to develop the first poetry workshop for people dealing with Aphasia.
Brendan has appeared in four issues of Rattle and was interviewed in issue #52.
Find more info and all the books here: https://brendanconstantine.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: A portmanteau is a blend of two words that combines their meaning. For example, brunch, spork, and sitcom are portmanteaus. Write a poem containing one or more portmanteaus. (Feel free to make up your own!)
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem set in a time period of at least one hundred years ago.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Marcela Sulak has published four titles with Black Lawrence Press–three poetry collections, including City of Skypapers (2021), Decency (2015) and Immigrant (2010), as well as her lyric memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds (2020). She’s co-edited with Jacqueline Kolosov the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Sulak, who translates from the Hebrew, Czech, and French, is a 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, and her fourth book-length translation of poetry: Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (University of Texas Press). Her essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and Gulf Coast online, among others. She coordinates the poetry track of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, where she is an associate professor in American Literature. She also edits The Ilanot Review and hosts the TLV.1 Radio podcast, Israel in Translation.
Find more info and all the books here: http://www.marcelasulak.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about unrequited love.
Next Week's Prompt: A portmanteau is a blend of two words that combines their meaning. For example, brunch, spork, and sitcom are portmanteaus. Write a poem containing one or more portmanteaus. (Feel free to make up your own!)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Edison Jennings lives in the southwestern corner of Virginia and works as a Head Start bus driver. He served thirteen years active duty in the Navy, and after separation he completed his education and began teaching and writing. His poetry has appeared in several journals and anthologies. He is also the author of three chapbooks, Reckoning, Small Measures, and A Letter to Greta. His first full-length book is Intentional Fallacies.
Find the book here: https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/intentional-fallacies-poems-by-edison-jennings
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: I love the way Joni Mitchell’s song “Circle Game” uses the image of a carousel to illustrate the passing of childhood. Choose a symbol we associate with childhood innocence--a teddy bear, a jump rope, etc.—and let your poem unfold from there.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about unrequited love.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions).
She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. Maria Gillan is Bartle Professor and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published more than twenty books of and about poetry, and has edited four anthologies. Her most recent book is When the Stars Were Still Visible (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2021)
Find more info and all of Maria's books here: http://www.mariagillan.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: At the library.
Next Week's Prompt: I love the way Joni Mitchell’s song “Circle Game” uses the image of a carousel to illustrate the passing of childhood. Choose a symbol we associate with childhood innocence--a teddy bear, a jump rope, etc.—and let your poem unfold from there.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast 104 features Roy Bentley and his new book, Hillbilly Guilt.
Roy Glenn Bentley is an Appalachian-American poet and university creative writing professor. The lives of the poor in America are the primary focus of his work. He has been published in poetry journals as well as in four books of poetry and ten chapbooks. He currently resides in Pataskala, Ohio, in the USA.
Roy Bentley's poems have appeared in Blackbird, Shenandoah, Rattle, The Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner--as well as many other notable journals and magazines. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Ohio Arts Council. Hillbilly Guilt is the winner of the Willow Run Poetry Book Award.
Find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Guilt-Roy-Bentley/dp/0999491563/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: A nonce form is one you make up yourself. Make up your own nonce form and write a poem using it. Be sure to include a short explanation of the rules.
Next Week's Prompt: At the library.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast 103 features frequent contributor Jack Ridl and his two most recent books, Saint Peter and the Goldfinch and Practicing to Walk Like a Heron. As always, we'll start with a brief look at current events with Poets Respond Live, and the second hour will feature open lines.
Jack Ridl taught at Hope from 1971 until retiring in 2006. He is the author of several collections of poetry, and has also published more than 300 poems in journals and has work included in numerous anthologies. He has given readings of his work and led workshops at colleges, universities, art colonies and other venues around the country. More than 85 of Ridl’s former students are now published authors, and nine of his students appeared in “25 under 25,” in blind judging, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye. Ridl grew up in both the world of basketball where his father was a well-known head coach at Westminster College and the University of Pittsburgh, and the world of the circus, inherited from his mother’s family. Ridl lives a short walk from Douglas Beach, arguably the most beautiful of Lake Michigan’s disappearing public beaches, with his wife, the writer and artist Julie Ridl, and a few barely domesticated beasts. His daughter is the artist, Meridith Ridl.
Find the book and more on Jack here: https://ridl.wordpress.com/books/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: When the sun goes down at the county fair.
Next Week's Prompt: A nonce form is one you make up yourself. Make up your own nonce form and write a poem using it. Be sure to include a short explanation of the rules.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast 102 features long-time contributor Ace Boggess and hew new book, Escape Envy. As always, we'll start with a brief look at current events with Poets Respond Live, and the second hour will feature open lines.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including The Prisoners, Ultra Deep Field, and I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, as well as the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. He earned his B.A. from Marshall University and his J.D. from West Virginia University. He serves as Senior editor at The Adirondack Review and Associate Editor at The Evening Street Review. His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, J Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. His awards include the Robert Bausch Fiction Award and a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts. In addition, he was locked up for five years in the West Virginia prison system, an experience which has been the basis for much of his writing. He currently resides in Charleston, West Virginia.
Find the book and more on Ace here: https://aceboggess.wixsite.com/aceboggess
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem that explores a common argument you have (with yourself or someone else).
Next Week's Prompt: When the sun goes down at the county fair.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast ep. 101 features our first returning guest, Bro. Yao, and his new book, One Shoe Marching Towards Heaven. This week's episode will jump straight to the guest with Poets Respond Live and the open lines coming in the second hour.
Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III) is the former founder and co-owner of one of the nation’s largest African American Bookstores from 1993-2008, and currently works as an Assistant Professor at Bowie State University in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies. He is currently working on a book of essays called The Wuhan Soundtrack based on his experience living in Wuhan, China. He appeared on Rattlecast #12 with his first book, Inheritance. His most recent book is One Shoe Marching Towards Heaven.
Visit his blog at: http://freeblackspace.blogspot.com/
For find the new book here: https://africaworldpressbooks.com/one-shoe-marching-towards-heaven-by-bro-yao-hoke-s-glover-iii/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on, or containing, an idiom. If you need help finding an idiom, try the idiom generator at randomword.com/idiom.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that explores a common argument you have (with yourself or someone else).
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast ep. 100 features Alison Luterman and her newest book, In the Time of Great Fires. As always, the first half-hour is dedicated to Poets Respond Live.
Alison Luterman is a poet, essayist and playwright. Her books include the poetry collections In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press), Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press), The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press) See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions), and a collection of essays, Feral City (SheBooks). Luterman's plays include Saying Kaddish With My Sister, Hot Water, Glitter and Spew, Oasis, Touched, and the musicals, The Chain (with composer Loren Linnard), The Shyest Witch (with composer Richard Jennings, and song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark (with composer Sheela Ramesh).
Alison Luterman was raised in Massachusetts, the oldest of four children. She began writing poetry at the age of six or seven and has never stopped. Since 2000, she has taught Memoir and Poetry through The Writing Salon in Berkeley, California, as well as at Esalen and Omega Institutes, at the Great Mother Conference, and at poetry festivals and conferences around the country. She lives in a rambling old house in Oakland where she tries and fails to keep the cat from clawing the couch, and writes poems, essays, plays, and song lyrics.
For more on Alison Luterman, visit: https://www.alisonluterman.net/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem in which the speaker is aboard a moving train.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on, or containing, an idiom. If you need help finding an idiom, try the idiom generator at randomword.com/idiom.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast #99 features Tina Parker and her new book Lock Her Up. As always, the first half-hour is dedicated to Poets Respond Live.
Tina Parker is the author of three books of poetry. The poetry collection Mother May I and the poetry chapbook Another Offering were published in 2016. Her newest collection, Lock Her Up, is forthcoming from Accents Publishing. Tina’s work has received support from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Individual poems have been published in Appalachian Heritage, Still: The Journal, Pen+Brush, Rattle, and Literary Mama. She grew up in Bristol, VA, and now lives in Berea, KY.
For more on Tina Parker, visit: http://tina-parker.org/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on a folk tale or fairy tale.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem in which the speaker is aboard a moving train.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast #98 features Wyn Cooper, whose poem "Smoke" appears in the summer issue of Rattle. As always, the first half-hour will is Poets Respond Live.
Wyn Cooper has published five books of poetry, most recently Mars Poetica. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review, Five Points, Slate, and more than 100 other magazines. In 1993, "Fun," a poem from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow's Grammy-winning song "All I Wanna Do." Cooper has taught at the University of Utah, Bennington College, Marlboro College, and at The Frost Place. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation. He lives in Boston and works as a freelance editor.
For more on Wyn Cooper, visit: www.wyncooper.com
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Macro photography is the close-up, highly-detailed photography of small objects or organisms—common subjects include an insect wing or a blade of grass. Write a “macro poem.”
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem based on a folk tale or fairy tale.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast #97 features the former Utah Poet Laureate and Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist Lance Larsen. As always, the first half-hour will feature Poets Respond Live.
Born in Idaho, Lance Larsen was educated at Brigham Young University, where he earned both his BA and MA, and at the University of Houston, where he earned a PhD in literature and creative writing. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Erasable Walls (1998); In All Their Animal Brilliance (2005), winner of the Tampa Review Prize; Backyard Alchemy (2009), and What the Body Knows (2018). His poems touch on Mormon heritage while examining everyday encounters. Larsen has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2012, the governor of Utah appointed him the state poet laureate. He is a professor of English at Brigham Young University.
To order the book, visit: https://utampapress.org/product/what-the-body-knows
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: A pivotal moment in your childhood.
Next Week's Prompt: Macro photography is the close-up, highly-detailed photography of small objects or organisms—common subjects include an insect wing or a blade of grass. Write a “macro poem.”
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast #96 features the editor of Light poetry magazine, Melissa Balmain. As always, the first half-hour will feature Poets Respond Live.
Melissa Balmain is a humorist, journalist, and teacher. Since 2012 she has edited Light, the country's longest-running journal of light verse (founded in 1992 by John Mella). Balmain's poems have appeared in The American Bystander, American Life in Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, Literary Matters, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The New Criterion, The New Verse News, Poetry Daily, Rattle, The Spectator (UK), Verse Daily, The Washington Post, and many anthologies; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Weekly Humorist, and elsewhere. A former columnist for Success magazine and other publications, she's the author of a memoir, Just Us: Adventures of a Mother and Daughter (Faber and Faber). Balmain has received national honors for her journalism, including the National Society for Newspaper Columnists humorous columnist award and multiple Pulitizer Prize nominations. She teaches at the University of Rochester and lives nearby with her husband and two children. Her poetry collection Walking in on People was chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award. Her newest collection is The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy-Tale Reboots for Adults, illustrated by Ron Barrett (Humorist Books).
For more on the author, and to order the book, visit: https://www.melissabalmain.com/
Visit Light poetry magazine here: https://lightpoetrymagazine.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a a poem in which an inanimate object or concept is personified. (See “Mirror” by Sylvia Plath for a great example.)
Next Week's Prompt: A pivotal moment in your childhood.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast #95 features a contributor to last winter's issue, Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal, and her debut collection The Yak Dilemma. She'll join us at noon EDT, but we'll start with a half-hour of Poets Respond Live.
Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal was born in the Himalayan town of Palampur, India. She studied at St. Bede’s College, Shimla; Trinity College, Dublin; and Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, German and Italian, and have recently appeared in Ambit, Banshee, Gutter, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Jukebox, Poetry London, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Irish Times, The Lonely Crowd, The Pickled Body, The Tangerine and elsewhere. In 2018, she was one of the twelve poets selected for Poetry Ireland’s ‘Introductions’ series. She is the 2021 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent. The Yak Dilemma is her first full-length collection.
For more on the author, and to order the book, visit: https://www.supriyakaurdhaliwal.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a parasite—be as literal or figurative as you wish.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a a poem in which an inanimate object or concept is personified. (See “Mirror” by Sylvia Plath for a great example.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Segments: 3:03 Richard Westheimer: "An American Jew Fails to Make Sense of the Carnage in Gaza" 12:35 Poets Respond Live continues 30:00 Featured Guest: Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal 1:33:15 Open Lines
Rattlecast #94 features frequent contributor Kerrin McCadden and her new book, American Wake.
Kerrin McCadden is the author of American Wake, coming in March, 2021, from Black Sparrow Press. Her debut collection, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, won the Vermont Book Award and the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Keep This to Yourself, was awarded the Button Poetry Prize. McCadden has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and in such journals as American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She is associate director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching at The Frost Place and associate poetry editor at Persea Books. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Montpelier High School in Vermont and lives in South Burlington.
For more on the author, visit: https://www.kerrinmccadden.com
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Use the random article option on Wikipedia (go to Wikipedia.com and click on the “random article” link on the left-hand side of the page) and write a poem based on your results.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a parasite—be as literal or figurative as you wish.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast #93 features frequent contributor Martin Willitts Jr. and his new book, Harvest Time.
Martin Willitts Jr. is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He was nominated for 15 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Martin Willitts Jr. has 25 chapbooks including the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, The Wire Fence Holding Back the World (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 21 full-length collections including the Blue Light Award 2019, The Temporary World. His recent book is Unfolding Towards Love (Wipf and Stock, 2020). He is an editor for The Comstock Review, and he is judge for the New York State Fair Poetry Contest. His newest book, Harvest Time, was just published by Deerbrook Editions.
Buy Harvest Time here: https://www.deerbrookeditions.com/harvest-time/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a reverse poem—a poem with lines that can be read both forward and backward.
Next Week's Prompt: Use the random article option on Wikipedia (go to Wikipedia.com and click on the “random article” link on the left-hand side of the page) and write a poem based on your results.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattlecast #92 features frequent contributor Michael Mark.
Michael Mark’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, River Styx, Salamander, The Southern Review, The New York Times, The Sun, Verse Daily, Waxwing, American Life in Poetry, and other places. He was the recipient of the Anthony Hecht Scholarship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He’s the author of two books of stories, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). Michael Mark lives with his wife Lois in San Diego.
For more info on the poet, visit: http://www.michaeljmark.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: This Lithub article details the 32 “most iconic” poems in the English language. Read, or reread, a few and write a poem that replies to one of these works. https://lithub.com/the-32-most-iconic-poems-in-the-english-language/
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a reverse poem—a poem with lines that can be read both forward and backward.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #91 features Tanya Ko Hong and her latest book, The War Still Within: Poems of the Korean Diaspora.
Tanya Ko Hong (Hyonhye) is a poet, translator, and cultural curator who champions bilingual poetry and poets. Born and raised in South Korea, she immigrated to the US at the age of eighteen. She is the author of four books, most recently The War Still Within: Poems of the Korean Diaspora (KYSO Flash Press, 2019), and is the recipient of the Yun Doon-ju Korean-American Literature Award. Tanya has an MFA from Antioch University and is a Ph.D. student in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She lives in southern California with her husband and three children.
For more info on the poet, visit: https://www.tanyakohong.com/
Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Still-Within-Tanya-Hong-Hyonhye/dp/0998037567/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write an ekphrastic poem after one of the ten cards from Hermann Rorschach’s original 1921 inkblot test.
Next Week's Prompt: This Lithub article details the 32 “most iconic” poems in the English language. Read, or reread, a few and write a poem that replies to one of these works. https://lithub.com/the-32-most-iconic-poems-in-the-english-language/
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #90 features Janée J. Baugher and her new book on the creative process, The Ekphrastic Writer.
In addition to The Ekphrastic Writer, Baugher is the author of two ekphrastic poetry collections, Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010) and The Body’s Physics (Tebot Bach, 2010). Her writing has been published in journals such as Tin House, The Southern Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Nano Fiction, and The Writer’s Chronicle, and she’s read from her books at the Library of Congress. She regularly collaborates with choreographers, dancers, composers, and visual artists, and her work has been adapted for the stage and set to music at University of Cincinnati–Conservatory of Music, Contemporary Dance Theatre in Ohio, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Dance Now! Ensemble in Florida, The Salon at Justice Snow’s in Colorado, and University of North Carolina-Pembroke. Baugher teaches Creative Writing in Seattle, is the columnist at The Ekphrastic Review, and an assistant editor for the literary journal, Boulevard.
For more info on Janée, visit: https://www.janeebaugher.com/
Buy the book here: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/the-ekphrastic-writer/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem that starts and ends with the same line.
Next Week's Prompt: Write an ekphrastic poem after one of the ten cards from Hermann Rorschach’s original 1921 inkblot test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #89 features 2013 Neil Postman Award winner Eugenia Leigh and her book Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows.
Eugenia Leigh's Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), was winner of the Late Night Library's 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry as well as a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Rumpus, Ploughshares, Waxwing, Pleiades, North American Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, the Best New Poets 2010 anthology, and the 2017 Best of the Net anthology. Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was awarded the Thomas Lux Scholarship for her dedication to teaching, demonstrated through her writing workshops with incarcerated youths and with Brooklyn high school students. Since her time at Sarah Lawrence, Eugenia has served as a teaching artist with a variety of organizations including the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund's undocumented youth group, RAISE.
For more info, visit: https://www.eugenialeigh.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem that begins with the following sentence: Pull over at the next stop.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that starts and ends with the same line.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #88 features Kim Addonizio and her new book Now We're Getting Somewhere.
Kim Addonizio is the author of seven poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poetry has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Hungarian. Collections have been published in China, Spain, Mexico, Lebanon, and the UK. Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her latest books are a poetry collection, Mortal Trash, and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life. A new book of poems, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, has just been published.
For more info, visit: https://www.kimaddonizio.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem that contains the following randomly-selected adjectives: large, knotty, salty.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that begins with the following sentence: Pull over at the next stop.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast.
Alice Pettway is the author of The Time of Hunger (Salmon Poetry, 2017), Moth (Salmon Poetry, 2019) and Station Lights (forthcoming 2021). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, The Bitter Oleander, The Colorado Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, River Styx, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review and many others. She is a former Chulitna Artist and Lily Peter fellow. Currently, Pettway lives and writes near Seattle, Washington.
For more info, visit Alice's website: https://www.alicepettway.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a letter poem to an abstract concept.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that contains the following randomly-selected adjectives: large, knotty, salty.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Denise Duhamel is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Her previous books include Scald, Blowout, Ka-Ching!, Two and Two, Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, The Star-Spangled Banner, and Kinky. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her newest collection, Second Story, has just released from Pitt Press.
Find Second Story here: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966531/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem that explores what it would be like to be someone else.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a letter poem to an abstract concept.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Lois Baer Barr lives in Riverwoods, Illinois. A finalist for the 2019 Rita Dove Poetry Award, her chapbook Biopoesis won Poetica’s 2013 chapbook award, and her chapbook of fiction, Lope de Vega’s Daughter, is available from Red Bird Press. An emerita professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College, she is teaching creative writing in Spanish there in the fall of 2019. Her academic publications include two books, articles and reviews on Contemporary Spanish and Latin American fiction in journals such as Anales galdosianos, Hispania, Hispanic Review, and Romance Quarterly.
Find more here: https://loisbaerbarr.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a serious poem in limerick stanzas.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem that explores what it would be like to be someone else.
A correction from Lois: "I stated that Mary Zimmerman interviewed me for The Chicago Tribune but meant to say it was Transportation Editor Mary Wisniewski."
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Wendy Videlock is the author of the full-length poetry collections Slingshots and Love Plums (2015), The Dark Gnu and Other Poems (2013), and Nevertheless (2011), as well as the chapbook What’s That Supposed to Mean (2010). Videlock lives with her husband and children in Palisade, Colorado.
Find more here: https://www.wendyvidelock.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Give your poem a utopian or dystopian setting.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a serious limerick.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Anthony Tao‘s poetry appears in journals such as The Cortland Review, Prairie Schooner, Borderlands, Frontier, Kartika Review, Cha, Poetry East West, among other places, plus an anthology of China writing entitled While We’re Here. He has a “poetry x music” album called The Last Tribe on Earth, which features his original poetry with original compositions on the classical guitar by Liane Halton. He lives in Beijing, where he is managing editor of the New York-based online media company SupChina.
Find more here: http://anthonytao.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Homophones are pairs of words which are pronounced the same way but have different meanings, such as “ball” and “bawl.” Write a poem that contains at least one pair of homophones.
Next Week’s Prompt: Give your poem a utopian or dystopian setting.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
A.E. Stallings is an American poet who studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. She has published four collections of poetry, Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She also published verse translations of Lucretius’ The Nature of Things, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the pseudo-Homeric Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice. She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Having studied in Athens, Georgia, she now lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos, and their two argonauts, Jason and Atalanta.
Find more here: https://aestallings.wixsite.com/aestallings
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about one or more of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire.
Next Week’s Prompt: Homophones are pairs of words which are pronounced the same way but have different meanings, such as “ball” and “bawl.” Write a poem that contains at least one pair of homophones.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Derek Sheffield is the author of Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is a co-editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. His awards include a special mention in the 2016 Pushcart Anthology and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. Derek lives with his family on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.
Find more here: https://www.dereksheffield.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is arguably one of the most famous poems in the English language. Write a poem that imagines a scenario in which the speaker takes the road more traveled.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about one or more of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rebecca Starks is the author of the poetry collections Time Is Always Now, a finalist for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, and Fetch, Muse, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Winner of Rattle‘s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor, and past winner of Poetry Northwest‘s Richard Hugo Prize, she is a co-founder of Mud Season Review and a former director of the Burlington Writers Workshop. She works as a freelance editor and workshop leader; teaches in the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning program at the University of Vermont; and is on the board of Sundog Poetry. In her spare time she takes her dogs for runs in the woods and plays violin in the Me2 Orchestra, in support of its mission to reduce stigma surrounding mental illness. She and her family live in Richmond, Vermont.
Find more here: https://rebeccastarks.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a chance encounter with a stranger.
Next Week’s Prompt: “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is arguably one of the most famous poems in the English language. Write a poem that imagines a scenario in which the speaker takes the road more traveled.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Alison Townsend is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, The Blue Dress and Persephone in America, and a volume of prose, The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay on Moving Water. Her poem "Pantoum from the Window of the Room Where I Write" won the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize. Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, she lives in the country outside Madison.
Find her books here: https://www.amazon.com/Alison-Townsend/e/B001JS5MN2/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Onomatopoeia is a figure of speech in which a word, when spoken, imitates the sound it describes; tick-tock, clang, or splash are examples of onomatopoeia. Write a poem that include one or more onomatopoeic words.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem about a chance encounter with a stranger.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Russell Brakefield is the author of FIELD RECORDINGS (Wayne State University Press, 2018). His writing has appeared in the Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He has received fellowships from the University of Michigan Musical Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Parks Department. He teaches writing at the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.
Find more at: http://www.russellbrakefield.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a tourist town during the off-season.
