Today the show features Kevin Prufer, whose new book of poems, The Fears, has just been awarded the Rilke Prize! That’s a pretty big deal, but it’s a pretty great book. We spoke before the news was out, so I didn’t get a chance to congratulate him then, but I send that out now. The Fears also received the 2024 Burdine Johnson Honor Award of the Texas Institute of Letters.
Kevin Prufer’s poems often feature Roman and Greek myths and history, and being fascinated by that my whole life, it’s an immediate attractor to me, as it is in A.E. Stallings’ great poems—I was just talking with some poet friends about D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, a picture book I would check out of my school library all the time when I was a kid. But what makes me stay with his poems, reread them, is that he has a great way of straddling the lyric/narrative edge in his work. I’m not that much of a narrative poet, so I’m very interested in poems that can tell me a story without losing steam or growing boring.
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Kevin Prufer is the author of several books of poetry, including The Art of Fiction (2021), How He Loved Them (2018), Churches (2014), In a Beautiful Country (2011), and National Anthem (2008), all from Four Way Books. His new novel Sleepaway was published in 2024 by Acre Books.
He’s edited several volumes of poetry, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; with Wayne Miller), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016; with Wayne Miller & Travis Kurowski), and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017; with Martha Collins).
With Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, Prufer directs the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little known authors to new generations of readers through the annual republication of a large body of each author’s work, printed alongside essays, photographs, and ephemera.
Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.
Among Prufer’s awards and honors are many Pushcart prizes and Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. His poetry collection How He Loved Them was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book of 2018 from the American literary press.
Pick up a copy of The Fears here and Sleepaway here.
Read more about Kevin Prufer.
Coming soon on the podcast:
Up next is an interview with Callie Siskel on her new book, Two Minds. Also a new Sidebar episode featuring the too-little known poet Barbara Jordan!
Some notes:
I asked Kevin about his use of the + sign in his work, and if you’d like to see an example of it, here’s his poem “Election Night,” on the Academy of American Poets website. (And an excerpt of it below, but do go read the entire poem. It’s useful reading for next November.)
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Kevin and I spoke a bit about the poet Reginald Shepherd, whom he references in his poem, “W.H. Auden’s ‘The Fall of Rome’.” I still treasure my copy of Shepherd’s chapbook, Itinerary, from GreenTower Press, that John Gallaher was kind enough to send me not long after Shepherd passed away, far too young, from colon cancer. Get screened, folks! It’s taken a good bit of time, but Shepherd’s selected poems has finally been published, by the University of Pittsburgh Press (edited by Jericho Brown), and you can grab a copy here. And it’s on sale, during June, with the code PRIDE30.
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I’m on another podcast! My friend, Vicky Derkson, hosts the podcast Night Sky Tourist, and graciously asked me to read some “twilight” poems for her forthcoming episode on the subject. You’ll hear me read my own poem, “Twilight” (originally published on Rust & Moth) and Barbara Jordan’s poem, “Threshold,” from her book, Trace Elements. It’s a great podcast for night sky gazers; do give it a listen.
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Website: http://drunkasapoet.com
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About your host: Jason Gray is the author of the poetry books Radiation King (Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden (Hollis Summers Prize), and his poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and Image. His career in publishing has brought him to the university presses of Ohio State and Wisconsin, and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
A note on the podcast title. I am an unabashed fan of The Simpsons, and in Season 8, Episode 9 “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer),” Marge attempts to stop Homer from going to the local chili cook-off, because, as she says, every time he does, he “get[s] drunk as a poet on payday.” And that has made me laugh for decades now.
I in no way endorse getting oneself overserved and behaving like a jackass, poetic or otherwise. And if you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, there are resources for you: Alcoholics Anonymous Al-Anon