Episode 99: Douglas Kearney

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In this conversation Rachel welcomes poet, interdisciplinary artist, professor, and Bagley Wright Lecturer Douglas Kearney to Commonplace. They discuss their experiences writing and performing lectures for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, which supports contemporary poets.  Kearney and Zucker speak about ideas of influences on poetry and poetics, Kearney's recent ADHD diagnosis, scales for writers, the failures of metaphor, insight porn, epiphanies, performance, and how the idea of an authentic self is rooted in white supremacy.

This episode also includes excerpts from the following lectures: “Red Read / Read Red: Putting Violence Down in Poetry,” performed live with musician Val Jeanty at the Ace Hotel Brooklyn, hosted by Bomb Magazine; “#WerewolfGoals,” performed via Zoom and hosted by Washington University in St. Louis; and “I Killed, I Died: Banter, Self-Destruction, and the Poetry Reading,” performed via Zoom and hosted by Cave Canem.

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Photo © Bomb Magazine.

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Photo © Bomb Magazine.

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Douglas Kearney visiting Rachel’s undergraduate class at NYU, November 2021.

Books and Selected Other Work by Douglas Kearney

BOOKS / COMPOSITIONS

• Sho (poetry, Wave Books, 2021)

• Fodder, with Val Jeanty (poetry LP, Fonograf Editions, 2021) 

• Starts Spinning (poetry Chapbook, Rain Taxi, 2020)

• Buck Studies (poetry, Fence Books, 2016)

• Someone Took They Tongues. 3 Operas (libretti, Subito Press, 2016)

• Mess and Mess and (poetry and essays, Noemi Press, 2015)

• Patter (poetry, Red Hen Press, 2014)

• The Black Automaton (poetry, Fence Books, 2009)

LECTURES

• Douglas Kearney’s Bagley Wright Lectures

• “I Killed, I Died: Banter, Self-Destruction, and the Poetry Reading” (The Yale Review, 2021)

OTHER

• “Dear Editor——: An Open Letter from Douglas Kearney” (Cave Canem, 2020)

Also Referenced

• Bagley Wright Lecture Series

• Christopher Titus, Born With a Defect

• Tarik Dobbs

• Jennifer Holliday as Effie in Dream Girls

• Ellen Welcker

• Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo”

• James Wright, “A Blessing” and “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”

• lucille clifton

• Val Jeanty
  
  

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