Next Weeks' Prompt: Onomatopoeia is a figure of speech in which a word, when spoken, imitates the sound it describes; tick-tock, clang, or splash are examples of onomatopoeia. Write a poem that include one or more onomatopoeic words.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #77 features former California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia.
Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. Former California Poet laureate and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia was born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican descent. The first person in his family to attend college, he received a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from Harvard in Comparative Literature. For fifteen years he worked as a businessman before quitting at forty-one to become a full-time writer. His most recent books are 99 POEMS: NEW & SELECTED and STUDYING WITH MISS BISHOP.
Find more at: http://danagioia.com/
As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write an alphabet poem, a type of acrostic poem in which the first letter of each line spells out the alphabet. If you’re up for more of a challenge, write a double alphabet: the last letter of each line also spells out the alphabet, but in reverse order.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a tourist town during the off-season.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #76 features Jennifer Jean and her new book, Object Lesson.
Jennifer Jean's poetry collections include OBJECT LESSON (Lily Books) and THE FOOL (Big Table). She's also released the teaching resource book OBJECT LESSON: A GUIDE TO WRITING POETRY (Lily Books). Her poetry, prose, and co-translations have appeared in: Poetry Magazine, Waxwing Journal, Rattle Magazine, Crab Creek Review, DMQ Review, Green Mountains Review, On the Seawall, Salamander, The Common, and more. She's been awarded a Peter Taylor Fellowship from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, a Disquiet FLAD Fellowship from Dzanc Books, and an Ambassador for Peace Award from the Women's Federation for World Peace. As well, she is the translations editor at Talking Writing Magazine, a consulting editor at the Kenyon Review, a co-translator of Arabic poetry and organizer for the Her Story Is collective, the founder of Free2Write Poetry Workshops for Trauma Survivors. Jennifer is the new Manager of the Fine Arts Work Center's 24 Pearl Street Online Writing Program; and she lives in Peabody MA with her family.
Find more at: https://jenniferjeanwriter.weebly.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Dictionary.com named pandemic its Word of the Year for 2020. Users of the online dictionary elected unprecedented as the People’s Choice 2020 Word of the Year. Write a poem using both of these words.
Next Week's Prompt: Write an alphabet poem, a type of acrostic poem in which the first letter of each line spells out the alphabet. If you’re up for more of a challenge, write a double alphabet: the last letter of each line also spells out the alphabet, but in reverse order.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #75 features 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist Alexis Rotella and her most recent book, Dancing the Tarantella.
Alexis received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Drew University, where she did her thesis on Zen Buddhism. She also received a Masters in Classical Acupuncture from The Academy for Five Element Acupuncture, as well as a doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy. In 1984, she served as the President of the Haiku Society of America and edited it's haiku journal Frogpond the same year. In 2009, she founded Prune Juice, an English-language journal for senryu. Rotella is the 2019-2020 honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento. She has authored or coauthored more than forty books and chapbooks, most of which have focused on haiku and related Japanese poetry in English.
Find more at: https://alexisrotella.wordpress.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: A circus with no audience.
Next Week's Prompt: Dictionary.com named pandemic its Word of the Year for 2020. Users of the online dictionary elected unprecedented as the People’s Choice 2020 Word of the Year. Write a poem using both of these words.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #74 features Marjorie Lotfi, a frequent contributor to Poets Respond, and her most recent book, Refuge.
Marjorie Lotfi was born in New Orleans, spent her childhood in Tehran, then lived in San Diego, Washington DC and New York before moving to London in 1999 and Edinburgh in 2005. She founded and runs Open Book, which organizes reading groups in community settings and with vulnerable adults, and The Belonging Project, a creative writing project considering flight, journey, assimilation and belonging alongside the experiences of refugees and migrants. Her poetry examines journeys and questions of belonging, particularly relating to the experiences of refugees and migrants. Refuge takes its starting point as 1970s Tehran, in an Iran on the cusp of revolution, and explores ideas of flight, journey and assimilation.
Find more on Marjorie at: http://www.marjoriegill.com/
Find the Open Book fundraising anthologies at: https://openbookreading.com/donate/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: We used randomwordgenerator.com to select three random words: fear, staircase, passage. Use all three words in a poem, or use the Random Word Generator to pick three words of your own.
Next Week's Prompt: A circus with no audience.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #73 features Skye Jackson, one of the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize finalists, and her recent chapbook, A Faster Grave.
Skye Jackson was born in New Orleans. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop where she serves as an associate poetry editor of Bayou Magazine. She is the author of the prizewinning chapbook, A Faster Grave, published by Antenna.
Find the book here: https://www.antenna.works/product/a-faster-grave/
Find more on Skye here: https://www.skyejackson.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem titled “Astronaut.” Avoid using the words space, spaceship, stars, moon, rocket, planet.
Next Week's Prompt: We used randomwordgenerator.com to select three random words: fear, staircase, passage. Use all three words in a poem, or use the Random Word Generator to pick three words of your own.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #72 features Amy Miller and her most recent book, The Trouble with New England Girls. Amy has appeared many times in Poets Respond and six times in Rattle's issues, most recently issue 67.
Amy Miller's full-length poetry collection, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press, and her latest chapbooks are I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press) and Rough House (White Knuckle Press). She won the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, judged by Tony Hoagland, the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize from Cultural Weekly, and the Earl Weaver Baseball Writing Prize from Cobalt Review, and has been a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Tinderbox Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award.
For more information, visit: http://writers-island.blogspot.com/
I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (free PDF): https://bit.ly/3ntVnxb
Rough House (free): https://www.whiteknucklepress.com/amy-miller-rough-house
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a Clogyrnach, a syllabic Welsh form with six-line stanzas. Learn more about it here: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/clogyrnach-poetic-form
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem titled “Astronaut.” Avoid using the words space, spaceship, stars, moon, rocket, planet.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #71 features Sarah P. Strong and their new book, The Mouth of Earth. Sarah has appeared in seven issues of Rattle, most recently in this winter's.
Sarah P. Strong is the author of two poetry collections, Tour of the Breath Gallery, winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize (Texas Tech, 2013), and The Mouth of Earth (University of Nevada, forthcoming 2020), and two novels, The Fainting Room (Ig, 2013) and Burning the Sea (Alyson, 2002). Their poems have appeared in many journals, including The Nation, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Sun. They are the recipient of a Connecticut Artist Fellowship Award, a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review, and their work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Sarah teaches creative writing at Central Connecticut State University and the University of Hartford.
For more information, visit: https://sarahpstrong.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate and typically commonplace objects. Write a still life poem.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a Clogyrnach, a syllabic Welsh form with six-line stanzas. Learn more about it here: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/clogyrnach-poetic-form
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #70 features Alan W. King and his forthcoming chapbook, CROOKED SMILING LIGHT. Alan has appeared in issues 31 and 54 of RATTLE.
Alan King is an author, poet, journalist and videographer, who lives with his family in Bowie, MD. He’s a communications specialist for a national nonprofit and a senior editor at Words Beats & Life‘s global hip hop journal. King is the author of POINT BLANK (Silver Birch Press, 2016) and DRIFT (Aquarius Press, 2012). He’s a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Low-Residency Program at the University of Southern Maine. His poems and short stories appear in various literary journals, magazines and are featured on public radio.
For more information, visit: https://alanwking.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a scientific discovery—real or imaginary.
Next Week's Prompt: A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate and typically commonplace objects. Write a still life poem.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #69 features winter issue contributor Jim Peterson and his new book, The Horse Who Bears Me Away.
Jim Peterson is the author of six collections of poetry, three chapbooks, numerous plays, and a novel, Paper Crown, published by Red Hen Press and recently made available on Audible. His poetry collection The Owning Stone won Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Award for 1999. His newest collection, Speech Minus Applause, was released by Press 53 in 2019. His poems have appeared widely in journals including Poetry, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and many others. His stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, South Dakota Review, and The Laurel Review. A collection of stories, Many Small Fires, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Retired Coordinator of Creative Writing at Randolph College, he is on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-Res MFA Program in Creative Writing. He lives with his charismatic corgi, Mama Kilya, in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Find Jim's new book at: https://redhenpress.org/products/the-horse-who-bears-me-away-by-jim-peterson
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: What’s on the other side of that door?
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a scientific discovery—real or imaginary.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #68 feature's Steve Henn and his forthcoming book, Guilty Prayer. His poems have appeared in Poets Respond and four issues of Rattle.
Steve Henn wrote Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year (Wolfson Press 2017), And God Said: let there be Evolution! (NYQ Books 2012), and Unacknowledged Legislations (NYQ Books 2011) and the forthcoming chapbook from Main Street Rag, Guilty Prayer (out Feb/Mar 2021). He has been featured at the Long Beach Poetry Festival, the Uptown Poetry Slam, IUSB Visiting Writer Series, Bloomington Writers Guild series, at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, in the Divedapper Carnival poetry showcase, and elsewhere. He raises the 4 children of he and the late artist Lydia Frances Henn (1980-2013) and teaches in Indiana.
For more information, visit: https://www.therealstevehenn.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Randomstreetview.com is a site that randomly generates photographs of streets all over the world. Find a photo that speaks to you and write a poem about it.
Next Week's Prompt: What’s on the other side of that door?
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #67 features RENT Poet founder Brian Sonia-Wallace and his new book, The Poetry of Strangers.
In 2012, Brian set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and accidentally started his business: RENT Poet. Over 5,000 poems later, his book of essays, The Poetry of Strangers, profiles the communities he's written for across America, and the desperate desire to be listened to and heard that he found. Excerpts have been published in The Guardian and Rolling Stone, and he's been the official Writer in Residence for unlikely clients from Amtrak to the Mall of America. Brian Sonia-Wallace also just been named Poet Laureate of West Hollywood.
For more information, visit: https://rentpoet.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem that focuses on opposites or contradictions—a noisy library, a sunny night, a tragic comedy, etc. (Write your whole poem about one or sprinkle many throughout.)
Next Week's Prompt: Randomstreetview.com is a site that randomly generates photographs of streets all over the world. Find a photo that speaks to you and write a poem about it.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #66 features Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, literary translator, editor, and zheng harpist who writes and translates in English, French, Chinese, and occasionally Spanish. She is the author of three books of poetry: Water the Moon (2010), My Funeral Gondola (2013), and most recently The Ruined Elegance (2016) from Princeton, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books. She has translated several volumes of contemporary Chinese-language, French, and American poets, and guest/coedited three anthologies of international literature. Her work was shortlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award and longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. In 2018, she was the inaugural writer-in-residence at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. She serves as an editor at Vif Éditions, a small independent press based in Paris. As a zheng musician, she has performed worldwide.
For more information, visit: http://www.fionasze.com/
Use code RATTLE-FG for 30% off and free shipping for Rain in Plural through 12/15/20: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691203560/rain-in-plural
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a concrete poem (a poem that takes a particular shape on the page). The content of the poem should have a connection to the shape.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that focuses on opposites or contradictions—a noisy library, a sunny night, a tragic comedy, etc. (Write your whole poem about one or sprinkle many throughout.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
This episode of the Rattlecast is a pre-recorded broadcast of our conversation with Jan Beatty this June, which appeared in issue #69 of Rattle magazine.
