Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures

and presenting the intersection of spirituality, politics, and philosophy in an engaging and accessible way.

Well, friends, one of my closest friends, a poet once told me that her first word as a child was no.

And she said that that was a huge part of how she became a poet, that the world wouldn't

stay in place for her unless she permitted it.

And I love this because it indicated to me that there was something about seeing things differently,

about the world opening up for her through a refusal to just accept the inherited language

that fixed objects, that fixed definitions, that fix the explanations and the lines.

Today's episode is with poet Stephen Sexton, and it features his reading of poetry from

his amazing book, If All the World and Love Were Young, which is about death and Super Mario World.

Each poem is named after and loosely follows a level in the game, and it helped me understand just how deeply poetry can go.

I mean, I've had all these frustrations or confusions around how we fit our view of games, console games, video games,

you know, all this, into our lives when we want to consider the world spiritually.

And Stephen's poetry really relevates all of that for me. We also talk about light

and surfaces and the dead and the way repetition works. We talk about his other two amazing books,

oils and the upcoming book, Cheryl's Destinies. So we talk about the playing of console games as spells and as a sort of suppressed kind of

pornography about writing an elegy made up of poems to put grief into a game and turning that game into a monument.

We talk about the tarot and how to make a time horse. You'll see what I mean.

Stephen's poetry, I think, really gives people a doorway in, or maybe like a green pipe, a portal to

a strange world that is our own world through poetry, just like my friend's word no gave to her

when she was a child. I know that people

who are interested in poetry often sing its praises to the bafflement of those who don't read it.

...