Poetry

That's a good way to put it.

so uh yeah we want to end by introducing our guests for this episode which um you know i went solo uh this this this time and and uh in talking to joel diaz porter i think the the best way i can introduce him is to do a little story time about my own personal experience with joel because joel's somebody who i've known for a long time now um Way back in, I want to say 2013, right around when I was starting to write about poker and starting to kind of collect stories from looking for interesting characters in the poker world, I stumbled on a profile of Joel in Poetry Magazine, in which he was described as a... a homeless poker-playing poet living in Atlantic City who basically used his comps at the Borgata to just kind of hop from hotel room to hotel room, play cards, and write poems.

And as kind of a literature nerd myself and a longtime poker player, I was like, I need to meet this guy.

So at some point in 2013, 2014, I actually flew up to AC and spent a weekend with Joel.

Yeah, and so that was my first...

When I first discovered you, I think it was a friend of yours, he wrote kind of a...

I guess it was a sort of profile of you in, I think, Poetry Magazine or something.

And the way that you were described was this... homeless poker playing poet, you know, homeless because you basically had comped hotel rooms and you hopped from, you know, whatever casino to casino and you were grinding playing poker and, you know, you're also writing, which we'll get to.

Yeah, and totally.

And so this poem was in Poetry Magazine last year.

I don't know much about Caroline Laganas, but...

She is doing, I believe, a PhD and she earned an MFA in creative writing from California Institute of the Arts.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Larry Wilson Prejudices, First Series by H. L. Mencken The New Poetry Movement The current pother about poetry, now gradually subsiding, seems to have begun about seven years ago, say in 1912.

It was during that year that Harriet Monroe established Poetry, a magazine of verse, in Chicago, and ever since then she has been the mother superior of the movement.

Other leaders have occasionally disputed her command.

The bombastic Braithwaite, with his annual anthology of magazine verse, Amy Lowell with her solemn pronunciamentos in the manner of a Harvard professor, Rachel Lindsay with his nebulous vaporings and chautauqua posturings, even such cheap jacks as Alfred Kreimborg out of Greenwich Village.

But the importance of Miss Monroe grows more manifest as year chases year.

year.She was, to begin with, clearly the pioneer.

Poetry was on the stands nearly two years before the first Braithwaite anthology, and long before Miss Lowell had been lured from her earlier finishing school doggerels by the Franco-British imagists.

It's such a pleasure.

Carl Dennis is the author of 14 previous books of poetry, most recently Earthborn, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

He taught for many years in the English Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo and in the Warren Wilson Writing Program in North Carolina.

He lives in Buffalo, New York.

But speaking of a mini sermon, I want to draw our attention now, collectively, class, to the poem memorandum.

And There is a line, well, a stanza in this poem that I have actually written out.

I share it across social media during National, I think it was National Poetry Month.

I posted one poem or at least a section of a poem every day.

It's called Abracadabra.

She published it in Poetry Magazine in 2019.

My mother holds the wriggling mouse in her gloved hand, thumb poised above its vertebrae.

My father in his white coat behind her whispers the right places to break.

Did it happen in that discovering poetry? Did it be another slower thing?

It did.

It was, it was that, it was that, um, Poetry was just so much stronger for me.

Wow.

It was just so much, the pull was just so much stronger.

The poetry would show me something, and then I would write the prose after to try to figure out what the poem had shown me.

And I was always making these definitions.

Poetry does this, as my first book is full of this.

Prejudices, first series by H. L. Mencken.

The New Poetry Movement.

The current pother about poetry, now gradually subsiding, seems to have begun about seven years ago, say in 1912.

It was during that year that Harriet Monroe established Poetry, a magazine of verse, in Chicago, and ever since then she has been the mother superior of the movement.

Other leaders have occasionally disputed her command.

The bombastic Braithwaite, with his annual anthology of magazine verse, Amy Lowell with her solemn pronunciamentos in the manner of a Harvard professor, Vachel Lindsay with his nebulous vaporings and Chautauqua posturings, even such cheap jacks as Alfred Kreinborg, out of Greenwich Village.

But the importance of Miss Monroe grows more manifest as year chases year.

She was, to begin with, clearly the pioneer.

Her debut novel, Rabbit and Juliet, was named a Best YA Book of 2024 by both Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal.

She's also the author of four poetry collections and is a two-time Pushcart Prize winner whose poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry.

She holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD from Florida State University.

She's been teaching for 20 years, currently as a professor at North Central College.