Poets who know it

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2018

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To celebrate National Poetry Month, we’re featuring some of our favorite American practitioners. Tracy K. Smith shares some of her surprising sources of poetic inspiration: David Bowie and the Hubble Space Telescope. And she chooses the winners to our listener poetry competition. Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” gets the American Icons treatment. And Kurt Andersen talks to award-winning poet and “Sexiest Man Alive” Terrance Hayes about his 2015 book, “How to Be Drawn.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	from PRX
0:03.4	This is Studio 360.
0:10.0	I'm Curtis, and I'm sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
0:13.1	This first level of garden.
0:14.4	This is Thomas Jefferson's vegetable garden.
0:16.3	I like to have the roasted chicken base.
0:18.0	Very well done.
0:19.1	Editing is all about timing.
0:23.3	I try to get a little bit away from the actual subject.
0:25.2	You must get sick of your own voice, right?
0:28.9	Studio 360. With Kurt Anderson.
0:34.2	Our bodies run with ink-dark blood.
0:42.6	Blood pools in the pavements, seams. Is it strange to say love is a language few practice, but all or near all speak? Even the men in black armor, the ones jangling
0:51.8	handcuffs and keys. What else are they so buffered against,
0:57.0	if not love's blade, sizing up the heart's familiar meat?
1:02.0	We watch and grieve.
1:05.0	We sleep, stir, eat.
1:09.0	Love, the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.
1:15.4	Love.
1:17.0	Naked almost in the everlasting street.
1:20.4	Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.
1:27.4	That's Tracy K. Smith reading her poem, Unrest in Back kind of breeze.
	...

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