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poetry book, podcast, tv show, a protest movement

Hello! In this paid post, I want to do a new thing and talk loosely about projects and stuff I am interested in — not all of which are online. There’s a poetry book, a podcast, a TV show, and a protest movement in this post. It is a little inspired by what John Ganz (whose newsletter

Unpopular Front

I recommend) does.

But people on TikTok also message me asking what books I like, and I realize that maybe the reason they do that is because it’s getting harder to find cool things nowadays (slop capitalism maybe is at fault). And so here are a few cool things I’ve found (or re-found) lately and want to share with you (audio version is below paywall):

Spring and All, William Carlos Williams

I re-read this book ( pdf link ) every spring. It’s short, and probably WCW’s most famous one — it has some real bangers in it (like the Red Wheelbarrow poem). I love having a poetry book or anthology around because when my attention span doesn’t feel long enough for a novel, I can read a poem, which might be like a page long.

Williams

Reading poetry for me is meditative. You don’t understand a line, so you re-read. Spin your eye down the page, bring it back again, and do that exact same thing but stay focused and let it hit different — the motion reminds me of breathing during meditation.

I’m grateful to college professors that taught me to close-read poems, so I usually read once to get an impression, then again watching punctuation and sentence structure. I scan syllables, looking at rhythm and marking it with a pencil if there’s something interesting happening. And then I think about imagery, or try to memorize a little snippet of it. Doing these motions over and over is really soothing, and it’s one reason why I tend to like older poems that are really rhythmic and rhyming.

Spring and All is not older poetry, of course — it is emphatically modern, and it really is the founding branch of one of the big forests of American (and probably world) poetry today. Rupi Kaur can make her lines like that and have people see it as poetry because WCW did it first. Written in 1923, it’s kind of a reply to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which Williams found to be far too Doomer. Spring and All looks at war, electricity, industrialization, commercial culture, and modernity. It’s also about America. There’s a part in “To Elsie” which always hits:

Somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

The “it” could be many things, from the United States to capitalism, to modernity in general — which is why the word grabs so much power. In other forms of writing, language is most potent when it is discerning and specific — we generally associate clarity with articulateness. But poetry (and memes too) can say a lot through ambiguity, by not precisely marking what an “it” or a “this” might be, and letting you feel the way your mind wants to fill the gap (makes me think of those “when it happens” TikToks). This is the point of poetic language to me.

And then that metaphor — “no one to drive the car.” In the poem, it’s 1923, so cars are pretty new. And that’s still what it feels like to live in the United States — we’re just barreling down the road somewhere, strapped into a powerful new technology, and there’s no one to drive the car. Which in a way is even scarier than somebody bad driving the car.

Revolutions podcast (Mike Duncan)

I discovered Revolutions podcast — the original seasons — years after its original run. I started with the French Revolution, and listened through the rest, deciding to save the hundred-plus half hour episodes telling the story of the Russian Revolution for last. I used it to to help me fall asleep, and so Mike Duncan’s voice is ingrained deep in my subconscious.

What’s fascinating about Revolutions is the arc of the series. Duncan started twenty years ago as a history nerd working at a grocery fish counter, creating History of Rome in his spare time (which is also brilliant). He started Revolutions as an entrepreneurial and successful podcaster who had essentially helped invent the medium, fresh off History of Rome’s success, wanting to tackle more modern stuff. He began with the English and American revolutions and moved in roughly chronological order, devoting a season to each revolution. Around the Haitian Revolution (season 4) you see the change described in the meme below, which I found on the subreddit for the podcast: