ep. 172 - Elaine Sexton

Elaine Sexton’s latest collection of poems is Drive (Grid Books, 2022). Her three previous books of poetry are: Sleuth (New Issues, 2003), Causeway (New Issues, 2008), and Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015). An avid book maker and micro-publisher, she is the author of several chapbooks, and has curated site-specific events with accompanying limited-edition chapbooks, and periodicals, among them Hair and 2 Horatio. She teaches text and image and poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has been guest faculty at New York University and in the graduate writing program at City College (CUNY). Formerly a senior editor at ARTnews and visual arts editor for Tupelo Quarterly, she serves as a contributing editor for On the Seawall, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Find much more here: https://www.elainesexton.org/ As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/ This Week's Prompt: Victoria Chang radically changes the way in which we regard obituaries by writing an entire poetry collection using obits as form. Write an obituary for one of the following: a previous version of yourself, a friendship or romantic relationship, a body part, your adult child’s childhood, or for someone who has not died but that you’ve lost (read “One Year After My Dying Father and I Stop Speaking to Each Other Again” by Eugenia Leigh in Split This Rock for inspiration!) Next Week’s Prompt: Color Memory. What is your earliest memory of a color? Draft notes toward a poem starting with the first thing, the first color that comes to mind. Name it, and refine this description. Write down any and all details you can think of related to this color, describing it so a reader can begin to "see" what you see, and the circumstances around this experience. Joseph Albers, artist, color theorist, and arts educator, wrote: “If one says “Red” (the name of the color) and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.” He considered color to be “passive, deceiving, and unstable.” When drafting your next poem describe the color and every action, idea, and concrete image that comes to mind. This may be a list poem, a prose poem. See what comes. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.