Let's Have a Renaissance: The DateKeepers Podcast with Itto and Mekiya Outini
Sep 30, 2026 · 36 min · 14 segments
In this episode, we speak with Jeremy Schraffenberger, poet, author, educator, and editor of *The North American Review*, about his many deaths and resurrections, what it means to lose a mother, the…
It's the titular line, but there's a peculiar American sadness that lasts forever.
What is particularly American about this mode of sadness that you are investigating?
I love it when you're interviewed and you can tell that the hosts have actually read your work.
Well, first of all, I'd say the whole collection being called American Sad, you know, it's confronting the sad, the dark, things that one would rather not face all the time.
I call these poems in American Sad my nightmare poems, where I'm talking sometimes about literal nightmares, but also just darker moments in life.
It's always looking toward, you know, Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, self-reliance, and that if you just work hard enough, you will succeed.
And I think that holding out that kind of promise of a future golden era, it's a myth, first of all, but we don't give it up.
And I think holding on to something like that can be a peculiar kind of sadness.
I do think that if the American character, as some have posed, is kind of defined by our relationship to the wild, for instance, on the frontier, as the civilized East slowly colonized the West in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, That kind of manifest destiny feeling leads to sadness when you realize that we can no longer truly engage with that time or that space, that frontier.
It's the titular line, but there's a peculiar American sadness that lasts forever.
What is particularly American about this mode of sadness that you are investigating?
I love it when you're interviewed and you can tell that the hosts have actually read your work.
Well, first of all, I'd say the whole collection being called American Sad, you know, it's confronting the sad, the dark, things that one would rather not face all the time.
I call these poems in American Sad my nightmare poems, where I'm talking sometimes about literal nightmares, but also just darker moments in life.
It's always looking toward, you know, Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, self-reliance, and that if you just work hard enough, you will succeed.
And I think that holding out that kind of promise of a future golden era, it's a myth, first of all, but we don't give it up.
And I think holding on to something like that can be a peculiar kind of sadness.
I do think that if the American character, as some have posed, is kind of defined by our relationship to the wild, for instance, on the frontier, as the civilized East slowly colonized the West in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, That kind of manifest destiny feeling leads to sadness when you realize that we can no longer truly engage with that time or that space, that frontier.
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