Jan Beatty’s sixth book, The Body Wars, will be published in fall 2020 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is the winner of the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard, forthcoming in 2021. Jackknife: New and Collected Poems (2018 Paterson Prize) was named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019, and The Switching/Yard was listed by Library Journal as one of “30 New Books That Will Help You Rediscover Poetry.” The Huffington Post called her one of ten “advanced women poets for required reading.” Her poem “Shooter” was featured in a paper delivered in Paris by scholar Mary Kate Azcuy: “Jan Beatty’s ‘Shooter,’ A Controversy For Feminist & Gender Politics.” Beatty’s other books include Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, a Discovery/The Nation Prize finalist, recipient of a $10,000 Artist Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation, and a $15,000 Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation. For many years, Beatty worked as a waitress, as an abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She directs creative writing and the Madwomen in the Attic Workshops at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is Distinguished Writer in Residence in the MFA program.
For more information, visit: www.janbeatty.com
Because this is a pre-recorded broadcast, there is no open mic this week.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a concrete poem (a poem that takes a particular shape on the page). The content of the poem should have a connection to the shape.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #64 features David Mason, who has two poems in the current issue of Rattle. He'll being reading from his book of new and selected poems, The Sound, as well as a forthcoming manuscript, Pacific Light.
David Mason’s books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, was published in 2007 and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. It was also featured on the PBS News Hour. Author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, his memoir, News from the Village, appeared in 2010. A new collection of essays, Two Minds of a Western Poet, followed in 2011. Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, he served as Poet Laureate of Colorado (2010–14) and now lives in Tanzania, Australia.
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem exploring the motivations of a mythological creature (vampire, unicorn, dragon, etc.).
Next Week's Prompt: Write a concrete poem (a poem that takes a particular shape on the page). The content of the poem should have a connection to the shape.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #63 features Jessica Goodfellow and her book, Whiteout. Jessica has appeared in three issue of Rattle, including our most recent.
Jessica Goodfellow grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but has spent the last twenty years in California, Florida, and Japan. She received an MS degree from the California Institute of Technology and an MA in linguistics from the University of New England. Her first book of poetry, The Insomniac's Weather Report (three candles press), won the Three Candles Press First Book Prize, and was reissued by Isobar Press in 2014. Her second book Mendeleev's Mandala is available from Mayapple Press (2015). Her new book Whiteout is out from the University of Alaska Press (July 2017), and was completed while she was a writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland (Concerete Wolf, 2006), winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2018, Best New Poets 2006, and has been featured by Garrison Keillor on NPR's "The Writer's Almanac." Jessica currently lives in Japan with her husband and sons.
For more information, visit: http://www.jessicagoodfellow.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem from the perspective of a famous person (living or dead).
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem exploring the motivations of a mythological creature (vampire, unicorn, dragon, etc.).
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #62 features A.M. Juster and his latest book, Wonder and Wrath.
A.M. Juster is an award-winning poet, translator, and critic. His most recent books include John Milton's The Book of Elegies, The Elegies of Maximianus, and Sleaze & Slander, and his first book of original poetry, The Secret Language of Women, won the Richard Wilbur Award. Juster's poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, The New Criterion and many other publications. Just also had a long career in the federal government, where he worked in senior positions for four Presidents, twice in the White House, including six years as Commissioner of Social Security. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.
For more information, visit: https://www.amjuster.net/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about an abandoned castle.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem from the perspective of a famous person (living or dead).
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #61 features former Nevada County Poet Laureate Molly Fisk and her newest project, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology.
Molly Fisk is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow (2019), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow (1999), and the author of two poetry collections: The More Difficult Beauty, and Listening to Winter, which was #4 in the California Poetry Series. She's a commentator for NPR and community station KVMR-FM Nevada City. Fisk was the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Nevada County, CA (2017-19) and is currently Poet Laureate of radio station KVMR and Hell's Backbone Grill in Boulder, UT. Through her on-line workshop Poetry Boot Camp, she has taught more than 500 participants from around the world, including the South Pole. She also teaches expressive writing to cancer patients and trauma survivors, and works as a radical life coach. Her honors include grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the California Arts Council, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize, the Dogwood Prize, the Billee Murray Denny Prize, and the National Writer's Union, Local 7 Prize. Fisk lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills, in Nevada City, CA.
For more information, visit: http://www.mollyfisk.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem with a color as the title.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about an abandoned castle.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #60 features 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner Kathleen McClung.
Kathleen McClung is the author of Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly, and Almost the Rowboat. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is the winner of the Rita Dove, Morton Marr, Shirley McClure, and Maria W. Faust national poetry prizes. Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies, including Fire & Rain: Ecopoetry of California, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, Atlanta Review, Connecticut River Review, Southwest Review, and others. Kathleen lives in San Francisco and teaches at The Writing Salon and Skyline College, where she served for ten years as director of the annual Women on Writing conference. She is associate director and sonnet judge for the Soul-Making Keats literary competition. In 2018-19 she was a writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.
For more information, visit: https://www.kathleenmcclung.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt (from Taylor Mali's Metaphor Dice): "Hope is a vacant curse."
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem with a color as the title.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #59 features slam legend Taylor Mali. Taylor has appeared in many issues of Rattle and was winner of the 2nd annual Rattle Chapbook Prize.
Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement and one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series “Def Poetry Jam.” A four-time National Poetry Slam champion, he is the author of four collections of poetry and a chapbook, The Whetting Stone, which won the 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize. He is the author of the acclaimed nonfiction book, What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World. In April of 2012, Mali donated 12 inches of his hair to the American Cancer Society Mali after convincing 1,000 people to become teachers. He lives in Brooklyn where he curates the Page Meets Stage reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club.
For more information, visit: https://taylormali.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem from the point of view of an animal.
Next Week's Prompt (from Taylor Mali's Metaphor Dice): "Hope is a vacant curse."
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #58 features Gregory Loselle. Gregory's formal poems have appeared two issues of Rattle, most recently the summer 2020 issue.
Gregory Loselle won four Hopwood Awards and The Academy of American Poets Prize at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. He has won The William van Wert Fiction Award from Hidden River Arts, and Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition for his short fiction, and The Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for Playwriting.
His poems have won The Robert Frost Award of The Robert Frost Foundation, the Rita Dove Prize for poetry (both First Prize and an Honorable Mention) at Salem College, and multiple awards in the Poetry Society of Michigan's Annual Competitions, and have appeared in The Ledge, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Georgetown Review, River Styx, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, Alehouse, Sow's Ear, and many others, and online in The Ambassador Poetry Project and other sites as well.
His chapbooks include Phantom Limb (2008), and Our Parents Dancing (2010, both from Pudding House Press); The Whole of Him Collected (2012), and About the House (2013, from Finishing Line Press; and In Ordinary Time (2019, from Moonstone Press). His first full-length collection, The Very Rich Hours, came out in 2019 through The Poetry Box Press.
For more information, visit: https://www.gloselle.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: September is Classical Music Month. Listen to a piece of classical music and let it inspire your poem.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem from the point of view of an animal.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #57 features Alejandro Escudé. Alejandro has appeared often in both Rattle's print issues and Poets Respond, and was interviewed for issue #59.
Alejandro Escudé’s first book of poems, "My Earthbound Eye," was published in September 2013 upon winning the 2012 Sacramento Poetry Center Award. He received a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis, where he was taught by such notable poets as Gary Snyder and Sandra McPherson. Alejandro works as an English teacher, having taught in a variety of school systems at the secondary level for over fifteen years. Originally from Córdoba, Argentina, he immigrated to California many years ago at the age of six. A new book, “The Book of the Unclaimed Dead,” published by Main Street Rag Press, is now available on the MSR website. Alejandro is a single dad of two wonderful kids and lives in Los Angeles with his dog, a feisty yet lovable Jack Russell named Jake.
For more information, visit: https://escudepoetry.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Look out your window. Write a poem about what you see.
Next Week's Prompt: September is Classical Music Month. Listen to a piece of classical music and let it inspire your poem.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.
Rattlecast #56 features longtime Rattle contributor Jennifer Perrine and her new book, Again.
Jennifer Perrine is the author of three previous books of poetry, most recently No Confession, No Mass, winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Perrine’s other books include In the Human Zoo, which was selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, and The Body Is No Machine. A recipient of fellowships from Literary Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, Perrine lives in Portland, Oregon.
For more information, visit: https://www.jenniferperrine.org/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on one of the top 100 most famous paintings.
Next Week's Prompt: Look out your window. Write a poem about what you see.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Rattlecast #55 features novelist, poet, translator, and diagnostic nuclear radiologist Amit Majmudar. Amit has appeared in Poets Respond twice, and has another poem in the soon-to-arrive fall issue of Rattle.
Amit Majmudar’s books include Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf/Penguin Random House India, 2018) and the mythological novel Sitayana (Penguin Random House India, 2019). His fourth poetry collection, What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020), was just published. His novel Partitions (Holt/Metropolitan, 2011) was shortlisted for the HWA/Goldsboro Crown Prize for Historical Fiction and was named Best Debut Fiction of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, and his second novel, The Abundance (Holt/Metropolitan, 2013), was selected for the Choose to Read Ohio Program. His poetry has appeared in The Best of the Best American Poetry 25th Anniversary Edition, numerous Best American Poetry anthologies, as well as the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and Poetry; his prose has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017, The Best American Essays 2018, and the New York Times. Winner of the Anne Halley Prize and the Pushcart Prize, he served as Ohio's first Poet Laureate. He practices diagnostic and nuclear radiology full-time in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife, twin sons, and daughter.
For more information, visit: http://www.amitmajmudar.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem that is entirely dialogue.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on one of the top 100 most famous paintings.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
This pre-recorded episode features Paul E. Nelson's interview for our summer issue, conducted in March, bookended by a more recent reading of some of his poems. As such, there is no opportunity for audience questions or an open mic, but we hope you still enjoy watching this episode together.
The full transcript of his interview appears in Rattle #68: https://www.rattle.com/i68/
Paul E. Nelson is the founder of SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) and the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events and 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets and whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, and many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets: Interviews 1994–2012 (2018), American Sentences (2015), A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). He has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Portuguese, and writes an American sentence every day. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a twenty-year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
For more information, visit: https://paulenelson.com/
Next Week's Prompt (for 8/25): Write a poem this is entirely dialogue.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Rattlecast #53 features Rhina P. Espaillat and her three most recent books, including And After All. Rhina was interviewed in Rattle #38 and has appeared in many issues, with both original poems and translations.
Rhina P. Espaillat has published ten full-length books and three chapbooks, comprising poetry, essays, and short stories, in both English and her native Spanish, and translations from and into both languages. Her national and international awards include the T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the Richard Wilbur Award, the Howard Nemerov Prize, the May Sarton Award, the Robert Frost “Tree at My Window” Prize for translation, several honors from the New England Poetry Club, the Poetry Society of America, the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College. She is a frequent reader, speaker, and workshop leader, and is active with the Powow River Poets, a literary group she cofounded in 1992.
For more information, visit: https://www.rhinapespaillat.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem for which the title is a line from your favorite song.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem that is entirely dialogue.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Rattlecast #52 features longtime friend of Rattle and issue #12 interviewee James Ragan, and his new book, The Chanter's Reed.
James Ragan is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. He has a Ph.D. from Ohio University and two Honorary Ph.D’s (London’s Richmond U. and St. Vincent College). He served for three years as Poet-in Residence at Cal Tech and for 25 years as Director of the Professional Writing Program at the U. of Southern California. He currently serves for 26 summers as Distinguished Professor of Poetry and Film at Charles U. in Prague. Published in 15 languages and 30 anthologies, world-wide, he has authored 10 books of poetry including The Hunger Wall, Too Long a Solitude, and co-edited Yevgeny Yevtushenko: Collected Poetry.
