Episode 156: The Challenge/Pleasure Ratio

Kathy puts the kibosh on our introductory weather ramblings, Slushies. Instead we’re sharing what makes us grateful. Seems like, with our combined love of coffee, we’re keeping the baristas in business. Aside from java, Tobi’s thankful for poetry podcasts (not just ours), including Poem Talk from Penn Sound. Lisa’s grateful for the public library that gives her free access to novels like The Copywriter by Daniel Poppick. Eric appreciates his students. And we reveal the secret behind why we’re not on YouTube. Of course we’re thankful to YOU for listening, Slushies, and to the writers who allow us to discuss their work, like today’s featured poet, Sarah Brockhaus.   In the first poem, “Still Here,” Eric notes the honest intertwining of the writing and teaching life. And Tobi remarks how the flexible nature of the English language, with its ability to shift nouns into verbs, is on display in the poem. The poem’s nimble leaps reminds Jason of Richard Siken’s valuable advice to “focus less on the lyric leap and more on the lyric landing.” The second poem challenges us with its frequent use of enjambment and caesura, but the ratio of challenge to pleasure is high. We end with Jason’s sage advice on how to structure a submission. Thanks, as always, for listening, Slushies!   At the table: Eric Baker, Tobi Kassim, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (Sound Engineer)   Author Bio: Sarah Brockhaus is an MFA student at Louisiana State University. She is a co-editor of The Shore Poetry. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and her poems are published or forthcoming in Guernica, The National Poetry Review, American Literary Review, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere. Website: sarahbrockhaus.com Social Media:    Instagram: @sarahb._23   Blue Sky: scbrock.bsky.social   Still Here   I try to teach  my students to exist outside  themselves and they email about double    spacing and panic apologize for 12:01 submissions  and I want to see them and say we’re real  people, all of us, we’re real. Do you see? But I stare    at my wall for hours and it means nothing. I’ve been losing  things in dreams, each shape afterimages on my lids  and I can’t see the space around enough    to place them. Perhaps there never was a hairbrush, a magnet in the shape  of Louisiana, a letter written springs ago. Fingers trace    the handwriting by heart like revision,  same stories and script but the wrong  heart. I’m translating farther and farther   from the origin. My nails grow too long. I imagine  myself bodiless, avoid reflections. I hold still  and myself.    There are eight taxidermied ducklings at the craft fair. So like life and so  still. I want to break    them from the cage, find a way  for their bodies  to hold again.   Phonagnosia   A wasp taps again against  the window. I imagine the hollow  clunk communicating other causes: an acorn    slouching from a branch into a pool. A man’s  head, drunk, hitting the wall lullabically, my hand  slid into the space between skin and cinder   -block, how one might protect a baby’s soft  skull from a corner. I try to tell the wasp I am not  home and everything from my body sounds    human. To sleep I make lists on the uselessness  of language: the phrase how are you? and how your doing well is a wall I trace my own name    on like tally marks, how the sea swallows  song and estranges it, how without air I am voice -less, how I haven’t trained my ear to echo locate,    and can’t even vibrate some signal through a        pane  of glass, can’t replay what you said years ago in any voice    but the one inside me, that won’t go, won’t sound  like anyone I know.