Rattle Poetry Rattlecast

Chera Hammons is a winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award through PEN Texas and the 2020 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award through the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and recently served as Writer-in-Residence at West Texas A&M University. Her poetry chapbook Amaranthine Hour received the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award. Poetry collections include Recycled Explosions, The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City, and Maps of Injury. Her debut novel, Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom, is available through Torrey House Press. She is a member of the editorial board of poetry journal One. She often writes about chronic illness and invisible disability, horses, and the unique landscape of the Texas panhandle, where she resides. Find her on Instagram @chera_writes.

For more on Chera, visit her website:
https://www.cherahammons.com/

As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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:
Write journalistic poem that explores the sensory details of where you live.

Next Week’s Prompt:
Write a poem that features multiple unexpected turns, leaps, or voltas.

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.

Kari Gunter-Seymour first appeared on Rattlecast 48 and was interviewed in our Appalachian Poets issue. She is the current Poet Laureate of Ohio and just published a new book of poems, Dirt Songs. Her previous poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. A ninth-generation Appalachian, she is the editor of I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, funded by the Academy of American Poets and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Women of Appalachia Project’s anthology series Women Speak.

For more on Kari, visit her website:
https://www.karigunterseymourpoet.com/

As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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:
Write a traditional ghazal that references at least one other poet. When submitting, please include the name of the poets referenced in the submission note.

Next Week's Prompt:
Write journalistic poem that explores the sensory details of where you live.

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.

Maaz Bin Bilal is a poet, translator, and academic. His first collection of poetry, Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu, was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. His translations of Fikr Taunvis’s Partition diary, The Sixth River, and Mirza Ghalib’s Persian long poem on Banaras, Chiragh-e-Dair, Temple Lamp, were also critically noted. Reviews of his books may be found in Wasafiri, World Literature Today, The Hindu, Indian Express, and other publications. His poems have been translated into German, Hindi, Irish, and Bengali. Maaz was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Trust fellowship in writing and translation in Wales (2018–19), and the Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship in writing in Germany (2022–23). He holds a PhD on the politics of friendship in E. M. Forster’s work from Queen’s University Belfast and teaches literary studies at O. P. Jindal Global University.

For more on Maaz, visit his website:
https://www.maazbinbilal.com

As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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:
Write a poem set on a specific road or path.

Next Week’s Prompt:
Write a traditional ghazal that references at least one other poet. When submitting, please include the name of the poets referenced in the submission note.

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.

Erin Murphy first appeared on Rattlecast 142. She is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Human Resources, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; Fluent in Blue (April 2024); Taxonomies (2022), a collection of demi-sonnets, a form she devised; and Assisted Living (2018), poems about caregiving. In addition, her chapbooks include Fields of Ache, a collection of centos (2022). Her most recent co-edited anthologies are Bodies of Truth, a collection of narrative medicine essays (University of Nebraska Press), and Creating Nonfiction (SUNY Press), both of which won Gold Medals in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.

For more on Erin, visit her website:
https://sites.psu.edu/erincmurphy/

As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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:
Write an elegy for something that was in your home.

Next Week’s Prompt:
Write a poem set on a specific road or path.

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.

Christine Potter is the author of the time-traveling YA series The Bean Books. She has also published three collections of her poems: Zero Degrees At First Light, Sheltering In Place, and most recently, Unforgetting. She's taught creative writing to high schoolers, junior high students, and senior citizens. Christine ran the online poetry workshop The Gazebo for many years. Her poems have appeared in magazines ranging from Rattle to The Anglican Theological Review--and once wrapped around a stick of Double Bubble in Gum Ball Poetry. She's been nominated for the Pushcart Prize a few times, and has had a poem commissioned for July 4th by ABC Radio News. Christine is also a sometimes-singer and a dulcimer and guitar player who knows how to fake change ringing on a small carillon. She's appeared many times in Rattle and Poets Respond, and is the new poetry editor of Eclectica magazine.

For more on Chris, visit her website:
https://chrispygal.weebly.com/

As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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:
Write an extended metaphor poem that features a celestial body.

Next Week’s Prompt:
Write an elegy for something that was in your home.

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.

Annie Finch is an American poet, writer, translator, speaker, teacher, and performer. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Spells: New and Selected Poems. Her other works include influential essays, books, and anthologies on poetics, feminism, and women’s earth-based spirituality, including the influential book Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. Educated at Yale and Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D, she has lectured at universities including Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford and performed her poetry across the United States and in India, Mexico, Africa, and throughout Europe. She was the interviewee in issue 82 of Rattle.

For more on Annie, visit her website:
https://anniefinch.com/

Annie also shared some links and notes on meter:

How to Scan a Poem video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZh1NNP6WsQ

Substack scansion intro
https://anniefinch.substack.com/p/useful-background-on-scansion

How to Scan a Poem (print)
https://bookshop.org/a/1041/9781737307563

Poetry Witch Community/Meter Magic Spiral
www.poetrywitch.org

As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. 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:
Write a poem set in a place you’ve always dreamed of going to but never have. Allude to all the basic senses.

Next Week’s Prompt:
Write an extended metaphor poem that features a celestial body.

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.