Happy totality! I hope many of you were able to view today’s total solar eclipse.
An auspicious meeting of astronomical event and poetry book, as today we feature Lisa Ampleman and her book Mom in Space. And if you’re stuck in traffic after leaving your eclipse viewing spot, it’s a good time to load up the podcast and give it a listen.
Lisa Ampleman is the author of three full-length poetry collections—Mom in Space, Romances, and Full Cry, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competition sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies—and the chapbook I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You, winner of the Wick chapbook competition. Her poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and in literary journals, including 32 Poems, Image, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and The Rumpus.
Lisa is the recipient of scholarships and prizes from the Sewanee Writers Conference, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes, the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat. Most recently, she was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for FY2022.
She is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and the poetry series editor at Acre Books.
Read more about Lisa on her website.
Pick up a copy of Mom in Space.
And if you’re in the Cincinnati area, find her reading at the Cincinnati Observatory this April.
Reading Recommendations
Beyond Lisa’s book, LSU Press has had a great spring season in poetry books. They also put out Ryan Wilson’s In Ghostlight and George David Clark’s Newly Not Eternal, for two examples.
Since this day is a total solar eclipse across much of North America, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the outstanding essay by Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse,” from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. In it, she describes witnessing a total eclipse that passed over the Yakima Valley, Washington, in 1979.
She writes of the moment of eclipse: “The deepest, and most terrifying, was this: I have said, I heard screams. (I have since read that screaming, with hysteria, is a common reaction even to expected total eclipses.) People on all the hillsides, including, I think, myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. But something else was happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, which made us scream.
“The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and locked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon.”
I’ve remembered that description of the fast-moving shadow ever since first reading this essay as a student at Alfred University.
Future Episodes:
Episode 4: J.L. Conrad / A World in Which
A new series of shorter shows on individual poems, called Sidebar.
Other ways to follow us:
Website: http://drunkasapoet.com
Instagram: @drunkasapoetonpayday
BlueSky: drunkasapoet.bsky.social
TikTok: @jgraypoet
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 the soon-closing 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