Episode 125: The Poetics of Motherhood
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The third of five episodes featuring the lectures that became Rachel Zucker’s newest book, The Poetics of Wrongness. After an introduction from Rachel this episode contains archival audio of “Why She Could Not Write A Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood” presented at the UC Berkeley English Department on November 15, 2016 and the introduction to the event given by poet Robert Hass.
In this lecture, Rachel Zucker—while teaching and mothering and preparing to record a conversation with poet mother Alicia Ostriker in the months leading up to and in the days following the 2016 presidential election—discusses the difficulty of writing a lecture on the work of poet mothers Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Toi Derricotte and others, and what might or might not constitute a poetics of motherhood.
Many thanks to the English Department at UC Berkeley, The Bagley Wright Poetry Lecture Series and the BWLS Podcast, Ellen Welcker, Heidi Broadhead, Charlie Wright and everyone at Wave Books. Here is a longer list of acknowledgments and a partial list of referenced sources for Rachel’s lectures.
Books by Rachel Zucker
Books by Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg
Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (University of Iowa Press, 2010)
Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (University of Iowa Press, 2008)
Also Referenced
Bio
Rachel Zucker is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose including The Poetics of Wrongness, SoundMachine and MOTHERs. In addition to working as a labor doula, childbirth educator, and pearl stringer, Rachel has taught writing for more than twenty-five years. She's taught people of all ages at the 92nd Street Y, Friends Seminary (K-4), Basic Trust Day Care, Antioch Low Residence Program, Yale, Columbia and, for the past fourteen years, graduate and undergraduates at New York University. She is founder and host of the podcast Commonplace and Directrix of The Commonplace School for Embodied Poetics.
Commonplace has no institutional or corporate affiliation and is made possible by you, our listeners! Support Commonplace by joining the Commonplace Book Club: https://www.patreon.com/commonplacepodcast