Honors include three Fulbright Professorships, the Emerson Poetry Prize, ten Pushcart nominations, an NEA Grant, a Poetry Society of America Citation, London’s Troubadour Int. Poetry Prize finalist, and the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award, etc. He has read for seven Heads of State and for the U.N, Carnegie Hall, CNN, C-SPAN, PBS, NPR and audiences in China, Japan, India, England, France, Sweden, Spain, Brazil, etc.
In 1985 he was one of four poets from the West, including Seamus Heaney, Bob Dylan, and Robert Bly, invited to read for Mikhail Gorbachev at the 1st International Poetry Festival in Moscow. Ragan’s plays The Landlord and Commedia have been staged in the U.S., Moscow, Beijing, Athens, Prague, etc. In 1997 his poetry was recorded as lyrics by Kimiko Kasai for the jazz album “Tokyo Special” (CBS/Sony). He worked on staff during the making of The Godfather, in production on the Oscar winner The Deer Hunter, as co-writer on The Rising (2020) and collaborator on “Dom” (The House) winner of the Kieslowski Award for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival. He is the subject of the documentary, Flowers and Roots, (Arina Films, 2016), winner of 18 Int. Festival award recognitions, including the Remi Platinum Prize at the 49th Houston Int. Film Festival. In 1996 Buzz Magazine named Ragan one of the “100 Coolest People in Los Angeles: Those Who Make a Difference.”
Order The Chanter's Reed here: https://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=526&a=239
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a Greek god or goddess.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem for which the title is a line from your favorite song.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #51 features Rattle Poetry Prize legend Courtney Kampa. Courtney is a five-time Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and "Poems about Grace" was winner of the 2014 Readers' Choice Award.
Courtney Kampa’s first book, Our Lady of Not Asking Why, was selected by National Book Award winner Mary Szybist for New Issues Press. Her work has received awards and distinctions from Best New Poets, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Atlantic, RATTLE, North American Review, The Elizabeth George Foundation, Columbia University, and elsewhere. A 2016 Ruth Lilly finalist, she received her MFA from Columbia University and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2017-2019. She currently lives and teaches poetry and writing in Nashville, TN.
For more information, visit: https://courtneykampa.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem in a form you've never tried before.
Next Week's Prompt: Wright a poem about a Greek god or goddess.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #50 features long-time Rattle contributor David Romtvedt and his newest book, Dilemmas of the Angels, as well has his translations of Basque poetry. David has had poems in five issues of Rattle, including a issue #69 this fall.
David Romtvedt is professor of creative writing at the University of Wyoming. The author of more than a dozen books, he has also served as the Poet Laureate of Wyoming and, with the bands Ospa and The Fireants, plays the button accordion.
For more information, visit: http://davidromtvedt.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a phobia you have.
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem in a form you've never tried before.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #49 features long-time Rattle contributor Tom C. Hunley and his new book, Here Lies. Tom has appeared in issues 26, 40, 55, and 68 and is a 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner.
In a 30+ year publishing career, Tom C. Hunley has placed poems in journals beginning with every letter of the alphabet except for Y. The most recent of his six full-length collections is Here Lies (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018). Forthcoming from C&R Press in March 2021 is What Feels Like Love: New and Selected Poems. He has also written two textbooks and co-edited a third. He is a professor in the MFA/BA Creative Writing programs at Western Kentucky University, where he has worked since 2003.
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem in the style of teaching someone how to do something.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a phobia you have.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #48 features Kari Gunter-Seymour and her new book, A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen. Kari appeared in Poets Respond in 2014, and has been up to a whole lot since, just recently being named Ohio Poet of the Year and Poet Laureate of Ohio.
A ninth generation Appalachian, Kari Gunter-Seymour’s work is firmly and unapologetically attached to her home soil and is an examination of the long-lasting effects of stereotype and false narratives surrounding native Appalachians. Her poems appear in numerous journals and publications and on her website: www.karigunterseymourpoet.com. Her current collection is titled A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2020). Gunter-Seymour is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project™ (WOAP™), an arts organization she created to address discrimination directed at women from the Appalachian region by providing opportunities to come together in performances, exhibitions and publications, to embrace the stereotype, show the whole woman, beyond the superficial factors people use to judge her. (www.womenofappalachia.com). She is the editor of the (WOAP™) anthology series, Women Speak, volumes 1-5 and Essentially Athens Ohio, a collection of fine art, tales and experiences from those living in or with strong ties to Athens County, Ohio. She holds a B.F.A. in graphic design and an M.A. in commercial photography. She is a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, the Ohio Poet of the Year 2020 and Poet Laureate of Ohio. A poem she wrote in support of families living in poverty in Athens County, OH, went viral and has been seen by over 100,000 people, resulting in thousands of dollars donated to her local food pantry.
For more info, visit: https://www.karigunterseymourpoet.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on a famous event that occurred in the year of your birth.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem in the style of teaching someone how to do something.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #47 features frequent Rattle contributor Ron Koertge and his newest book, Yellow Moving Van.
Ron Koertge is the author of many celebrated novels, including Stoner & Spaz, Strays, and The Brimstone Journals, all American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults; Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, an American Library Association Top Ten Sports Books for Youth Selection; and The Arizona Kid, an American Library Association pick for “one of the ten funniest books of the year.” A two-time winner of the PEN Literary Award for Children’s Literature, Koertge is also author of several books of poetry for adults, most recently Yellow Moving Van. He lives in South Pasadena, California.
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Three minute poem. Set a timer for three minutes and write until your three minutes is up. No editing afterward!
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on a famous event that occurred in the year of your birth.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #46 welcomes Erik Campbell, one of the most frequent Rattle contributors over the last 20 years.
Erik Campbell’s poems and essays have appeared in New Letters, Tin House, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Rattle, and other literary journals. His first poetry collection, Arguments for Stillness (Curbstone Press 2006), was named by Book Sense as one of the top ten poetry collections for 2007. Red Hen Press published his second collection, The Corpse Pose, in spring 2016. His poem "Faith for My Father circa 1980" is included in the 2019 Pushcart Prize anthology. A high school English teacher for many years, he currently lives in Nebraska.
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on your most recent dream. Must not use adjectives or adverbs.
Next Week's Prompt: Three minute poem. Set a timer for three minutes and write until your three minutes is up. No editing afterward!
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #45 welcomes Marc Alan Di Martino and his new book, Unburial. Marc has appeared in Rattle #62, Poets Respond,and was the featured artist for one of this February's Ekphrastic Challenge.
Marc Alan Di Martino was born in the United States in 1974. He is the author of Unburial (Kelsay Books, 2019) and co-editor, along with Betsy Mars, of the anthology Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife (Kingly Street Press, 2019.) He lives in Italy.
For more information, visit: https://marcalandimartino.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic afterward for our weekly prompt or recent publications. For details on how to participate via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: With your eyes closed, open any book to a random page. Make the title of your poem the first word you see.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on your most recent dream. Must not use adjectives or adverbs.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #44 features Dorianne Laux and her recent recent new and selected collection, Only as the Day Is Long. Dorianne was interviewed in issue #8 of Rattle and has also appeared in issue #25 and Poets Respond.
Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection,The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry.
For more information, visit: http://www.doriannelaux.net/
This Week's Prompt: With your eyes closed, open any book to a random page. Make the title of your poem the first word you see.
Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on your most recent dream. Must not use adjectives or adverbs.
Episode #43 features John Philip Johnson and his two graphic poetry books, STAIRS APPEAR IN A HOLE OUTSIDE OF TOWN and BOOK OF FLY. The title poems for each of the books originally appeared in Rattle, and John worked with several well-known comic book artists to turn them into Kickstarted books.
John Philip Johnson is a poet and writer, mostly doing science fiction and fantasy. He has had work in many journals and magazines, both literary and genre. He has a master’s degree in poetry and teaches college English.
Find more information at http://www.johnphilipjohnson.com/
Note: The contact link on John's website isn't working. If you'd like to contact him, do so through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JohnPhilipJohnson
This Week's Prompt: Write a poem that begins and ends with a question (not the same question—two different questions.)
Next Week's Prompt: With your eyes closed, open any book to a random page. Make the title of your poem the first word you see.
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
The Rattlecast will be livestreaming on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
This week's episode of Poets Respond Live features Stephen Gibson's poem for Memorial Day, Tishani Doshi on a tragic mass-shooting in Kabul, Jennifer Jean with a speculative poem, Charles Harper Webb on Little Richard, and much more, including Megan Wildhood, Katie Entner, Harpreet Kathuria, Neal Lemery, Vidya Venkat, and Amit Saha.
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A weekly livestreaming open mic for all of your news poems. Every week, Rattle receives hundreds of submissions for our Poets Respond series, but we're only able to publish one or two of them. This is an opportunity to share more as we gather around and explore current events through poetry.
The best way to participate is to send Tim a chat message over Skype during the show at "rattlepoetry." You can also call the phone number shown during the show. Let it ring a few times, then hang up, and he'll call you back. Space is limited, so we'll just be choosing guests at in the order received from those who try to connect.
Please note that the poems you share will be shown and archived on the livestreamed video, both on Facebook and on YouTube, so only share poems you'd like to be saved in this format.
Episode #42 welcomes Meg Eden and her most recent book, Drowning in the Floating World, about the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Meg has appeared in issues #48 and #49 of Rattle.
Meg Eden's father has worked in Japan for most of her life, so she considers Japan her second home. Her work is published or forthcoming in magazines including Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College and the MA program at Southern New Hampshire University. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks and the novel Post-High School Reality Quest (2017). She runs the Magfest MAGES Library blog, which posts accessible academic articles about video games. Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
Warm-up Poem: “The Twenty-Year Workshop” by Lynne Knight https://www.rattle.com/the-twenty-year-workshop-by-lynne-knight/
This Week's Prompt: From the perspective of a ghost or spirit.
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem that begins and ends with a question (not the same question—two different questions.)
Episode #41 welcomes Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and her most recent book, Naked for Tea. Rosemerry has been a regular contributor to Poets Respond and the Ekphrastic Challenge for years.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in southwest Colorado and is the author of eleven collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in O Magazine, Rattle.com, TEDx, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion, and on river rocks she leaves around town. She’s taught poetry for Think 360, Craig Hospital, Ah Haa School for the Arts, Weehawken Creative Arts, Camp Coca-Cola, meditation retreats, addiction recovery programs, hospice, and many other organizations. She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest, and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. As Colorado’s Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015–2017), she created and curates Heard of Poets, an interactive poetry map. She earned her MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison. Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day. One-word mantra: Adjust. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the 2017 Able Muse Book Award.
For more information, visit: https://www.wordwoman.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Run-on-sentence poem. Write a prose poem consisting of one long sentence (commas and other punctuation OK).
Next Week's Prompt: From the perspective of a ghost or spirit.
The Rattlecast will be livestreaming on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #40 features Danusha Laméris and her latest book, Bonfire Opera. Danusha has appeared in issues #31, 33, and 68.
Danusha Laméris is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her poems have been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her second book is Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press), and she is the 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She teaches poetry independently, and is the current Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.
For more information, visit: http://www.danushalameris.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: A superhero comes home after a hard day at work.
Next Week's Prompt: Run-on-sentence poem. Write a prose poem consisting of one long sentence (commas and other punctuation ok).
Episode #39 welcomes former Missouri Poet Laureate William Trowbridge and has new book, Oldguy: Superhero—poems from which have been featured regularly in Rattle for years.
