Last episode’s Sidebar foray into the poetry of Anthony Hecht was fun, and I’ll do it again soon.
But back to our interview series! Today I get to talk to J.L. Conrad, author of the new book of poems, A World in Which, just published by Terrapin Books. Jen Conrad and I met when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, for a few years and we were a part of a great poetry writing group that was very helpful to me as I was working on the poems that would become my second book, Radiation King. As you’ll hear in our conversation, an aspect of Conrad’s poems I find so admirable is her ability to put the reader in an off-kilter space. The world of her poems is often a familiar one, but one where strange things happen, or where some expected rule of our universe doesn’t seem to apply. She has a terrific way of populating her poems with the natural world, as well.
Find the show on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Transistor, and many other podcast hosts.
J.L Conrad’s first full-length book is A Cartography of Birds (LSU Press), and she has published the chapbooks Recovery (2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize) and Not If But When (Salt Hill’s 2015 Dead Lake Chapbook Contest). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Jellyfish, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in creative writing from American University and PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. And she lives in Madison still, that great capital city and land of delicious fried cheese curds [Jason’s addition], as well as a fantastic writing community.
Pick up a copy of A World in Which here.
Read more about J.L. Conrad.
After our conversation, Jen Conrad emailed me to confirm her reference to Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. In a letter to Sachs, Celan wrote:
I am sending you something here that will help against the little doubts that sometimes come to one; it is a piece of sycamore bark. You take it between the thumb and the index finger, hold it very tight and think of something good. But—I can’t keep it from you—poems, and yours especially, are even better pieces of sycamore bark. So please, start writing again. And let us have something for our fingers.”
In Nelly Sachs’s poem, “You,” she talks about words as stones:
You
in the night
busy unlearning the world
from far far away
your finger painted the ice grotto
with the singing map of a hidden sea
which assembled its notes in the shell of your ear
bridge-building stones
from Here to There
this precise task
whose completion
is left to the dying.
Coming soon on the podcast:
A new Sidebar episode featuring the too-little known poet Barbara Jordan!
Some notes:
Recently, I was fortunate to read at Bull City Press’s relaunch of its House Party reading series along with writers David Haynes, Sebastian Merrill, and Karen Tucker. As a part of that reading, Bull City made this gorgeous broadside of my poem, “Octopus,” that originally appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review. I feel so honored that my poem was turned into this.
It looks great on the wall. You can pick one up for your own home for only $10 (!) from Bull City. There are lots of great other ones too if you’re looking to redecorate in a literary theme.
I like octopuses. I loved getting to see behind the scenes of their exhibit when I interned at the National Aquarium in Baltimore many years ago. One would sneak out of its tank at night and eat the fish next door. So, I’m watching the new National Geographic documentary Secrets of the Octopus, and I couldn’t believe this piece of information I never knew: Even though they can change the color of their skin to match their surroundings in less than a second (not to mention also their texture), octopuses are colorblind.
They see with their skin.
Have at that fun fact, poets.
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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