Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People)

Dec 28 2023 100 ep. 100 mins 694

Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People) Podcast artwork

Intimate and compelling interviews by Rachel Zucker with poets and other artists. Become a Patron & support our growing podcast! www.patreon.com/commonplacepodcast

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Episode 121: Fred Moten and Ronaldo Wilson - Part 2

Dec 28 2023 92 mins

In this two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Fred Moten about poetry as performance, influences and teachers, open field poetics, finding space for listeners and audience to feel welcome, how to define the limits—or lack thereof— of a book and, specifically, the performance they gave the night before at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church on Ma

Episode 120: Fred Moten and Ronaldo V. Wilson

Dec 27 2023 93 mins

In this two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Fred Moten about poetry as performance, influences and teachers, open field poetics, finding space for listeners and audience to feel welcome, how to define the limits—or lack thereof— of a book and, specifically, the performance they gave the night before at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church on Ma

Episode 119: Eugenia Leigh's Bianca (KTCO feed drop)

Dec 07 2023 100 mins

In this second Keep the Channel Open feed drop (check out our first, episode 113!), Rachel and Mike Sakasegawa discuss Bianca by Eugenia Leigh.

Episode 118: Laurel Snyder

Nov 20 2023 90 mins

Rachel talks with long time friend and writer for children, Laurel Snyder. They talk about the Iowa Writers Workshop, Laurel’s path from poet to children’s book author, money, the novice brain, labor, being “messy and extra but not totally batshit,” the relationship between poetry and picture books, the experimental nature of picture books, world building, getting things ou

Episode 117: Charif Shanahan & Safia Elhillo with Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Oct 30 2023 89 mins

Poets Safia Elhillo and Charif Shanahan talk to Isaac Ginsberg Miller, a poet and PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern, about their friendship, kinship, seeing and being seen by others, their intended audiences and ideal readers, inherited/received forms, experimentalism, the instability of racialized experience for many Black Southwest Asians and North African

Episode 116: The Gathered Congregation

Poets Jason Schneiderman, Cate Marvin, R. A. Villanueva, Lynn Xu and Rachel Zucker consider the pleasures, challenges, eccentricities and value of live, in-person poetry readings. These musings are followed by excerpts of the June 6, 2023 reading in Bryant Park (hosted by Jason and featuring Cate, Ron, Lynn and Rachel) and comments from the audience. PODCAST: PLAY IN NE

Episode 115: Moheb Soliman

Sep 08 2023 72 mins

Poet and interdisciplinary artist Moheb Soliman sits down with V Conaty at AWP in Seattle to talk about his debut collection HOMES, regionalism as a creative and critical practice, the poetics of the watershed, the “third coasts” of the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, having a non-extractive relationship to place, immigrant, indigenous, and settler narratives of the Great L

Episode 114: Live & Embodied

Host Rachel Zucker talks with choreographer Hope Mohr about her dance Horizon Stanzas (inspired by Alice Notley's feminist epic The Descent of Alette), the live arts, performance and distributed leadership, and with writer Alyssa Harad about Mohr, Notley, performance, power, feminism and much more.

113: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Aug 07 2023 75 mins

After a brief Commonplace update, Rachel shares episode 143 of Keep the Channel Open with host Mike Sakasagawa and guest Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a writer based in the Bronx, NY. In his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana presents us with a dystopian future America where convicted prisoners fight each other to the death in a televised bloodsport.

Episode 112: Gabrielle Octavia Rucker with V Conaty

Jun 14 2023 116 mins

Poet and teaching artist Gabrielle Octavia Rucker sits down with Commonplace producer V Conaty in Rachel's home in Washington Heights. They discuss Gabrielle's debut collection Dereliction, published last year by The Song Cave. The conversation wanders to being a self-taught writer, growing up, working odd jobs and then working for oneself, gnostic gospels, memes, the role of poetr