William Trowbridge holds a B.A. in Philosophy and an M. A. in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. He served as Poet Laureate of the State of Missouri from 2012-2016. His poetry publications include six full collections: Put This On, Please (Red Hen Press, 2014), Ship of Fool (Red Hen Press, 2011), The Complete Book of Kong (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2003), Flickers, O Paradise, and Enter Dark Stranger (University of Arkansas Press, 2000, 1995, 1989). He has also published three chapbooks, The Packing House Cantata (Camber Press, 2006), The Four Seasons (Red Dragonfly Press, 2001), and The Book of Kong (Iowa State University Press, 1986). He is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, where he was an editor of The Laurel Review/GreenTower Press from 1986 to 2004. Now living in Lee’s Summit, MO, he teaches in the University of Nebraska low-residency MFA in writing program.
For more information, visit: http://www.williamtrowbridge.net
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: Must be titled “The Swimmer.” Must not use the words “water” or “pool.”
Next Week's Prompt: A superhero comes home to an empty house after a long day on the job.
The Rattlecast will be livestreaming on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #38 features Wordplay host George Bilgere and his newest book, Blood Pages.
George Bilgere is the author of six previous poetry collections, including most recently, Imperial. The White Museum was chosen by Alicia Suskin Ostriker for the Autumn House Poetry Series. His third book, The Good Kiss, was selected by Billy Collins to win the University of Akron Poetry Award. He has won numerous other awards, including the Midland Authors Award, the May Swenson Poetry Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Bilgere is the recipient of grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, and the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, Fulcrum, and the Best American Poetry series. Bilgere’s poems have also been featured over fifty times on Garrison Keillor’s National Public Radio program, The Writer’s Almanac, and he has been a guest on A Prairie Home Companion.
For more information, visit: http://www.georgebilgere.com/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: From the point of view of the oldest living tree.
Next Week's Prompt: Must be titled “The Swimmer.” Must not use the words “water” or “pool.”
The Rattlecast will be livestreaming on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope.
Episode #37 welcomes long-time Rattle contributor Charles Harper Webb and his latest book, Sidebend World. Webb was our very first interviewee, way back in issue #4 (1995).
Charles Harper Webb has published twelve books of poetry, including Brain Camp. Webb’s awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize. Webb is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program.
For more information, visit: https://upittpress.org/authors/charles-harper-webb/
This Week's Prompt: Erasure poem using a news article from the past week.
Next Week's Prompt: From the point of view of the oldest living tree.
Rattlecast #36 features Katherine Barrett Swett and her Donald Justice Prize-winning collection, Voice Message.
A high school English teacher, Katherine Barrett Swett lives in New York City. She received a PhD in American Literature from Columbia University. Her poems have been published in various journals including, The Lyric, Rattle, Mezzo Cammin, The Raintown Review, and The Orchards Poetry Journal. Her sonnets were finalists for the Nemerov Contest in 2016 and 2017. Her chapbook, Twenty-one was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.
For more information, visit: https://www.autumnhouse.org/our-authors/katherine-barrett-swett/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week's Prompt: A happy love poem. (It’s harder than it sounds!) Try to avoid cliches.
Next Week’s Prompt: Erasure poem using a news article from the past week.
Rattlecast #35 features Wendy Barker and her new book Gloss.
Wendy Barker’s seventh full-length collection of poems, Gloss, is due out in 2020 from St. Julian Press. Her sixth collection, One Blackbird at a Time, was chosen for the John Ciardi Prize and was published by BkMk Press in 2015. Recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Rockefeller residency fellowship in Bellagio, as well as other awards in poetry, she has also been a Fulbright senior lecturer in Bulgaria. Her work has been translated into Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Bulgarian. She is Poet-in Residence and the Pearl Lewinn Endowed Chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982.
For more information, visit: https://www.wendybarker.net/
As always, we'll also include live open mic for responses to our weekly prompt. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded, via Skype, or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
Warm-up Poems: “The Preakness” by John Colasacco https://www.rattle.com/the-preakness-by-john-colasacco/
“Bob the Bear” by Frank Colasacco https://www.rattle.com/bob-the-bear-by-frank-colasacco/
This Week's Prompt: The first word must start with the letter “z,” the last word must end with the letter “z.”
Next Week's Prompt: A happy love poem. (It’s harder than it sounds!) Try to avoid cliches.
Episode #34 welcomes Rattle Chapbook Prize winner and Readers' Choice Award winner Jimmy Pappas and his new book Falling off the Empire State Building.
Jimmy Pappas served during the Vietnam War as an English language instructor training South Vietnamese soldiers. He received a BA in English at Bridgewater State University and an MA in English literature from Rivier University. His poems have been published in over 80 journals, including Sheila-Na-Gig, Cha:An Asian Literary Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Off the Coast, and Boston Literary Magazine. The poem “Bobby’s Story” was winner of the 2017 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award. Other poems about veterans are included in Jimmy’s first book, Scream Wounds, published by A15 Press in 2019. Jimmy is vice president of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and lives with his wife Barbara in the small town of Chichester, where they enjoy the state’s vibrant poetry culture.
For more on Falling Off, visit: https://www.rattle.com/chapbooks/falling-off-the-empire-state-building/
Order Scream Wounds at: https://www.amazon.com/Scream-Wounds-Jimmy-Pappas/dp/1970155043/
Warmup Poem: "Glance" by Jennifer Givhan https://jennifergivhan.com/
This Week's Prompt: A girl lying next to a radio in 1932. Suggestion: Sonnet.
Next Week's Prompt: The first word must start with the letter “z,” the last word must end with the letter “z.”
Episode #33 features Ellen Bass and her new book Indigo. Ellen has appeared in Rattle three times and was the featured conversation in issue #40.
Ellen Bass’s other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the NEA, the California Arts Council, three Pushcart Prizes, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pablo Neruda Prize, The Larry Levis Prize and the New Letters Prize. She coedited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.
For more information, visit: https://www.ellenbass.com/
Warm-up Poem: "You Moved Your Whole Town" by Paul T. Corrigan
This Week’s Prompt: A motel with no windows. Must use the words “descent” and “twin.”
Prompt Poems: Megan Green Carla Schwartz
Next Week’s Prompt: A girl lying next to a radio in 1932. Suggestion: Sonnet.
Episode #32 features Lola Haskins and her new book Asylum. Lola has appeared in Rattle seven times, including the just-released spring issue.
Lola Haskins lives in Gainesville, Florida and Skipton, Yorkshire. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, London Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle and elsewhere, as well as having been broadcast on NPR and BBC radio. She has published fourteen collections of poems, a poetry advice book and a non-fiction book about fifteen Florida cemeteries. Ms. Haskins has been awarded three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships,the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and several prizes for narrative poetry. She retired from teaching Computer Science at the University of Florida in 2005 and served from then until 2015 on the faculty of Rainier Writers Workshop.
For more information, visit: https://lolahaskins.com/
This Week’s Prompt: An addiction to soap operas. Suggestion: Epigram (short and witty).
Next Week's Prompt: A motel with no windows. Must use the words “descent” and “twin.”
Episode #31 welcomes Rachel Custer to the Rattlecast. Rachel has appeared in three issues of Rattle and three times in Poets Respond, including with "How I Am Like Donald Trump," perhaps the most-read and most-discussed poem in the entire series.
Rachel Custer is the author of The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017) and the recipient of a 2019 NEA Fellowship in Poetry. She has previously published poetry, personal essays, and flash fiction in many literary journals. She lives in Indiana, and her work is constantly informed by and wrestles with the values and struggles of the rural Rust Belt. Her Christian faith is vital to her understanding of the world and her art.
For more information, visit: https://rachelcuster.wordpress.com/
Prologue: "Siege Machinery" by Craig van Rooyen
This Week’s Prompt: President Trump goes to the arcade. Bonus suggestion: Villanelle.
Prompt poems by: Tim Megan Shaun Hines Kathy Gibbons Corinne O'Reilly
Next Week’s Prompt: An addiction to soap operas. Suggestion: Epigram (short and witty).
Episode #30 features Kelly Grace Thomas and her new book Boat Burned. Kelly's poem "And the Woman Said" appeared in Rattle #51 and won the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor.
Kelly Grace Thomas is a 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, released with YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Nashville Review, Muzzle, DIAGRAM, and more. Kelly currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Director of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit-Words Ignite. Kelly is a three-time poetry slam championship coach and the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot), currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Kelly has received fellowships from Tin House Winter Workshop, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the Kenyon Review Young Writers. Kelly and her sister, Kat Thomas, won Best Feature Length Screenplay at the Portland Comedy Film Festival for their romantic comedy, Magic Little Pills. Kelly lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Omid, and is currently working on her debut novel, a YA thriller, titled Only 10.001.
For more information, visit: https://www.kellygracethomas.com/
Prologue: "The Girls on Josephine Street" by Melissa McEwen
Prompt Responses: Tim Megan Brenda Komarinski Kris Beaver Richard Chetwynd David Cooke
This Week's Prompt: An undiscovered constellation. Must be no longer than 280 characters (“Twitter length”.)
Next Week’s Prompt: President Trump goes to the arcade. Bonus suggestion: Villanelle.
Episode #29 features Susan Browne and her new book Just Living. Susan's poems have appeared in issues 64, 66, and the forthcoming issue 67 of Rattle.
Susan Browne’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Subtropics, The Southern Review, Superstition Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, B O D Y, American Life in Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Love’s Executive Order, and 180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. She has published two books of poetry, Buddha’s Dogs and Zephyr. Awards include prizes from Four Way Books, the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, the River Styx International Poetry Contest, and The Fischer Poetry Prize. She received a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and her work has been nominated for three Pushcart Awards. She has also collaborated to create a word/music CD. Her third collection, Just Living, recently won the Catamaran Poetry Prize. She lives in Oakland, California.
For more information, visit: http://www.susanbrownepoems.com/index.html
This Week’s Prompt: The dinosaur museum at 3 AM. Must be at least 40 lines long, lines can be of any length.
Next Week's Prompt: An undiscovered constellation. Must be no longer than 280 characters (“Twitter length”.)
Episode #28 features 2019 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner Christina Olson and her book The Last Mastodon.
Christina Olson is the author of the poetry collections Terminal Human Velocity and Before I Came Home Naked as well as the chapbooks Weird Science and Rook & The M.E.: A Law & Order-Inspired Narrative. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared in Arts & Letters, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Brevity, River Styx, Gulf Coast, Passages North, The Normal School, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Willapa Bay AiR. She teaches creative writing at Georgia Southern University and tweets as @olsonquest.
For more information, visit: https://thedrevlow-olsonshow.com/
Prologue: "After the Bowling Stopped" by Thadra Sheridan https://www.thadrasheridan.com/
This Week’s Prompt: The dinosaur museum at 3am. Must be at least 40 lines long, lines can be of any length.
Michael T. Young's third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was published by Terrapin Books. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press), received the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. His other collections include The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets Wear Prada), Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax Press), and Because the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks Press). He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous print and online journals including The Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Edison Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, The Potomac Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, In the Black/In the Red, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.
For more information, visit: http://www.michaeltyoung.com/
Warm-up Poem: "Jane's Heartbreak Yard Sale" by Lytton Bell https://www.rattle.com/janes-heartbreak-yard-sale-by-lytton-bell/
Next Week’s Prompt: The stuntman walks home from work. Must reference a Shakespearean work, either within the poem or in an epigraph.
Episode #26 features 2019 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist Kathleen Balma and her chapbook Gallimaufry & Farrago.
