Happy Thanksgiving

Dear Readers,

We editors at Talk to Me in Long Lines are taking a break (last week and this week) to catch up and, more importantly, enjoy Thanksgiving weekend. But, we want to leave you with some recommendations for some weekend reading:

Versecraft

I think most of our readers know about the excellent podcast Versecraft from the one-and-only Elijah Blumov, that meticulous metrists who is also sartorially splashy and flashy. His recent episode on Dana Gioia’s poem “In Chandler Country” is fantastic. Please take a listen. If you don’t follow Elijah and listen to Versecraft, well, you need to amend your ways. It is time well-spent.

New Verse Review’s Rusty Paperweight

If you don’t know about New Verse Review’s monthly compendium of links to good poetry things, well, you are missing out. Steven Knepper, NVRs editor-in-chief, included a few poems from Talk to Me in Long Lines in Novembers Rusty Paperweight. (Thank you, Steve!)

Don Paterson on Seamus Heaney

Don Paterson reworks a talk he gave about Seamus Heaney not long after Heaney’s death. This is a very good essay/talk on Heaney’s use of words, particularly his deep understanding of the layers of each word’s meaning:

But just because a reader found Heaney’s surface sense pretty clear didn’t mean that they’d even begun to engage with its meaning. And those who like their poems to be either transparently simple or transparently complex will never get Heaney, since he insisted on a poem being both. Beneath the performative ease of his melodies were layers and layers of shifting harmony, formed of every rich thing the language has in it: prosody, undertone, etymology, allusion, and of course music itself. This was down to Heaney knowing the language better than just about anyone: where most of us dog-paddled, Seamus dived in and swam like a seal.

A Wiseblood Thanksgiving Reader

If you aren’t following Wiseblood Books on Substack, you need to. Yesterday, we shared this little collection of stories and poems as a “Thank you” to our supporters. I’m including it here because I may as well and because I want you to follow what we’re doing over there. No long poems in the Wiseblood Thanksgiving Reader, but good ones, nonetheless, plus two most excellent stories.

We hope you had a very Happy Thanksgiving and we’ll see you next week with a new poem.

The Editors at Talk to Me in Long Lines