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Rumble Strip

A Perfect Drive with Garret Keizer

Rumble Strip

Erica Heilman / Rumble Strip

Places & Travel, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.91.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2019

⏱️ 19 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

'What good is a poem? Maybe the good lies in the fact that there’s no easy answer to that question...'

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The show is sponsored by Honey Road, serving Eastern Mediterranean small plates at the corner of Church and Main Street in downtown Burlington.

0:09.0

Head Chef Kara Tobin was a James Beard semi-finalist in both 2018 and 2019.

0:15.0

Plus she and Allison who own and run the restaurant are just excellent people.

0:20.0

If you're going out to dinner, go there. You won't be sorry.

0:25.0

On to the show.

0:27.0

Welcome to Rumble Strip.

0:37.0

Confession.

0:39.0

The month is only two days old and already we have seen a circus and ridden a bicycle together.

0:48.2

I wish I had never told a lie in my life.

1:00.6

That's Garrett Kaiser reading one of his poems in a field in the late summer in the Northeast Kingdom. We found the right field after a couple hours

1:04.0

driving around the kingdom talking about poetry and Lake Willoughby and fishing

1:08.2

spots. Look at that hedge. That's a commitment. That is the mother of all hedges.

1:15.0

We have a beautiful day for a drive, don't we?

1:18.0

I first heard of Garrett Kaiser a few years ago when I read his book,

1:22.0

Getting Schooled, about his years as a high school teacher up here in the kingdom.

1:26.0

He described this place where we both live more honestly and more humanely than anything I'd ever read about this place before, the humor, the poverty, the landscape.

1:36.0

Garrett's written a number of books he writes for Harper's magazine and Mother Jones and a bunch of others,

1:41.0

and is one of the only writers where I find myself copying whole passages down from his work, like I'll need them later.

1:49.0

They're not always easy or nice things I copy down.

1:52.0

Garrett Kaiser is one of the most critical and most contemplative people I've ever met.

1:57.5

I write them down because they remind me of something fundamental about being human that I don't want to forget.

2:03.0

Recently he came out with a book of poetry called The World Pushes Back.

...

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