Today, we release episode #141 in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, recorded on a very special ModPo visit to the Providence, RI home of Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. There, host Al Filreis gathered a panel that included (shown from left to right) Laynie Browne, Mónica de la Torre, and Kate Colby (with a cameo by Lee Ann Brown) to discuss Rosmarie Waldrop's prose poem "Memory Tree," which comes from the book Split Infinitives (Singing Horse Press, 1998).
Filreis' PoemTalk blog post on this episode offers this brief summation of the poem: "'Memory Tree' bears a major linguistic disruption: it integrates and mashes up folkloric messaging and makes phrasal and homonymic fragments of fragmented memories. The prose poem offers itself as an alternative representation of the disaster. It is a post-traumatic portrait of the artist as a young girl. Its first six stanzas or paragraphs are written out of the moment in September 1941 when, at a time of absolute control of every aspect of German society by the Nazi regime, a girl goes to school for the first time — enters, that is to say, the vortex of totalitarian socialization." You can read more about the program, find the complete text of Waldrop's poem, see many more wonderful photos, and listen to or watch this special video episode by clicking here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.
