After introductory comments, Filreis' Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode starts by characterizing the poems from the "Curb" series as follows: "In each of the 'Curb' poems one encounters instances of anti-Asian violence, one at a time, in three forms: a prose note, typically providing a description of the attack and/or historical context; latitudunal and longitudinal coordinates (printed in the top right corner of the recto); and a poem, which the PoemTalk group identifies variously as documentary, lyric, narratively disrupted, open-ended and persuasive (at once), and elegaic." Later on, he makes this key connection between those pieces and the last poem considered by the group: "'Frequency (Alka's testimony)' picks up two key issues from the 'Curb' poems: sound and safety. The 'Curb' poems we chose take place in a subway station, outside a diner, at a township football field, while Divyenda Sinha of 'Frequency' was 'mere yards away from his suburban home,' on a post-dinner walk with his family. Faced with such a desperately urgent sense of insecurity and vulnerability, Victor chooses for the accompanying poem to define the term 'frequency' multiply — it happens often, regularly; it happens despite humanizing sociality (frequentia, “a gathering of people”); it must be listened to, must be heard in the ears to be understood as testimony."
You can listen to this latest program and read more about the show here. PoemTalk is a joint production of PennSound and the Poetry Foundation, aided by the generous support of Nathan and Elizabeth Leight. Browse the full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, by clicking here.