Kathleen Balma is a public librarian and the author of Gallimaufry & Farrago (Finishing Line Press 2018), a poetry chapbook. She received a Master of Library Science and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry Writing from Indiana University. A Fulbright Fellow and Pushcart Prize winner, she is the recipient of a Katherine Bakeless Nason Scholarship from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference, a Tennessee Williams scholarship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a writer-in-residence fellowship from Rivendell Writers' Colony. She has published widely in magazines and anthologies, including Ecotone, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology, and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize Anthology. She grew up in the Ohio River Valley of Illinois and has lived in the Ozarks of Missouri, a Michigan forest, urban Andalucía, a naval base near the Windy City, suburban New South Wales, Western Australia, a trailer park in Little Egypt, several corners of the Hoosier state, Castilla la Mancha, small-town New England, and the only Garden District in Central Louisiana. New Orleans is her forever home.
For more information, visit: https://www.kathleenbalma.com/
Pre-show: "Building Nicole's Mama" by Patricia Smith https://www.rattle.com/building-nicoles-mama-by-patricia-smith/
In this episode we'll visit with Chaun Ballard and his chapbook, Flight. Chaun has appeared in issues 66 and 60 of Rattle, and several times in Poets Respond.
Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and San Bernardino, California, Chaun Ballard is the co-host of the Blue Doors Poetry Retreat in Galaxidi, Greece, an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, a Callaloo fellow, and a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Chaun Ballard’s chapbook, Flight, is the winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and is published by Tupelo Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Frontier Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Lunch Ticket, Narrative Magazine, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Rattle, Spoon River Poetry Review, The New York Times, Tupelo Quarterly, and other literary magazines. His work has received nominations for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.
For more information, visit: https://chaunballard.com/
Warm-up Poem "Roll Call for Michael Brown" by Jason McCall https://www.rattle.com/roll-call-for-michael-brown-by-jason-mccall/
Clint Margrave's poem "When Death Travels" appears in this winter's issue of Rattle, and he has another in issue #67 this spring. Salute the Wreckage, his second collection of poems, explores the universe within us and the universe in which we live. Clint Margrave is also the author of The Early Death of Men, a collection of poems published by NYQ Books. His work has also appeared in The New York Quarterly, Rattle, Cimarron Review, Verse Daily, Word Riot, and Ambit (UK), among others. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
For more information, visit: http://www.clintmargrave.com/
Warm-up Poem: M.L. Liebler http://www.mlliebler.com/
After a break for Christmas and New Year's Eves, the Rattlecast returns with an episode featuring another frequent contributor, Barbara Crooker, and her new book Some Glad Morning.
Barbara Crooker is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently The Book of Kells (which won the Best Poetry Book 2018 Award from Poetry by the Sea) and Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series). Her first book, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature. Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
Find Barbara's books at: https://barbaracrooker.com/books.php
Prologue: “Morir Soñando” by Martín Espada https://www.rattle.com/morir-sonando-by-martin-espada/
Luis Garden Acosta Legacy Fund at El Puente: https://www.classy.org/campaign/luis-garden-acosta-legacy-fund/c242344
Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York City where he operated heavy equipment, managed a nightclub and drove a taxi. He is the author of eleven books and chapbooks including most recently, Mean Time and The Man Who Never Was. His poems, essays and photographs have been published in hundreds of journals including The Amsterdam Quarterly, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cortland Review, Diode, Guernica, Hippocampus, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The New York Times, The New Welsh Review, Rattle, The Shakespeare Quarterly and elsewhere. Looking for Thelma, an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, won the 2018 Wilt Nonfiction Chapbook Prize sponsored by St. Leo University. He has received awards and fellowships for teaching and for writing from numerous organizations including The Folger Shakespeare Library, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The White House Commission on Presidential Scholars and Yaddo. The founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University, Peter has led hundreds of workshops for writers and teachers.
For more on Peter E. Murphy: http://www.peteremurphy.com/
Prologue featuring Abby E. Murray: https://www.abbyemurray.com/
For episode 21, we visit with longtime Rattle contributor Tony Gloeggler, along with a special "closed" mic, featuring poems from the anthology Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism. Tony's most recent books focus on his relationship with his ex-girlfriend's autistic son, and his poems are also included in the anthology.
Tony Gloeggler was born and raised in New York City. He is the author of a half-dozen full-length poetry collections, most of them from NYQ Books. His most recent is Until the Last Light Leaves. His chapbook One on One won the 1998 Pearl Poetry Prize. Gloeggler’s work has been published in journals and anthologies such as Chiron Review, Paterson Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Nerve Cowboy, Spillway, The Examined Life, Raleigh Review, San Pedro River Review, and Juked. He’s had 10 poems appear in Rattle over the last 20 years and his poem "1969" is one of the most-read in Rattle's history. Gloeggler currently manages a group home for developmentally disabled men in Brooklyn.
Also featuring:
Yvonne Blomer Lauren Camp Barbara Crooker Cheryl Dumesnil Megan Merchant Connie Post Angeline Schellenberg Alison Stone Emily Vogel
Alongside We Travel: https://nyq.org/books/title/alongside-we-travel
And Tony's Until the Last Light Leaves: https://nyq.org/books/title/untilthelastlightleaves
Naomi Shihab Nye was interviewed in Rattle #21, and in this week we discuss her newest book The Tiny Journalist. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize, and "The Betty Prize" from Poets House, for service to poetry, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2019 she was named Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. Her most recent book is The Tiny Journalist. Nye is Professor of Creative Writing - Poetry at Texas State University. For more information, visit: https://www.barclayagency.com/speakers/naomi-shihab-nye/
Buy The Tiny Journalist: https://www.boaeditions.org/products/the-tiny-journalist
Prologue: Ukamaka Olisakwe Al Maginnes
Epilogue: Sarah Lipton Philip Hess David Cooke Carla Schwartz Joshua Corwin Partha Sarkar
Bob Hicok has appeared in several issues of Rattle, including the conversation in issue #29. His poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, journals, and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. His books have been awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and named a "Notable Book of the Year" by Booklist. His most recent book is Hold. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator. He is currently a professor at Virginia Tech University.
As always, we'll also include live open mic after talking to our guest. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded or via Skype, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
Also note our new format: Our guest each week will appear at 9pm EDT, but the pre-show starts about 15 minutes early, so tune in ahead of time for more poetry.
Prologue: Amy Schmidt John Philip Johnson Florence Jacquemin-Veber Rasaq Malik Gbolahan
Epilogue: Joy Colter Suzy Berry Penny Peyser David Cooke Carla Schwartz
Nickole Brown's chapbook To Those Who Were Our First Gods was winner of the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize. She received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition was reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. The audio book of that collection came out in 2017. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at four different animal sanctuaries. For more information, visit: http://www.nickolebrown.com/
Prologue:
Anis Mojgani (http://thepianofarm.com) Ron Koertge (https://ronkoertge.com)
Epilogue:
Christine Hoper Joel Showalter Charlene Jones Frank Paino
Wally Swist is the author of some three dozen books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, most recently The Bees of the Invisible. His book Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love was selected co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Contest, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa served as judge, and the book was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2012. Swist is a recipient of Artist's Fellowships in poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1977 and 2003). He currently makes his home in western Massachusetts, where he is semi-retired and works as a freelance editor and writer. Order his most recent book, Bees of the Invisible, here: https://www.amazon.com/Bees-Invisible-Wally-Swist/dp/1947067893
Prologue:
Bill Glose James Valvis Aaron Brown
Lynne Knight was the winner of the 2009 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is the author of several books of poetry, most recently The Persistence of Longing (2016) and The Language of Forgetting (2018). Her cycle of poems on Impressionist winter paintings, Snow Effects (2008), has been translated into French by Nicole Courtet. Knight’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, and her awards include a Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and an NEA grant. For more information, visit: http://www.lynneknight.com/
Prologue featuring:
Brian Trimboli Tony Gloeggler Brett Garcia Myhren Tiana Clark
Francesca Bell was born in Spokane, Washington, into a family with deep, hardscrabble roots in the Northwest. Her poems and translations appear in many magazines including ELLE, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner. She’s also appeared in many issues of Rattle, was the featured conversation in issue #56, and won the 2014 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. She is the co-translator of Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish’s collection, A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), and the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019). For more information, visit her website: https://francescabellpoet.com
Prologue:
Amy Miller Ruth Bavetta Caitlin Gildrien
Epilogue open mic:
Melinda Jane (The Poet Mj) Joy Colter Stephen Roberts Kevin Lemaster James Snay Emilio Peurta Elizabeth S. Wolf
Janet Fitch is the author of the #1 national bestseller White Oleander, a novel translated into 24 languages, an Oprah Book Club book and the basis of a feature film; Paint It Black, also widely translated and made into a 2017 film; and two epic novels of the Russian Revolution, "The Revolution of Marina M" and "Chimes of a Lost Cathedral." Many of the characters in those last two books are poets, with a body of poems written by Janet, which she'll share as poems as we discuss the book. For more information, visit: https://www.janetfitchwrites.com
You can also watch her weekly writing lessons on her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMcQA2Ax_K29FwWZX5xoP0g
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On the pre-show: Devon Balwit Jesse Bertron Jane Byers Peter Harris
On the open mic: Alisha Hammond Liz Gallo Carrie Magnes Radna Michelle Parks Joshua Corwin Erin Bealmear Dean Barker
Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His book of translations from Sappho, Stung With Love, was published by Penguin Classics in 2009, and his translation of Apollonius’ Jason and the Argonauts was released 2014. For his work in translation he was awarded a 2010-2011 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book of original poetry, The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press), was published in 2012 and his second book, Manhattanite, was winner of the 2016 Able Muse Poetry Prize. His thriller in verse, Mr. Either/Or, was released by Etruscan Press 2017. His work has appeared in such journals as The Guardian, Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement. For more information, visit: https://www.aaronpoochigian.com/
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Prologue (Pre-Show):
David Kirby (https://davidkirby.com) Rick Lupert (http://poetrysuperhighway.com)
Epilogue (Open Mic):
Aleksandar Antic Patrick Murphy J. Thomas Brown Coco Erick Bischoff Joshua Corwin L.I. Henley
Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III) is a poet, teacher, former owner of Karibu Books, and author of the book "Inheritance." His work has centered on issues of literacy and the promotion of reading in the African American and larger community. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Bowie State University. His poetry and/or essays have been published in African American Review, Smartish Pace and Ploughshares, as well as Rattle #52 and #60. He has recorded with Black Notes and Sunny Sumter, and is currently working with a musician group Free Black Space. For more information, visit: http://freeblackspace.blogspot.com/
Order "Inheritance" at: https://www.mahoganybooks.com/9780997199642
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Prologue featuring: Three poems by Alejandro Escude
Epilogue featuring open mic readings by: Charlie Baylis Liz Rizzo John Luna Liz Gallo Michelle Parks Cathy Prather Russell
Jamey Hecht, PhD, LMFT is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He studied poetry with Allen Grossman, John Burt, and Frank Bidart at Brandeis University in the 1990’s. His first book of poems was Limousine, Midnight Blue (Red Hen Press, 2009), fifty 14-line elegies for President Kennedy. Dodo Feathers collects the best of Jamey Hecht’s poetry from the past thirty years (1989-2019).
