Grace Cavalieri Releases New Podcast with Jeffrey Lamar Coleman
Coleman is a professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland. He is the editor of Words of Protest, Words of Freedom: Poetry of the American Civil Rights Movement and Era (Duke University Press) and author of Spirits Distilled: Poems (Red Hen Press).
Grace Cavalieri's new series on the poets of Maryland, for which she was recently funded by Maryland Humanities, is off to a strong and engaging start. This week's guest, professor of English, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, is the editor of Words of Protest, Words of Freedom: Poetry of the American Civil Rights Movement and Era and an accomplished poet in his own regard (his latest collection Spirits Distilled: Poems, is available from Red Hen Press).
In this podcast, Coleman discusses and reads many poems from his own work and from black poets of the civil rights era. Grace and Coleman also talk about the erasure of black voices from the "classic rock" canon, especially the multi-talented Prince. Coleman impresses with his unique cadence, his breadth of historical knowledge, and his passion for social justice.
DID YOU KNOW...
Grace Cavalieri's Other Voices, Other Lives includes transcripts from some of her best interviews of US Poets Laureate on "The Poet and The Poem"?
Featured Audio: “Letter from Sligo Creek” a poem by Rose Solari
Like the cover photo, the poems in Difficult Weather are timeless and—unlike the poems in many first books—extraordinarily mature. Although the narrative voice is generally that of a young woman in her late twenties and early thirties whose subject matter sometimes ranges back to early childhood, these are poems of adulthood: the discovery and endlessly painful rediscovery of human frailty, sexual and emotional betrayal, bad love in all its familial and romantic varieties, memory, and elegy…
Listen to Grace Cavalieri Interview fmr. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
Grace Cavalieri is known widely for her stirring and empathic poetry, collected in her Legacy work Other Voices, Other Lives, but did you know that she is also an impressive interviewer? On her NPR show, The Poet and The Poem, she interviews significant poets from the US and around the world, with an aim of interpreting their lives through their poetry. In her tenure on the program, she has interviewed 9 US Poets Laureate (you can find a list with these archived interviews HERE), including the incomparable Robert Pinsky.
Featured Poetry: “Toytown” by Grace Cavalieri
The name Other Voices, Other Lives, is not purely poetical, in fact, for Grace Cavalieri it is a mission statement. In her Legacy Book of the same name there are several sections in 3rd person omnipotent which aim to breathe the same air as famous women who have suffered adversity. Tragic figure Anna Nicole Smith, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Cora from William Carlos William’s Kora in Hell. All in all they are an admix of Grace Cavalieri’s poetic life, all brought together in one beautiful volume; so, perhaps, we might figure that Anna Nicole Smith converses with Mary Wollstonecraft for the very first time in the pages of Other Voices, Other Lives.
Today, from the Anna section we have the heart-rending “Toytown”