Today we release the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, its 154th program in total, which focus on "The Similitude of This Great Flower" by Elizabeth Willis. For this show, host Al Filreis brought together a panel consisting of (from left to right) Kate Colby, Simone White, and Angela Carr over Zoom to discuss Willis' poem.
Filreis starts his PoemTalk blog post announcing the new episode in an evocative fashion: "'You promised to go on' indicates mere survival in the end." He continues, "The compressed and converged idioms of the previous sentences — there's a fly on the wall looking through a keyhole 'trying to read the wall'! — have a comic, almost punny multivalent quality, but whatever that indicative writing on the wall is, at least 'It says we haven't died.' We’re alive indeed and that’s grimly good — and, the group agrees, such witness to survival is owing to the writing as writing. We 'go on' through the resistant act of writing, yes, but also in the writing, in the materiality of those words. The poem is a small machine for going on."
You can read more about this latest show, read Willis' poem, and listen to the podcast here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.
