The Ruth Stone House Podcast – Poets reading poems, and sometimes talking.

The Anxiety of Art’s Capacity: John James, Candace Jensen & Bianca Stone

The Anxiety of Art’s Capacity: John James, Candace Jensen & Bianca Stone

Published April 13, 2021

The Ruth Stone House Podcast

The Anxiety of Art's Capacity: John James, Candace Jensen & Bianca Stone

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The poet John James talks with RSH Letterpress Director Candace Jensen, and Bianca Stone, about his latest book MILK HOURS, reads new poems, getting into the anxiety of art’s capacity to effect social justice, or even the questions art and artist can ask in those emotions.

About the Guests:

John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize (Milkweed, 2019). He is also the author of Chthonic, winner of the 2014 CutBank Chapbook Award. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN America, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. A digital collagist, his image-text experiments appear in Quarterly West, The Adroit Journal, and LIT. https://jj-poetry.com/

Candace Jensen is committed to realizing a culture profoundly informed by deep ecology. She is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, printmaker, calligrapher, activist and woods witch. She proudly serves as the Letterpress and Book Arts Programming Director for the Vermont poetry nonprofit the Ruth Stone House, in Goshen VT, as well as the assistant art editor and administrative collaborator for its online poetry publication, Iterant Mag.

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Standing Tall Even When the Room is Crooked: ARISA WHITE

Standing Tall Even When the Room is Crooked: ARISA WHITE

Published April 1, 2021

The Ruth Stone House Podcast

Standing Tall Even When the Room is Crooked: ARISA WHITE

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Bianca Stone talking with the poet, Arisa White about her incredible new book “Who’s Your Daddy,” from Augury Books We discuss everything from the hybridity of memoir and poetry, to the epistolary documentarian forms of writing, to the incredible transformation that can happen in the time it takes to really create a manuscript.

“Somewhere nearing its end, Arisa White says of Who’s Your Daddy, it’s “a portrait of absence and presence, a story, a tale, told in patchwork fashion . . .” This exactly says what Who’s Your Daddy is, though it doesn’t say all it takes to do justice to the mythic paradox an absent parent guarantees a child, young or grown, or what it takes to live with and undergo such birthright. There’s not only a father’s absence and presence, there’s a mother who says “you raise your daughters, and love your sons,” there are stepfathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, a grandmother, brothers, lovers, all of whom leave their marks and give and take love. Surrounding the whole book hovers the questions do I forgive him, and is forgiveness possible? This beautifully, honestly conceived genius of a book shook me to the core.” —Dara Wier

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and an assistant professor of creative writing at Colby College. She is the author of four books, including the poetry collection You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, and coauthor of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, winner of the Maine Literary Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle- Grade Nonfiction. She serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press. Find her at arisawhite.com. (Photo: Nye’ Lyn Tho)

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Speculative Destinations with the Poet Ted Dodson

Speculative Destinations with the Poet Ted Dodson

Published March 23, 2021

The Ruth Stone House Podcast

Speculative Destinations with the Poet Ted Dodson

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Bianca Stone and Ben Pease sit down with the poet, Ted Dodson, to discuss his new collection of poetry “An Orange” from Pioneer Works / Wonder Books

BUY HERE!!!

About “An Orange”
“It would be too easy to say love vanished from the earth…” begins Ted Dodson’s An Orange, his thoughtful, experiential second collection of poems. It’s a provocation to which An Orange wholeheartedly responds. Dodson’s work reroutes essay, narrative, and confessionalism, detouring from criticism into bisexual desire and navigating modernity as fluently as it imagines speculative destinations for language. From the graceful realism of the opening travelogues to its final long poem, “The Language the Sky Speaks,” An Orange guides memory and affect into cosmopolitan forms: disalienating, expansive, and tonic.

