As Sean said, we did curse poems in the last episode, so we're doing love poems next to get the bitter taste out of our mouths." In this episode, we talk about how love poems are always starting with the threat of sentimentality, always have an implied narrativity, and are always in defiance of Rilke's directive to his young poet addressee, "Don't write love poetry." In this episode, with attention to the fact that we all hate-to-love and love-to-hate love poems, and extra attention to some canonical love poems that are talking about LGBT relationships before the poets could openly talk about them, we talk about Walt Whitman's lesser-known "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers"; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous Sonnet 44 about married love; and Frank O'Hara's sweet "Having a Coke with You." (WW: https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/30) (EBB: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50538/sonnets-from-the-portuguese-44-beloved-thou-has-brought-me-many-flowers) (FOH: https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you)
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As Sean said, we did curse poems in the last episode, so we're doing love poems next to get the bitter taste out of our mouths." In this episode, we talk about how love poems are always starting with the threat of sentimentality, always have an implied narrativity, and are always in defiance of Rilke's directive to his young poet addressee, "Don't write love poetry." In this episode, with attention to the fact that we all hate-to-love and love-to-hate love poems, and extra attention to some canonical love poems that are talking about LGBT relationships before the poets could openly talk about them, we talk about Walt Whitman's lesser-known "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers"; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous Sonnet 44 about married love; and Frank O'Hara's sweet "Having a Coke with You." (WW: https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/30) (EBB: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50538/sonnets-from-the-portuguese-44-beloved-thou-has-brought-me-many-flowers) (FOH: https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you)
In which we told ourselves we were going to talk about inaugural poems and didn't.
This inaugural episode of the Black Box Poetry Podcast was recorded in January 2017, just after the inauguration of President Trump. The original theme was "inauguration poems" which the team quickly reinterpreted as "occasional poetry" since we didn't feel that we had all that much to say about inauguration poetry itself. In this episode, we discuss "Curse" by Frank Bidart; "not an elegy for Mike Brown" by Danez Smith; and the classic, "Easter 1916" by W.B. Yeats.
If you actually want to know something about inaugural poems, since we don't end up talking about them in this episode, you can read what Sean C. Hughes had to say about them in 2013 on Full Stop.
Black Box Poetry
As Sean said, we did curse poems in the last episode, so we're doing love poems next to get the bitter taste out of our mouths." In this episode, we talk about how love poems are always starting with the threat of sentimentality, always have an implied narrativity, and are always in defiance of Rilke's directive to his young poet addressee, "Don't write love poetry." In this episode, with attention to the fact that we all hate-to-love and love-to-hate love poems, and extra attention to some canonical love poems that are talking about LGBT relationships before the poets could openly talk about them, we talk about Walt Whitman's lesser-known "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers"; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous Sonnet 44 about married love; and Frank O'Hara's sweet "Having a Coke with You." (WW: https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/30) (EBB: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50538/sonnets-from-the-portuguese-44-beloved-thou-has-brought-me-many-flowers) (FOH: https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you)
