Today we release the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series — that's #166 if you're keeping track — which addresses Steve Dalachinsky's poem "with shelter gone," taken from a 2008 reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. For this program host Al Filreis convened a virtual panel including Bonny Finberg, Julien Poirier, and Jake Marmer, who just happened to host the reading from which the recording under discussion was taken. Dalachinsky's death last September can't help but cast a shadow over the proceedings, particularly given that all three panelists knew him well, however that sense of loss is counterbalanced with happy memories stirred by the immediacy and intimacy of the poet's voice.
Filreis' PoemTalk blog post announcing the new episode begins by acknowledging those complex emotions, which turn this "poem about what one feels and ponders in the midsummer heat in a Brooklyn apartment where the fruitflies are not merely irritating but serve as harbingers of bodily fragility and decay" into a "pre-elegy" that replicates the process of "winding back" which becomes a refrain as the poem unfolds. "Time, here, is that which can be wound back, such that as readers or witnesses to its performance we are no longer suffocating from the city heat," he observes. "Rather, we begin to feel the breezy thrills and spills of old Coney Island, overhearing the music of youth ('you're my coney island baby'), and moving eastward to the edges of the borough — out to cafés of Russian immigrants ... and, in a sense, running the whole complex, intertwined story of Beat despondency and ecstasy, and similarly of jazz, of Jewish Brooklyn, of Russian Jewish immigration — a story run backwards to the eastern limit of that moment just prior to the invention of the cultural convergences one hears here and in most if not all of Dalachinsky’s performances."
You can learn more about this latest program, read Dalachinsky's poem (and watch him perform it), and listen to the podcast here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.