Ted Dodson is the author of An Orange (Pioneer Works / Wonder, 2021), At the National Monument / Always Today (Pioneer Works, 2016), and Pop! in Spring (Diez, 2013). His writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, BOMB, Fence, The Stinging Fly, and The Brooklyn Rail among other publications. He works for BOMB, is an editor-at-large for Futurepoem, and is a former editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

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Editing a Poetry Manuscript

Editing a Poetry Manuscript

Published March 11, 2021

The Ruth Stone House Podcast

Editing a Poetry Manuscript

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Bianca Stone & Leanne Ruell talk about their experiences working on a poetry manuscript, helpful practices and mindset tools, the mechanics of editing poetry, and provide fire for that dead-inside feeling about your own!

If you’re working on your first book, second book, thesis, or chapbook, or simply interested in the idea you might have a book to put together, this conversation will help you get going.

HEGEL QUOTE!
from The Phenomenology of Mind PREFACE
On scientific knowledge

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The Nature of Duality in Poetry & Psychotherapy

The Nature of Duality in Poetry & Psychotherapy

Published February 24, 2021

The Ruth Stone House Podcast

The Nature of Duality in Poetry & Psychotherapy

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Bianca Stone talking with James Barnes

This conversation is ongoing and sprawling.

There is a huge amount in common between modern psychoanalytic theory and poetry theory, particularly in the importance of negative capability, and the mutual experience needed between therapist and patient, poet and poem.

In this episode I’m talking with James Barnes, a psychotherapist and writer based in Exeter, UK. I tracked him down online following a research hole I feel into, finding an article that explored the origins of dualism; the pitfalls of our western proclivity to see nature as mechanistic, that our minds are separate from matter and specifically, the dangers those ideas pose to the psyche. This fascinating and important topic coincided with a lot discussions we’ve been having at the RSH, some of which Leanne Ruell and I discussed in the last episode “Why I Make Poetry Comics This Podcast Won’t Tell You.” The crossovers in philosophy, psychology and poetry are a rich resource for creative discovery. This will be the first in an ongoing discussion.

Articles discussed:

How the dualism of Descartes Ruined our Mental Health, James Barnes

On Bion’s Concepts of Negative Capability and Faith, G. Civitarese

James Barnes is a psychotherapist and writer based in Exeter, UK, who has a background in relational psychoanalysis and philosophy. He has been in the mental health world for almost two decades, working in the UK, US and Mexico, and also experiencing mental health services himself. He recently returned to the UK to help facilitate a paradigm shift in the understanding and treatment of emotional/psychological distress. He has a particular interest in working on the philosophical and conceptual foundations of this shift. More at: https://www.jamesbarnes52.com/.

ALSO: Check out our new YOUTUBE STATION!!

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A Sentence Unsaid: Julia Cohen

A Sentence Unsaid: Julia Cohen

Published February 19, 2021

The Ruth Stone House Podcast

A Sentence Unsaid: Julia Cohen

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Bianca Stone sits down and talks with the poet and essayist, Julia Cohen, about her newest chapbook, Good Timing & Gertrude Stein, and the intensity of the unsaid sentences in us.

About the Collection

Out of invisible gauze or membrane, some sentences construct a wall within you. A black plum riding on the tongue. These sentences only seem possible inside your body: an act of evaporation escapes your mouth before ever reaching a recipient.

As solely interior sentences, their possibility exists as a reminder of vast emotional oceans between the thinking-island & the saying-shore.

Julia Cohen is an editor at Essay Press. She’s the author of one collection of lyric essays, I Was Not Born (Noemi Press, 2014), which was recently translated into German and released by Literaturverlag Droschl. She’s also written two books of poetry, Collateral Light (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014) and Triggermoon Triggermoon (BLP, 2011). Her nonfiction and poetry appear in issues of Juked, Jellyfish Review, Heavy Feather Review, The Rumpus, Entropy, Boston Review, and BOMB. She’s currently working on a new collection of essays, Freak Lip.

O R DER GOOD TIMING & GERTRUDE STEIN FROM DIODE EDITIONS

Julia Cohen has a BA from Wesleyan University, an MFA from The New School, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She’s an Assistant Professor of English and Literature at Wright College. She teaches creative writing and literature courses. She’s an activist for public higher education.

Her heart is a fainting couch—it will catch you if you fall.

Find her on Twitter @JuliaACohen.

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Why I Make Poetry Comics (This Podcast Won’t Tell You!)

Why I Make Poetry Comics (This Podcast Won’t Tell You!)