Order Dodo Feathers here: https://ipbooks.net/product/dodo-feathers-poems-1989-2019-by-jamey-hecht/
For more on Jamey Hecht, visit: http://poetrypoliticscollapse.blogspot.com/
And Blank Verse Trance: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGUpBdpJwoaqmQycXNjgidw
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On the open mic:
Nyumah Waggeh Kim Tedrow Michelle Parks
Episode 10 of the Rattlecast features Al Ortolani and his 2019 Rattle Chapbook Prize winning collection "Hansel and Gretel Get the Word on the Street." Al is a retired high school teacher, so "each poem is like a chalk mark on a blackboard. Much like the teacher who has leaned one too many times against the chalk tray, Ortolani wears his poems on the back of pants, his shirt sleeves, his jacket elbows."
____ Al Ortolani’s newest collection of poetry, On the Chicopee Spur, was released from New York Quarterly Books in 2018. How Wally Lost His Thumb and the Boy Scouts Became Cannibals, a mix of old and new “Wally poems,” also appeared from Spartan Press the same year. A previous collection, Ghost Sign, co-authored with J.T. Knoll, Adam Jameson, and Melissa Fite Johnson, was selected as a Kansas Notable Book for 2017. Ortolani is the manuscript editor for Woodley Press, and has directed a memoir writing project for Vietnam veterans across Kansas in association with the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas. After 43 years of teaching English in public schools, he currently lives a life without bells and fire drills in the Kansas City area.
For more information, visit: https://www.alortolani.com/
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On the open mic:
Carrie Radna Emilio Puerta Davion Tinsley Joshua Corwin Kevin Kiely Patrick Murphy
Episode 9 of the Rattlecast features Rattle #65 contributor Alexandra Umlas and her debut book "At the Table of the Unknown," which, according to David Hernandez, is "deft, attentive, and often turn the quotidian into moments steeped in mystery."
As always, we'll also include live open mic after talking to our guest. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded or via Skype, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
____ Alexandra Umlas is the author of At the Table of the Unknown, published by Moon Tide Press. She is originally from Long Beach, CA, and currently lives in Huntington Beach, CA with her husband and two daughters. She holds an MFA in Poetry from California State University, Long Beach and an MA in Education with an emphasis in Cross-Cultural teaching.
For more information, visit: http://alexumlas.com
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On the open mic we featured:
Davion Tinsley Joshua Corwin Wilmer Ruiz Liz Gallo Aaron LaLux Alexej Savreux Kashiana Singh Kay Bell
Episode 8 of the Rattlecast features Kat Lehmann and her new book "Stumbling Toward Happiness," a spin on the “how to be happy” genre featuring 111 haibun and hybrid meditations of transformation and triumph.
As always, we'll also include live open mic after talking to our guest. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded or via Skype, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
____ Kat Lehmann is a Ph.D. scientist and a happiness and personal empowerment author. Her meditative writings are inspired by a deep contemplation of nature and the process of personal transformation. Kat writes at the intersect of poetry, meditation, self-help, and memoir. Her book "Small Stones from the River" (2017) collects tiny, nuanced truths about love, loss, healing, forgiveness, and resilience. Small Stones from the River is an ideal companion for quiet reflection or journaling, which can be done directly onto its pages. Her award-winning "Moon Full of Moons" (2015) is a collection of poetry about creating happiness in the midst of sadness. The book is divided into nine chapters, each named for a phase of the moon, to tell a story of a light that has known darkness. More than a hundred of her poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies. Kat lives in New England in the United States by the river where she writes, under a clear view of the Moon.
For more information, visit: https://songsofkat.com
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On the Open Mic:
Samantha Hawkins Emilio Puerta Carrie Magness Radna Bill Ratner Peter Specker (TWIXT) James Walton Elizabeth S. Wolf
Episode 7 of the Rattlecast features frequent Rattle contributor Kim Dower and her new book "Sunbathing on Tyrone Power's Grave." Who was Tyrone Power and what was the Poet Laureate of West Hollywood doing on his grave? We'll find out!
As always, we'll also include live open mic after talking to our guest. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded or via Skype, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
____ Kim Dower, originally from New York City, received a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she also taught creative writing. Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave is her fourth collection of poetry. Her other collections, Air Kissing on Mars, (2010) described by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” was on the Poetry Foundation’s Contemporary Best Sellers list, Slice of Moon, (2013) was nominated for a Pushcart, and called, “unexpected and sublime,” by “O” magazine, and Last Train to the Missing Planet, (2016), was described by Janet Fitch as being “full of worldly, humorous insights into life as it is,” were all published by Red Hen Press. Kim’s work has been featured in Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac," and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” as well as in Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Rattle and Eclipse. Her poems are included in several anthologies, including, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, (Beyond Baroque Books/Pacific Coast Poetry Series, 2015) and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles, (Tia Chucha Press). She teaches two workshops, Poetry and Dreaming and Poetry and Memory in the B.A. Program of Antioch University. Owner of Kim-from-L.A. a literary publicity company helping authors promote and market their books, Kim was the City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, from October, 2016 through October, 2018. She lives in West Hollywood with her family.
For more information, visit: http://kimdowerpoetry.com
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On the open mic:
Jonathan Humble Soren James Melinda Jane / The Poet MJ Nicole Jenkins Anthony Murphy Michelle Parks Emilio Puerta Sarah Simon
Episode 6 of the Rattlecast is a departure into the deep psyche—we'll be talking to Richard Gilbert about his book "Poetry as Consciousness" and the concept of the "haiku sanctuary," a zone of knowing between living and dreaming.
As always, we include a live open mic after talking to our guest. For details on how to participate, either pre-recorded or via Skype, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
Find Richard's book, "Poetry as Consciousness," here: https://anarchicsanctuary.com/book-sanctuary/poetry-as-consciousness-2/
And his essay on haiku sanctuary here: https://www.underthebasho.com/utb-2019/essays/2593-haiku-sanctuary,-between-living-and-dreaming.html
And find Gendai Haiku's archive of contemporary Japanese haiku poets here: http://gendaihaiku.com/
Join the Haiku Sanctuary: https://haikusanctuary.com
____ Richard Gilbert is a tenured Professor of American Literature at the Graduate School of Social and Cultural Sciences, Kumamoto University. In the 1980s, he studied with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and others at Naropa University (Boulder, Colorado). After receiving an MA in Contemplative Psychology he worked as an clinical outpatient psychotherapist; he received his Ph.D. in Poetics and Depth Psychology in 1990, studying Archetypal Psychology with James Hillman at The Union Institute & University. His book, Poems of Consciousness: Contemporary Japanese & English-language Haiku in Cross-cultural Perspective (2008), was awarded the HSA 2009 Mildred Kanterman Award for Haiku Criticism and Theory. In August 2013, The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A New Theory of English-language Haiku was awarded the Touchstone Prize in criticism. In 2017, he co‑authored Earth in Sunrise: A Course for English-Language Haiku Study.
____
On the Open Mic: Kris Beaver Kitty Carpenter Meg Eden George Morales J. Alan Nelson Toti O'Brien Lee Woodman Samantha Tisdel Wright
Rattlecast #5 features Pavana Reddy, plus another Skype open mic!
Pavana Reddy is a Los Angeles-based poet and songwriter. She is most well-known for her first book of poetry, Rangoli, as well as a song called “Remain the Sea,” written for the critically acclaimed album Land of Gold by Anoushka Shankar. She is currently set to release her second book of poems, Where Do You Go Alone, and is already working on her third.
For more on Pavana and her work, visit her website: https://www.pavanareddy.com/
Listen to Pavana Reddy's "Remain the Sea" performed by Anoushka Shankar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFNfYkT0ls4
Watch live on our YouTube channel (and be sure to subscribe!): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xMBJ5oWdTqfC2SrM-yMnw
Rattle is a publication of the Rattle Foundation, an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the practice of poetry, and is not affiliated with any other organization.
Rattlecast #4 features 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner Elizabeth S. Wolf, plus another Skype open mic!
Elizabeth S. Wolf is the author of the chapbook What I Learned: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Elizabeth’s poems have appeared in multiple anthologies and journals, including Persian Sugar in English Tea (in English & Farsi), Mosaics, Ibbetson Street, Peregrine Journal, Tuck Magazine, and others. She is a regular at the Merrimac Mic open mic and the Full Moon Story Slam. Elizabeth lives in Massachusetts and works as a metadata librarian.
For more on her chapbook, Did You Know?, go here: https://www.rattle.com/chapbooks/did-you-know/
Watch live on our YouTube channel (and be sure to subscribe!): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xMBJ5oWdTqfC2SrM-yMnw
Rattle is a publication of the Rattle Foundation, an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the practice of poetry, and is not affiliated with any other organization.
This special edition of the Rattlecast takes us to a meeting of the Powow River Poets, where they remember their friend and Powow member David Berman. Two of David's poems appeared posthumously in Rattle #62, and a poem written for him by Bruce Bennett appeared in the summer issue of the magazine. Bruce recently published a limited edition chapbook about David, called "First Reader."
Powow members Rhina Espaillat, Bruce Bennett, Alfred Nicoli, AM Juster join the livestream from Newburyport, Massachusetts.
For more on the Powow River Poets, visit their website: https://www.powowriverpoets.com/ ____ David Berman (1934-2017) was born on September 11, 1934, in New York City and raised in Hollywood, Florida. Berman was licensed as an attorney the same year and clerked at the Supreme Judicial Court for Justice Spiegel. From 1964 to 1967 he was an assistant attorney general under Edward Brooke. From 1967 until his death he had a private practice in the Boston area with an emphasis on business litigation.
Berman also had a parallel career as a poet. While working in Boston in the late 1950s, he took Robert Lowell's poetry seminar at Boston University. As a law student at Harvard he was permitted to take Archibald MacLeish's poetry course, which he called the "high point" of his week, and where he met and befriended the poet Bruce Bennett. While at Harvard, Berman was published in the Harvard Advocate and became "almost a fixture of its pages." Over the years, Berman published a number of poems in literary journals such as The Formalist, Piedmont Literary Review, Sparrow, Orbis, Iambs and Trochees, and Pivot. His favorite poems were eventually collected into a third chapbook, David Berman's Greatest Hits 1965-2002, published by Pudding House Publications.
Berman was a member of the Harvard Club and the Powow River Poets, a trustee of the Cantata Singers, and Vice Echanson and Vice Concelier Gastronomique Honoraire of the Boston chapter of the Confrerie de la Chaine des Rotisseurs. He passed away on June 22, 2017, after battling cancer for several months.
Rattle is a publication of the Rattle Foundation, an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the practice of poetry, and is not affiliated with any other organization.
Our second Rattlecast features Lynne Thompson. Lynne Thompson is the author of Start with a Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2013), Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007), and her newest book, Fretwork (Marsh Hawk Press, 2019). One of our most frequently published poets, she's also appeared in eight issues of Rattle, most recently Rattle #52.
Thompson received an Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles in 2015. She was born in Los Angeles, California, and received a BA from Scripps College and a JD from Southwestern Law School.
Watch live on our YouTube channel (and be sure to subscribe!): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xMBJ5oWdTqfC2SrM-yMnw
Our first Rattlecast livestream features Benjamin Aleshire, a poet-for-hire who travels the world writing poems for strangers on a manual typewriter. He'll read poems from his new book, Currency, and talk to Rattle editor Timothy Green about his life as a traveling bard, Instagram poetry, and more.
After the featured reading, we turn the stream over to an open mic via Skype.
______ Benjamin Aleshire is an artist based in New Orleans. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Iowa Review, Boston Review, and many others, and his poem "Good Manners" appears in Rattle #64. His collection of typewriter poems, 'Currency', is available at www.poetforhire.org
Rattle is a publication of the Rattle Foundation, an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the practice of poetry, and is not affiliated with any other organization.