Published February 7, 2021

The Ruth Stone House Podcast

Why I Make Poetry Comics (This Podcast Won’t Tell You!)

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Leanne Ruell (poet, Iterant Editorial Assistant and RSH Grant Writer) talks with Bianca Stone about her new essay on why she writes poetry comics. Sort of.

At first I thought I should make this into two shorter digestible episodes out of this interview…but then I realized that if you’re going to listen to 30 minutes of Leanne and I talking about “containment” of chaos in poetry comics, the inevitability of investigating despair in as an element of transmutation, and the illusional of–and authenticity of–duality, of the self, that reflects in art, and back to the viewer in art…..then I figured you were in for the full 50 minutes.

Take breaks if you need. And please send post your comments, questions, and thoughts.

This ain’t over….!

Read the Essay Here.

The Phenomenon of Man (Le phénomène humain) is an essay by the French geologist, paleontologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In this work, Teilhard describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness. The text was written in the 1930s, but it achieved publication only posthumously, in 1955. (Wikipedia!)

SHOW NOTES!

8:52. The Phenomenon of Man – unfolding the spirit into matter –through poetry comics!

10:45. Certainly there’s a crisis of self.

12:17. Adopting a poetic mindset to gain insight—across occupations/genres.

22:50 “What I love about poetry comics is…” the representation of duality, especially the anxiety of mind and body.

25:14 Poetry transmuting despair.

29:40 Poets deal in a place of ambiguity. Poetry is also not a place to barf up your hang-ups.

32:00 There is something of the poets and artists making sense of despair. Making art we are attempting to dismantle the structural hold of our questioning.

37:35 Ultimately we want to be seen.

43:00 Perception vs. knowledge.

45:20 “Trust” is the word. Adopting a sense of faith to create meaning. It’s just like true therapy functions.

47:00 Suspend all previous knowledge. Adopt an oscillating position of thought.

49:10 Share your poetic mindset with the world around you.

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A Conversation with Major Jackson

A Conversation with Major Jackson

Published January 18, 2021

The Ruth Stone House Podcast

A Conversation with Major Jackson

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Bianca Stone & Ben Pease talk with the acclaimed poet, Major Jackson, about his new book The Absurd Man, the complexities of self, the importance of readings and constructing communities in poems.

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Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020). His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, he has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the complexity between perception and reality, the body and desire, accountability and judgment.

Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Major Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronicles an increasingly technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, probes a failed marriage, and grieves his lost mother with a stunning, lucid lyricism.;

The arc of a man emerges; he bravely confronts his past, including his betrayals and his mistakes, and questions who he is as a father, as a husband, as a son, and as a poet. With intense musicality and verve, The Absurd Man also faces outward, finding refuge in intellectual and sensuous passions. At once melancholic and jubilant, Jackson considers the journey of humanity, with all its foibles, as a sacred pattern of discovery reconciled by art and the imagination.

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Poets in VT: Ben Aleshire, Modern Troubadour

Poets in VT: Ben Aleshire, Modern Troubadour

Published December 10, 2020

The Ruth Stone House Podcast

Poets in VT: Ben Aleshire, Modern Troubadour

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Our new series meeting poets living in Vermont right now. Bianca Stone sits down and talks with Ben Aleshire about what he’s been up to and where he’s been. Ben Aleshire, (who is currently quarantining in Burlington), a first generation college student, lived over a decade on streets around the world making a living writing poems for strangers. Back in VT, he’s working on an autofiction novel about his adventures while also remotely get his MFA from NYU.

In this podcast we talk about the life of the artist, academia, capitalism, po-biz and, of course, read poems.

Benjamin Aleshire is a twenty-first century troubadour. He travels the world with a portable Olivetti typewriter, and composes poems for strangers in the streets of New Orleans, Paris, Barcelona, Havana, London, and San Francisco, as well as at festivals, private events, weddings, and conferences. Clients include Bernie Sanders, Jimmy Page, Sir Tom Stoppard, House of Yes, Princeton University, Shakespeare & Co in Paris, the Troubadour London, and the Bellagio Las Vegas. More at poetforhire.org